17 October 2010
Outpost Tavern and the End of an Era
The Outpost Tavern burned down Friday night. The Outpost was a rickety little tavern in Houston a couple miles from Johnson Space Center, famous as a hang-out for astronauts and other NASA folks. It went out of business earlier this year and it has apparently now met its fiery demise. I first visited the Outpost when I was in the 2006 Goddard NASA Academy. 20 of us showed up without …
13 October 2010
Martian Chronicles is Moving!
Big news folks! Sometime next week, this blog will be moving over to the American Geophysical Union‘s new blog network! AGU is the organization responsible for the Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets, which is one of the most important journals in planetary science, particularly for the terrestrial planets. AGU also hosts the enormous “fall” meeting each December, causing 16,000 scientists to descend on downtown San Francisco like over-educated locusts. …
12 October 2010
John Huchra
Over the weekend I learned that observational cosmologist John Huchra passed away on Friday. I only met him once, when I was a summer intern at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He very graciously gave the group of summer interns an hour and a half of his time and told us about his research, and about the interplay between observation and theory in astronomy. But more than that he also shared …
8 October 2010
Russia's Steampunk Lunar Lander
I always found the contrast between Soviet and US engineering fascinating. The goals were generally similar, but while the US seemed to aim for elegant, lightweight, optimized designs, Soviet spacecraft always look like they’re bolted together out of cast iron or something. That’s why I love this gallery of photos of the Soviet lunar lander that they developed during the space race. This thing looks like it should be used …
2 October 2010
The 4th MSL Landing Site Workshop: Day 3 – Final Discussion
We wrapped up the landing site workshop on wednesday afternoon by revisiting each of the four sites and discussing them in turn. Unfortunately, the way that we did this was very disappointing, and made for a frustrating afternoon. The discussion was centered around a word document that was projected up on the screen in the room. Over lunch, the meeting leaders had conferred and listed what they thought were the …
30 September 2010
The 4th MSL Landing Site Workshop: Day 3 – Engineering and Safety
With the details of all four landing sites on the table, we started day 3 of the meeting by hearing from the engineers and several scientists about the properties of the ellipses, the risks for landing and the capabilities of the landing system. First on the schedule was Mike Watkins, who explained why MSL is so unique in terms of assessing the risk for the landing site because the landing …
29 September 2010
The 4th MSL Landing Site Workshop: Day 2 – Eberswalde Crater
The final site of the four that we discussed yesterday was Eberswalde, which of course is interesting because of the big delta that is preserved in the western part of the crater.The first presentation on Eberswalde was an impassioned and really interesting talk by terrestrial geomorphologist Bill Dietrich. Bill talked about how Eberswalde is an excellent site for going beyond just making qualitative statements about water on Mars and actually …
The 4th MSL Landing Site Workshop: Day 2 – Holden Crater
The second site that we discussed yesterday was Holden Crater. Ross Irwin gave the first, overview presentation. Holden is a 155 kilometer crater that formed right in the middle of a huge drainage system that spans from the Argyre basin to the northern plains, and at Holden you would land on a bunch of coalescing alluvial fans on the western crater floor and then drive southeast to access some nice …
The 4th MSL Landing Site Workshop: Day 2 – Mawrth
Holy cow. Today was jam-packed with interesting stuff about Mawrth Vallis, Holden Crater and Eberswalde Crater! I took tons of notes, and I will try to use those to assemble a coherent picture of what was presented and discussed today. But if you’re too impatient to wait for me to work through those and post the more coherent summary, here are the notes in their raw and unedited form. Read …
28 September 2010
4th MSL Landing Site Workshop: Day 1
It has begun! Today was the first of a three day workshop in which the Mars science community (not just those directly involved in the MSL mission) gathers together and hashes out what we know and what we don’t know about the four finalist MSL landing sites. For me the week actually started yesterday at the MSL team meeting, where we got lots of updates on the various aspects of …
