4 August 2012
Sol -2: Loose ends, interviews, landing site bingo, and Pixar
With this blog entry, I’m switching over to a more journal-like style that I will hopefully use throughout the mission. When there are Big Science Ideas to talk about related to the mission, I will of course try to explain them in their own posts, but I am also going to be doing posts like this one (although likely not usually as long), sharing what my day was like, what the ups and downs were, and hopefully providing a window into what it’s like to be involved in the mission without crossing the line into that which must not be blogged.
3 August 2012
MSL: Mars Action Hero
You know, I’m tired of hearing about how the Mars Exploration Rovers are so cute, and spunky, but their successor Mars Science Lab is big and ugly. MSL isn’t supposed to be cute, it’s supposed to be awesome.
Just how awesome, you ask? I’ll tell you how awesome.
5 Ways Landing on Mars is like Having a Baby
As we draw closer and closer to Curiosity’s landing, I can’t help but think that there are some important similarities between landing on Mars and having a baby. Before you ask: no, I don’t actually know what it is like to have a kid. For that matter, I also have never experienced the landing of a Mars mission that I have been involved with. But in both cases, I know enough …
2 August 2012
Curiosity is Going Home
This morning when I was walking the dog, I paused to appreciate the sight of the early sunlight shining through the dew-drenched grass and sparkling on the dripping ponderosa pine branches. It was a nice peaceful moment, and it made me think of what a different world we’re sending Curiosity to. The amount of liquid water that I saw glimmering on the grass this morning probably hasn’t been seen anywhere …
1 August 2012
5 days…
I don’t have much time to post since I am currently wrestling some particularly beastly paper revisions that need to be done by the end of the week before my life gets really complicated. But I wanted to mention a few things here before I dive back into revisions: Curiosity has already switched over to its Entry, Descent and Landing sequence. From the @MarsCuriosity twitter feed: “Timeline activated. Bleep-bop. I’m running …
28 July 2012
Blogging MSL
You guys. MSL lands in 8 days! My brain is having trouble grasping how soon that is. Later this week I pack up and drive to Pasadena, where I’ll be sharing an apartment with my supervisor and working on the mission. I expect it to be exciting and exhausting and fascinating and of course, I want to share it all here on the blog.
Except I can’t.
18 July 2012
MSL Care Package – Thank You Dunoon Students!
I had a very nice surprise when I came in to work today: a large box from Dunoon Grammar School in Scotland! A while back, Hugh O’Donnell, an English teacher at Dunoon contacted me, inquiring if I might be willing to answer some student questions about MSL. He is organizing an awesome interdisciplinary project in which students produce a piece of Mars-themed writing. They will also have Mars-themed lessons in …
10 July 2012
MSL Landing Dress Rehearsal
Now that I have moved out to Flagstaff and am starting to get settled in, it’s time to leave! I’m headed to JPL this week for the final Operational Readiness Test (ORT) before MSL lands. This test will be a “dress rehearsal” of events as they are expected to occur when Curiosity lands on August 5, and for the following 2 sols. We will even be working on Mars time …
4 July 2012
Happy Higgs of July!
I don’t normally talk about particle physics here. Planets are really more my thing, but today I need to make an exception for some big news. Scientists at CERN and Fermilab are reporting that they have found the Higgs boson, the missing link in the leading theory of how our universe works at the subatomic scale. The new particle was detected at a mass of 125 to 126 GeV …
12 June 2012
Curiosity gets an improved landing ellipse!
Yesterday NASA hosted a call-in press conference for reporters to announce some good news and some bad news about Curiosity. The good news: the landing system is going to be even more precise than expected. The bad news: the drill sheds teflon that gets into the samples.
