The two brightest planets in the sky, Venus and Jupiter, have been drawing closer and closer to each other as seen from Earth for the past several days. This weekend they will be joined by the hard-to-see innermost planet Mercury for a rare triple planetary conjunction. The three planets will form a triangle, with each [...]
In my previous post, I talked about the strong evidence for the presence of water ice in permanently shaded crater floors around the north pole of Mercury. Part of the evidence for this was the thermal modeling of surface and near-surface temperatures to predict polar temperatures. We’re all familiar with the fact that polar regions [...]
The universe is full of surprises. More than once I have read an article about a new discovery and told myself something like this: “That can’t be right! They must have messed up somewhere, and we’ll read about how in a few weeks.” Sometimes I’ve been right. Far more often, I’ve been wrong. Such was [...]
If someone were to ask people who have one way or another made a career out of science or technology what they read in their childhood, the chances are very good that the common thread would be science fiction. I read a lot of things when I was a kid, but my most beloved book [...]
Well, probably not like this. But it does carry instrumentation designed to look for biosignatures, evidence that simple microbial life may have existed at some point in the Martian past, even if it no longer does so.
You may have read that the Curiosity Mars rover is communicating with Earth mostly by relaying data through one of the spacecraft orbiting Mars, and wondered why that is so. Even if you haven’t wondered, I have! Hence this post. There are multiple reasons, of course, but the most important one is energy conservation. Even [...]
Quote: “This is just insane. The Internet is still totally exploding over what happened…” Rather than try to recap everything, I’m just going to point you to the two best web sources: the Curiosity site itself, and Emily Lakdawalla’s blog, the best source of information about solar system spacecraft there is. One note: there is [...]
In just a few more days, the largest and most complex spacecraft ever to land on Mars will either have six wheels on the ground or will be a smoking billion-dollar crater. I’ve posted this video before, but it’s cool enough for a repeat: The exact time of touchdown on Mars will be 1:31 a.m. [...]
Poor little Pluto! Every third-grader’s favorite planet got officially downgraded to a “dwarf planet” in 2006, and nothing’s been the same since. Although planetary scientists have known for more than 20 years that Pluto is just one of the larger of the objects comprising the Kuiper Belt, in the public’s mind those same scientists were [...]
Remember this picture? To my mind this is one of the most amazing images in the history of planetary exploration. It shows the Mars Phoenix lander descending under a parachute to the surface of Mars in 2008, and was taken from orbit by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The lander is actually much closer to the [...]
