Sexy NASA Jets

Remember a couple weeks ago when I posted about how cool it was to ride my bike to work past the two NASA jets in front of Johnson Space Center? Well, NASA just released an awesome photo of two of the same type of jets doing a flyby of the shuttle on the launch pad! [...]

Impact Crater

In my posts about our field trip to Arizona, I showed my best pictures of meteor crater, but really none of them come close to expressing the feeling of standing on the brink of such a feature and trying to imagine an explosion big enough to carve it out. I just came across a photo [...]

100th Carnival of Space!

Back in the early naive days of space carnivals, we looked to the future and were certain that the 100th carnival of space would actually be a carnival, and that it would actually be held in space. Sadly, protests from the carnival spin-and-barf ride-cleaner’s union quashed that dream before it could become a reality. Luckily, [...]

Pretty Dunes in Gale Crater

This is a tiny subframe from the HiRISE image PSP_009294_1750.

Discoveries in Planetary Science

The Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society just released several short sets of slides summarizing recent important discoveries in planetary science that aren’t yet in textbooks. They are very nice, easy to understand summaries so I encourage you to check them out. The topics so far are: Mars Methane, Extrasolar Planet Imaging, [...]

Spirit and Opportunity in the Robot Hall of Fame

On Tuesday, day 1884 of the Mars Exploration Rover mission, Spirit and Opportunity were inducted into Carnegie Mellon’s Robot Hall of Fame .  Who else made the cut?  Everyone’s favorite Austrian-accented  T-800. So it’s settled: Spirit and Opportunity are officially as badass as the Terminator. The fact that they were inducted with along with the floor-cleaning [...]

The Ares Launch Vehicles: How We’re Going Back to the Moon

I just came across this excellent video describing the Ares rockets that will be replacing the shuttle and taking us back to the moon (and possibly to near-Earth asteroids and Mars). I can’t seem to get it to embed, but here’s the link, and a blurb: “Imagine a rocket the size of a small skyscraper. [...]

The Pale Blue Dot

What better Earth day message is there than this? Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, [...]

Cassini Questions Answered

I got a bunch of questions about the BigPicture feature on the Cassini extended mission from an “enthusiastic” commenter, with whom I happen to be related (Hi mom!), and I thought I would dedicate a post to answering them. 1. How does a Jovian equinox work? Start by reviewing how one on earth works. Well, [...]

Big Picture: Cassini’s Extended Mission

The Big Picture, the Boston Globe’s photojournalism blog, does it again! This week they have a spectacular set of images of Saturn and its sattellites from the Cassini extended mission. Well worth a look. I especially liked the images showing Saturn’s upper atmosphere acting like a lens, causing the rings to apparently bend as they [...]