12 September 2008
Last Year's MSL Landing Site Workshop – Day 3
I’m in the airport on my way to California to participate in the third Mars Science Laboratory Landing Site Workshop, so I thought I would take this chance to post my blog entry from day three of last year’s workshop: What a day! We began with a series of highly anticipated presentations about potential landing sites with evidence for salts, sulfates and clays – all types of minerals typically formed …
10 September 2008
Register to Vote
If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know that I don’t talk about politics too much here. I do follow politics in the news though, and frankly what I’ve been seeing lately makes me sick. I see one side doing what it can to keep the discussion focused on the issues and how to improve life for the American people, and I see the other side focusing all of its …
Has the LHC Destroyed the Earth Yet?
In case you were wondering whether or not the Large Hadron Collider has destroyed the earth yet, check this website. In all seriousness folks, there’s no threat from the LHC. The earth gets bombarded all the time by cosmic ray particles with loads more energy than the LHC particles will have. So, if cosmic rays have not destroyed the earth, then there is no chance that the LHC will. Or, …
Last Year's MSL Landing Site Workshop: Day 2
Here is the summary from the second day of last year’s landing site workshop, copied from my old blog. I’m posting these to get everyone on the same page before going to this year’s Landing Site Workshop, where we will narrow the seven possible landing sites for the Mars Science Laboratory down to three. Stay tuned! Today was a marathon of landing site presentations, ranging all over the martian globe, …
9 September 2008
Last Year's MSL Landing Site Workshop: Day 1
Coming up next week is the 3rd Mars Science Laboratory Landing Site Workshop, where the Mars science community will come together to narrow down the possible landing site choices for MSL. There have been two similar meeting before this one, and I was lucky enough to attend the one last year. In fact, some of my first blogging experience was summarizing the three days of that meeting. I will be …
7 September 2008
Bubbling Lava Lake Video
The Halema’uma’u vent in Hawaii seems to be filling up with a lake of lava! In this video from Sept 5, taken from a helicopter hovering over the vent, you can see the surface of the lava lake bubbling and churning. The press release has lots more information. To stay up to date with the eruptions in Hawaii, check out the Hawaii Volcano Observatory page.
5 September 2008
Carnival of Space #69
This week’s Carnival of Space is being hosted by Free Space at Discovery News. What are you waiting for? Go! Check it out!
3 September 2008
Hawaii Field Work – Ground Truth
I posted a while back, right before I left to participate in the NASA Planetary Volcanology Field Workshop, describing what exactly I was going to be doing there. Our goal was to study a set of images and come up with a geologic map of the area, and then actually go to that location (something we can’t usually do for other planets) and see how good our geologic maps were. …
2 September 2008
How to Defrost Phoenix
Bad Astronomy brought this amusing Foxtrot comic to my attention (click for the whole thing). Now, to get to work on a proposal to use this to extend the Phoenix mission lifetime by periodically baking off any accumulated CO2 ice…
Science Policy Follow-Up
To follow up on my quick summary of Obama’s answers to the 14 ScienceDebate questions, Cocktail Party Physics (a blog that you should be reading if you don’t already) has an excellent post reflecting on the science and technology policies of both Obama and McCain. Like most posts at that blog it’s quite long, but definitely worth a read.
