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Blog Archive
New Horizons Day 2: Liquids on Pluto's surface?
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/09/13 01:27 CDT
Jeff Moore's presentation was cool because of the discussion it stimulated. He considered what exogenic processes might be operating on Pluto's surface. What's an exogenic process? It's something that modifies the shape of the surface from the outside, and doesn't require the body to be geologically active inside.
New Horizons Day 2: Tectonic features on icy worlds
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/09/09 01:05 CDT
New Horizons Day 2: Tectonic features on icy worlds
New Horizons workshop, day 1: Chemistry & climate on Pluto & other cold places
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/08/30 11:27 CDT
Today and tomorrow I'm attending the New Horizons Workshop on Icy Surface Processes. The first day was all about the composition of the surface and atmosphere of Pluto, Charon, Triton, and other distant places.
Gale's not the only Martian crater with an "enigmatic mound"
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/08/17 07:33 CDT
Gale's not the only Martian crater with an "enigmatic mound"
What a Day! From Earth to the Moon and Mars
Posted by Bill Nye on 2011/07/21 03:02 CDT
Mission accomplished! It's been thirty great years for the Space Shuttle program. With this venerable space vehicle retired, it's on to the next adventure.
Posted by Meg Schwamb on 2011/06/08 02:43 CDT
On May 5 and 6, I had a run on the WIYN (Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO) telescope, a 3.5 m telescope, the second largest telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona.
Posted by Ryan Anderson on 2011/05/27 09:01 CDT
Laser beams and space exploration are perfect for each other, and not just because all self-respecting starship captains know their way around a blaster. It turns out that zapping rocks with a laser is not only fun, it also can tell you what they're made of!
Posted by Meg Schwamb on 2011/05/25 08:30 CDT
The last decade has seen an explosion in our understanding of the solar system with the discovery of the largest Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) of comparable size to Pluto.
Searching for one planet, finding another
Posted by Konstantin Batygin on 2011/05/23 07:35 CDT
Guest blog: Konstantin Batygin: Searching for one planet, finding another
Galileo's still producing discoveries: A magma ocean within Io!
Posted by Jason Perry on 2011/05/13 11:44 CDT
A fresh report was published online yesterday in Science Express on the discovery of a magma ocean beneath the surface of Io. Big news! This is a paper I've been looking forward to seeing for more than year and half.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/27 01:03 CDT | 2 comments
If you go to a conference about lunar geology, sooner or later you'll hear the term "KREEP" bandied about. (And almost as soon as KREEP is mentioned, a bad pun will be made. It's inevitable.) Context will tell you it has something to do with a special kind of lunar rock, but that'll only get you so far. What is KREEP, and why is it important on the Moon?
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/19 11:21 CDT
When Mariner 10 flew past Mercury, it caught an immense impact basin lying half in and half out of sunlight, which they named Caloris. Even with only half the basin visible, scientists knew it was one of the largest in the solar system. Geologists had to wait more than 25 years to see the rest of Caloris, and when they did it turned out to be even bigger than they had thought. But the fact that Caloris was only half in sunlight was fortuitous in one sense, because it meant that the spot on Mercury that was exactly opposite the area of the Caloris impact was also partially in sunlight. That spot looks weird.
Comparing Clementine and Chandrayaan-1 spectra from the Moon
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/11 12:38 CDT
In a paper recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Georgiana Kramer and several coauthors performed a careful comparison of two data sets that seem like they're measuring the same things, so you'd think that the measurements they took would match between the two instruments. But they don't quite match.
Posted by Mike Malaska on 2011/03/29 11:49 CDT
Some recent high-resolution images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) have revealed large blocks on the lunar surface that show evidence of layers. The layered blocks were seen near the crater Aristarchus, which is a bright crater in the northeast quadrant of the nearside Moon.
LPSC 2011: Sponge-moon Hyperion
Posted by Mike Malaska on 2011/03/23 02:51 CDT
Saturn's moon Hyperion has a bizarre sponge-like appearance that is in dramatic contrast to other heavily cratered bodies in the solar system.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/22 04:40 CDT
Last week, Zibi Turtle and Jason Perry and a dozen other coauthors published a paper in Science discussing evidence for rain on Titan.
LPSC 2011: Kirby Runyon on Mars, the Moon, Hartley 2, and Ganymede
Posted by Kirby Runyon on 2011/03/15 01:57 CDT
Kirby Runyon, a second-year grad student at Temple University, offered to send me some writeups of selected presentations from last week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, and I enthusiastically agreed.
365 Days of Astronomy Podcast: A MESSENGER to Mercury
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/14 11:18 CDT
I've got another 365 Days of Astronomy podcast airing today, this one an overview of the MESSENGER mission with particular attention to what's been learned in the three Mercury flybys, and what's going to happen when it enters orbit only a little more than three days from now!
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/09 12:23 CST
While scanning through the talks scheduled for this week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference I came across the following talk title: "Interannual and Seasonal Variability in the North Polar Region of Mars: Observations in Mars Years 29 and 30 by MARCI, CTX, and CRISM." My first thought was "hey, cool research spanning a long time period and across data sets." But my second was "Mars years 29 and 30? What does that mean?"
The 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC)
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/07 11:16 CST
Science is all about asking questions, coming up with ideas that might explain the answers, and then poking at those ideas to see if they work. Scientists spend much of their time in solitary research working out those ideas. But they also devote big chunks of time to meetings where they pitch their ideas and see what their peers think of them.
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