Blog Archive

Nichelle Nichols and the Nerd-in-chief

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/04/03 11:02 CDT

I got this wonderful photo from Nichols' Twitter after Mike Okuda retweeted it.

Dione, Mimas, Titan, Tethys, Rhea, Enceladus, Hyperion, and Iapetus, from Cassini science data, to a common scale and from similar phase angles, montage by Emily Lakdawalla

What Saturn's moons can tell us about comets (Notes from LPSC 2012)

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/04/03 05:20 CDT

My notes on a two-part presentation by collaborators Jim Richardson and David Minton about the sizes of things in the Kuiper belt, a story they told by looking at Saturn's moons. How does that work? What connects Saturn's moons to the Kuiper belt is craters.

Simulated view of Opportunity at Greeley Haven

An update on Opportunity, and a plea for some volunteer desktop publishing help

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/04/03 05:00 CDT | 2 comments

A. J. S. Rayl has just posted her monthly update on the goings-on at Meridiani planum, noting that the update recaps the 99th month of the Mars Exploration Rover mission. There's a lot of detail on how the radio-tracking campaign is going. While she's not driving, Opportunity's acting like a lander, with radio antennas on Earth performing Doppler tracking to allow very fine measurement of Mars' orbital motion.