10 June 2012
The Scale of Phobos
You’ve probably heard that Mars has two very small moons, but just how small are they? Maybe this brilliant depiction of Phobos hovering over Grenoble like an alien invader will help put things into perspective.
6 June 2012
Ray Bradbury
I just found out that Ray Bradbury has passed away. His writing has had a huge influence on me, as you might suspect based on this blog’s title. If you have not read The Martian Chronicles or Fahrenheit 451, get away from your computer and to a bookstore or library! On my quotes page, I have a whole section dedicated to key excerpts from Bradbury’s writing, and I thought that I would share some of them here to commemorate a great man who will be missed.
5 June 2012
Meeting Under the Transit of Venus
Greetings from Paris! I’ve been here since Saturday afternoon, first taking some time to recover from jet lag and be a tourist, and then yesterday and today I have been at the ChemCam team meeting at the Observatoire de Paris. We’ve had a lot of good discussions: sharing the latest information about how we are getting ready for landing, how to use our various software tools, what sorts of science …
30 May 2012
What’s that rock made of? Good question…
You would think it would be pretty easy to figure out what a rock is made of, but it is actually a very complicated question. For ChemCam, we need a list of geologic samples (“standards”) with a range of known compositions so that we can accurately measure the composition of unknown rocks on Mars. Our measurements are only as good as our standards, so I have been spending an inordinate …
23 May 2012
SpaceX Successfully Launches Dragon Capsule to ISS
In the wee hours of the morning, SpaceX took a major step forward in private space exploration, launching their Dragon capsule on a mission to dock with the International Space Station. If the mission is successful, it will be the first time a privately owned spacecraft has docked with the ISS. This is a major milestone, and it’s great to hear the joy in people’s voices toward the end of this video. Congratulations SpaceX!
20 May 2012
Spectacular view of Mars from Viking 1
We planetary scientists are spoiled. Yeah, so most of my days are spent programming, wrestling with excel spreadsheets, and editing Word documents. But some of our data is beautiful. I’ve raved before about the pretty pictures coming down from new instruments like HiRISE, but even our vintage data is spectacular. For example, feast your eyes on this mosaic of Viking 1 images, put together by Daniel Machacek. I highly recommend clicking the image and downloading the full-resolution (21 MB) version.
11 May 2012
Our Super Moon
You may have heard all the excitement last weekend about the so-called “supermoon”. The gist of it is that the moon’s orbit is not perfectly circular, so its distance from the earth varies slightly. But all the talk of the “SuperMoon” got me thinking and I realized that we were missing a teachable moment. No, the moon being at perihelion is not a big deal, but our Moon is pretty “super”. Let me show you why:
23 April 2012
The Joys of Fake Geology
Well, I survived Operational Readiness Test 8 (ORT)! Prior to this week, my only experience with rover operations was as payload downlink lead (PDL) for the color cameras on the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER). I joined MER well into the extended mission, when all of the bugs had been worked out and the planning process was very efficient and streamlined. My day as a Pancam PDL is pretty easy: take …
19 April 2012
Billionaires to Fund Asteroid Mining?
In another development that supports my suspicion that private enterprise is going to shape the future of space exploration, it looks like James Cameron, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and other influential wealthy nerds are unveiling a “new space venture” next week that is going by the name “Planetary Resources”. Of course, the press release doesn’t give any details; they want speculation to run rampant this week. Given the name, a …
16 April 2012
Rover Training
The Mars Science Laboratory Rover Curiosity is a huge and phenomenally complex machine, and operating it is no easy task. And when so much taxpayer money and so many careers are on the line, you want to be ready to roll when you touch down on Mars. That’s why this week I am at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena for “Operational Readiness Test 8” (ORT8).
