13 June 2008
Sand Dunes!
Greetings folks! I’ve been silent for a few days because I am in the midst of a lot of traveling. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week I was at a team meeting for the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) and Context Camera (CTX). Rather than spend a lot of time explaining what that means, I will do what I always do and link to the planetary society blog. My adviser …
11 June 2008
Phoenix has a bun (ok, soil) in the oven
Some exciting news from Phoenix: the soil that was too clumpy to make it into the TEGA (Thermal and Evolved-gas Analyzer) oven, even after vibrating the screen over 3 days, has made it through the screen, and the oven is full! It’s a little unclear when the soil fell through, and whether it was caused by the final round of vibration or because of some material change in the soil. …
10 June 2008
Phoenix tries to shake 'n bake
An update on the soil that’s too clumpy to fall through the screen on the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA): to try to break up and loosen the soil, the engineers shook it for 7 minutes using vibrators inside TEGA. A few particles were detected to fall through the grate, but not enough to fill the oven and run a test Here’s an animation of the clumpy soil before and …
9 June 2008
For Phoenix, size (and cohesion) matters
Phoenix put its engineering team’s creativity to the test this weekend when the first scoopful of martian soil dumped into one of the Thermal Emission and Gas Analyzer (TEGA) ovens failed to actually make it to the oven. Emily over at the Planetary Society has a great post on this, so I’ll just summarize here. The scoop of soil was from the top 2-4 centimeters of soil on the north …
6 June 2008
Carnival of Space #57
It’s that time of week again. The carnival of space is up, over at Out of the Cradle, and apparently this one is “for the ladies”.
The Big Picture
This news is a few days old, but it’s so cool I had to share it. At the American Astronomical Society (AAS) conference this week, astronomers have unveiled a 55 meter long infrared image of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The image is a mosiac of more than 800,000 images from the Spitzer space telescope. Forget the “Megapixels” you’re used to hearing about for your digital camera. This bad boy …
5 June 2008
Phoenix's Neighborhood (Part I): The Basin
If you’re like us, you’ve been refreshing the Phoenix news page constantly, looking for the next update from Mars. If you need a little catching up on what’s going on in the mission, here are some recent posts with updates. But with all the Phoenix coverage, there hasn’t been much talk about the context for the Phoenix landing site. What’s so cool about the north pole of Mars? The north …
3 June 2008
Phoenix can dig it, can you?
Check it out: Phoenix has successfully broken ground on Mars, and the arm camera has proof in vivid color! Notice that there is some white stuff, even in this first scoop. Is it salt? Is it ice? Is it Something Else? Nobody knows… stay tuned.
Twittering Phoenix
Apparently, Phoenix is a web-savvy little lander, and has been twittering since before landing. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Twitter has been called “micro-blogging”: posts can be a max of 140 characters. People can use it to keep others updated on the minutiae of their lives. For most people most of the time, it seems like this would be incredibly dull to me, but it’s perfect for the …
2 June 2008
Space-Based Solar Power
Have I ever mentioned how much I love the idea of space based solar power? It’s totally awesome: you launch solar panels into geosynchronous orbit, where they are always illuminated by the sun, and they beam the energy down to receiving stations on the Earth. Sure, it costs a lot to set up, but the result is essentially unlimited free power, beamed anywhere you want it. Apparently China and India …
