Rings around the Earth – Implications

Last week I posted a video that speculates what it would look like if the Earth had rings like Saturn. Well, over at Quantum Rocketry, Joe Shoer has two excellent follow-up posts. First he calculated what the rings would really look like with gaps caused by Earth’s moons rather than just copying and pasting Saturn’s [...]

Lava Tubes on the Moon!

Ever wonder how astronauts on the moon are going to avoid deadly space radiation? One option is to live in caves, and luckily the Kaguya team has found one! Read more about it in my article over at Universe Today.

Take-out is not an Option

What would happen if the Apollo 13 crew cooked thanksgiving dinner at Gene Kranz’s house? Probably something like this:

If Earth had Rings

There’s a great video making the rounds showing what it would look like if Earth had a ring system like Saturn’s, including some gorgeous views from the ground. Of course, rings probably wouldn’t be stable with our moon, or at least would look very different, but that doesn’t take away from the coolness of this [...]

Flying over Enceladus

Check out this awesome animation from the November 21 flyby of Enceladus (via the Planetary Society Blog). Remember, these are actual pictures, taken by an actual spacecraft! I’m constantly amazed at how close the Cassini team can get to Enceladus. This is the sort of cool fly-through I’d expect to see in the opening sequence [...]

New Enceladus pictures!

The Cassini spacecraft just did a very close flyby of Enceladus, the icy moon of Saturn that has become famous for the plumes of water vapor billowing from its south pole, and the pictures coming back are so spectacular that they are taking seasoned planet-watchers by surprise. Here’s a teaser: a panorama assembled from the [...]

Black Hole Starships?

Do you ever get tired of science fiction stories using black holes to solve every imaginable problem? (I’m looking at you, new Star Trek.) Well, if so, you should not go take a look at my inaugural article for Universe Today, in which I report on a couple of physicists who calculated that a future [...]

Review: Earthlight

What happens when humans expand to the planets, but then the planets try to assert their independence? It’s a common science fiction storyline, and the central focus of Earthlight. Earthlight is one of Arthur C Clarke’s earlier novels, originating as a short story in 1941 and published as a novel in 1955. It is set [...]

Be a Martian!

Fact #1: As a Mars scientist, I am incredibly spoiled. There are so many missions to Mars right now sending back so much data, that even if they all went silent tomorrow, it would be decades before we managed to look at all the data and figure out what it’s telling us. Fact #2: There [...]

Crescent Earth, Water on the Moon, and Free Spirit!

Just a quick post to update you on the latest space news and remind you to keep voting for my article about how MSL is like James Bond. First of all, the Rosetta spacecraft, on its way to a rendezvous with a comet in 2014, swung by Earth the other day, and took some beautiful [...]