This week, Comet PANSTARRS will be a naked eye object for observers in the northern hemisphere. But you need to be quick–it is low on the western horizon, close to the sun. If you are too early, the sky is too bright to see it. If you are too late, it will have already set. [...]
Most people my age who have wound up in some sort of a science-related career (and many who have not) can trace their excitement about the subject to the space programs of the late 1950s and 1960s. I’m no exception. With advance warning that you will see a scary picture of the 14-year-old me, you [...]
The nearly simultaneous and completely coincidental occurrences of a near miss by an asteroid and the biggest meteor to hit the Earth in more than a century have prompted a lot of questions. There is so much that is fascinating about these objects, from their danger (one will eventually be on a collision course with [...]
At about 2:30 p.m. EST on February 15th, 2013, a 50 meter (150 feet) diameter asteroid will approach within 28,000 km (17,000 miles) of the Earth, traveling at about 8 km/s (18,000 mph). Should you be worried? That depends on your time frame. In the short term: absolutely not. There is NO CHANCE that this [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The formation of our solar system, with multiple planets and other bodies of varying sizes and compositions—this was not a simple process. The more planetary systems we discover around other stars, the more we confirm the truth of this. Scientists are still working out the details of exactly why we have a system that has [...]
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.
I must confess that I am puzzled by people who ask me if I am excited about a “blue moon”—commonly understood to mean a second full moon in the same calendar month. It’s nice and big and bright, but it means the worst possible conditions for stargazing. The full moon is so bright that it [...]
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 [...]
