Merry Christmas from Mars!

Emily Lakdawalla over at the planetary society blog posted this cute poem from Unmannedspaceflight that I just had to share. If you want to hear a recording, head over to her blog. by Astro0 (with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore or possibly Henry Livingston Jr.) Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the stars [...]

AGU 2009: Day 4 – Enceladus and Exoplanets

Thursday at AGU started with a tough choice. At 8 am there was a talk about methane on Mars, and a special lecture about the water plumes on Enceladus, and plate tectonics on Venus! In the end I decided to go to the Enceladus lecture, given by Sue Kieffer. She explained that there are two [...]

Avatar Review

Avatar was spectacular. I always worry when a movie gets as much hype as Avatar did that in the end it will not live up to expectations, but Avatar delivers. It is probably the most beautiful movie I’ve ever seen and one of the best sci-fi movies in recent memory. And even better, it is [...]

AGU 2009: Day 3 – Astrobiology and Society

Wednesday was full of particularly interesting stuff: in between the Venus and moon talks there was also the Sagan lecture and an afternoon session about astrobiology and its implications in society. The Sagan lecture was given by Tori Hoehler, a scientist at NASA Ames. He discussed the fundamental thermodynamics behind life, and showed that even [...]

AGU 2009 – Day 3: Venus and the Moon

I’m splitting day 3 into two posts because there were so many interesting sessions. Stay tuned for the second post about astrobiology and society. But for now, Venus and the moon! I started the day off at the Venus session. One of the first talks I heard was by Cedric Gillman about the history of [...]

More AGU Posts Coming Soon

Apologies for the delay on posting about AGU. During the conference I had woefully little time to actually sit down and turn my chicken-scratch notes into something approaching coherence. I did a big chunk of that on my red-eye flight home and I’ll be posting them later today. So, stay tuned!

AGU 2009 – Day 2

I started off day 2 of AGU at a couple of lunar talks showing off data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Unfortunately, I missed the early sessions about the high-res cameras, but the bright side was that I learned abount some instruments I was less familiar with. First was the Lunar Orbital Laser Altimeter – [...]

AGU 2009 – Day 1

For those not familiar with the conference, the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union is a terrifyingly, overwhelmingly large conference. Each year, something like 16,000 geoscientists descend on San Francisco to share their work. It is also one of the major planetary science conferences, so a lot of new results are first presented here. [...]

Realistic Space Battles and a Blog About Craters

Two quick links to hold you over until my AGU coverage starts on Monday. First up, Joe Shoer has a great post on his blog about what space battles might actually be like. This should be required reading for sci-fi authors, especially those with hard sci-fi leanings. Second, Jim Richardson, a researcher here at the [...]

Carnival of Space #132!

Hey, check it out, it’s the carnival of space! Things will be pretty quiet around here this week because I’m a bit preoccupied with a two-page abstract for next year’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (due Thursday) and putting together a poster for the American Geophysical Union conference next week. I can only imagine the [...]