en-us http://planetary.org/blog/ A guide to interesting stuff going on in space science, space exploration, and space advocacy. 15 Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:34:44 GMT Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:34:44 GMT http://www.planetary.org/_img/rss/logo.jpg 127 111 http://planetary.org/blog/ blog@planetary.org (Emily Ladakawalla) Copyright © 2010 by The Planetary Society. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002387/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002387/ Well, it's already mid-day on the Friday a week after the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference ended and I'm STILL not done writing up my notes. In the interest of moving on to other things, I am now posting pretty much everything I have left, with minimal editing to make it readable and few of my usual comments; any comments I have will be in italics and/or brackets. I apologize for these notes being less interpreted than previous ones and .... Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:27:24 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002386/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002386/ For some reason both Jason Perry and Ted Stryk took it upon themselves to produce new, pretty versions of Jupiter's moon Europa this week, so I'm hereby featuring them! Europa is picturesque and strange both from a distance, as seen by Voyager, and from close up, as seen by Galileo. There's no landscape in the solar system quite like it. First, a global view, from Voyager 2, produced by Ted Stryk. It is amazing in hindsight to find out that .... Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:24:46 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002385/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002385/ Yes, it's yet another post on Helene! I keep on finding new stuff to post. This time it is a really cool montage assembled by Ian Regan, another one of the amateurs who hangs out on unmannedspaceflight.com. Unlike Ted Stryk and Gordan Ugarkovic, who prefer to work with calibrated, archived data to craft beautiful, realistically colored images, Ian is most interested in gleaning what he can from the raw images posted rapidly to the Internet, .... Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:59:18 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002384/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002384/ Despite the fact that I began my career in science doing research on Magellan images of Venus, I've often avoided Venus sessions at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference because they've tended to be pointlessly contentious. But I decided to attend the one this year to see how things went. It was moderately interesting, but I left with a feeling of some frustration. There are untapped wonders yet to be found in the Magellan data set, for .... Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:16:07 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002383/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002383/ I posted already some neat images from Cassini's flyby of Helene last week, and commented on how most of the images from that encounter missed Helene entirely or only caught the moon at one edge of the camera field of view. Here's an example of one of those images, which also catches Saturn's cloud tops in the background. The color is fake; I did it to help differentiate Saturn from Helene. There are other images in the sequence that can tell .... Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:40:04 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002382/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002382/ This is one of the things that came out during LPSC last week and all I could do at the time was Tweet it, which doesn't serve most of my readers, I realize. So here it is in blog form: the most unbelievably spectacular 3D animation of a bit of Mars I've seen yet, produced by Adrian Lark. The flight takes us through part of Candor Chasma, one of the largest sub-canyons in the Valles Marineris complex. I've embedded it here at low definition; .... Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:53:05 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002381/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002381/ The Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced yesterday that the venerable 70-meter dish at the Goldstone Deep Space Network station is being taken offline so that major surgery can be performed. Part of its "hydrostatic bearing assembly," which allows the enormous dish to rotate horizontally, is being replaced, for the first time since the antenna was built. They say the replacement has a design lifetime of 20 years, which, based on past experience .... Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:37:22 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002380/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002380/ Last week Mars Express had its closest-ever flyby of Mars' larger, inner moon Phobos. They used the close encounter for radio science, to attempt to probe the inner structure of the little potato. It'll be a few weeks at least before they have any kind of reportable results on what that data tells them, but one thing that they can already report is that they have lovely data. Here's what it looks like:Click to enlarge >Phobos' Gravity Pulling on .... Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:43:35 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002379/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002379/ A week later and I am finally getting to the mountains of notes I took on Moon-related talks I saw at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) held in Houston last week. Unlike previous years at LPSC, the Moon was really the leader, with the most talks and posters, even more than Mars, which has never, to my knowledge, happened in the years (since 1998) that I have been attending the conference. On top of that, there was an especially .... Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:17:28 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002378/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002378/ by Louis D. Friedman, Executive Director of The Planetary Society The Planetary Society presented the Cosmos Award for Outstanding Public Presentation of Science to Stephen Hawking in Cambridge England on February 27. Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's widow and collaborator, Neil deGrasse Tyson and I presented the award, a beautiful glass sculpture of Saturn. 2010 Cosmos Award Ceremony Bijal Thakore, Bill Nye, Jim Bell, Dan Geraci, Ann Druyan, .... Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:20:30 GMT