Radioactively hot, that is. While the Curiosity Mars Rover was cruising for eight months between Earth and Mars, one of the instruments aboard was measuring the radiation levels encountered along the way. The Radiation Assessment Detector—RAD—was inside the spacecraft, shielded in much the same way as astronauts would be on an interplanetary mission. Now the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
NASA and JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) released this new video to explain the unbelievably complicated procedures by which they hope to land the Curiosity rover on Mars: Why so complicated? My favorite blogger Emily Lakdawalla begins a multi-part series today, promising to explain this in great detail. There is no better person out there to [...]
When I was six years old, I wanted to be what every other six-year-old boy wanted to be in Texas—a cowboy. When I was eleven years old, I wanted to be what every kid in America wanted to be—an astronaut. And the astronaut I most wanted to be was John Glenn. I created an “instrument [...]
