Mars Science Laboratory Instruments: MAHLI

Last time, I talked about the MastCam color cameras on MSL, so it only makes sense to continue with one of the other cameras: the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). MAHLI will serve the same role on MSL that the microscopic imager on the current MER rovers does: it will provide detailed photos of the [...]

Dueling Mars Movies

Last week and this week, Dwayne day posted two very nice reviews of the dueling Mars movies of 2000, a.k.a. Mission to Mars and Red Planet. Now, I know, neither was the greatest movie, but Dwayne’s reviews do a nice job of discussing what was done well in addition to what was done…less well. Take [...]

Welcome to Mars! … I mean, Syndey

Last week a dust storm swept its way from the Australian outback and blanketed Sydney with orange dust. The dust storm was pretty large for Earth: 500km x 1000 km, and unusual in that it managed to reach Sydney instead of petering out in the outback. The Big Picture has a great series of photos [...]

A Detailed Look at Water on the Moon

It looks like Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society blog has beat me to the punch! After the big announcement that three separate groups have found evidence of water on the moon, she dove in, read the papers and has a series of posts with all of the details of their findings. Well worth a [...]

Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, Remixed

This is awesome.

Water on the Moon

In case you haven’t heard yet, there is quite the buzz building about three separate results that indicate that there is water on the lunar surface. There isn’t much: moon rocks returned by Apollo are pretty darn dry, but it’s still an exciting result, and it means that future missions might be able to extract [...]

Mars Science Laboratory Instruments: MastCam

A few weeks ago I gave a lunch talk at Cornell summarizing the MSL mission and particularly the instruments that it will carry and was shocked by the number of people who showed up! So, sensing that there is some significant “Curiosity” about the mission, I decided to do a series of posts here. If [...]

Los Alamos

Greetings from Los Alamos New Mexico! I’ll be out here until the 24th, first getting trained to use lasers safely, then collecting lots of data and starting to crunch the numbers. This is a placeholder post, but while I’m here I’m planning on doing a series of posts about the instruments on MSL, so stay [...]

Disney’s “Mars and Beyond”

I just stumbled across this awesome Disney cartoon from 1957 over at the Tor.com blog. It’s worth watching just for the various bizarre aliens, but is also surprisingly informative about the history of astronomy, the origin of earth and life, and our fascination with life on Mars. Also note how they call galaxies “island universes”.

New Hubble Images

Four images taken with the brand-new camera on Hubble have just been released, and although there are no solar-system objects in the bunch, I can’t complain too much. I mean, just take a look at this! Enjoy!