Articles

Ryan Anderson

Today was all about volcanoes.

Ryan Anderson

After a hectic week of tying up loose ends and running around like a chicken with its head cut off, I now have my proster done for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, and am in Phoenix for the Planetary Surface Processes field trip, led by my adviser Jim Bell.

Ryan Anderson

There are a pair of excellent articles in this week's Space Review by Adrian Brown, looking at the Technical and Budgetary reasons that the Mars Science Lab launch was delayed until 2011.

Ryan Anderson

Google Earth's latest edition was just released and guess what? It has a Mars setting!

Ryan Anderson

NASA has put together a nice movie of Dr. Mike Mumma summarizing his discovery of methane on Mars.

Ryan Anderson

Mike Griffin started the press conference, and got right down to business announcing the launch delay and indicating that the actuators as well as other technical problems are responsible.

Ryan Anderson

At 12 noon EST. I know what the announcement is, but I'm not allowed to tell you! How frustrating is that?!

Ryan Anderson

As I post this, NASA is holding a press conference in which they are announcing that the Mars Science Laboratory's launch date will be slipped by two years.

Ryan Anderson

I just heard, via this article at Universe Today, that the sample cache on MSL has been canceled.

Ryan Anderson

I've known about this for a little while but it was finally made public: The list of MSL landing sites had now been trimmed to four.

Ryan Anderson

NASA is holding a press conference right now regarding MSL and it sounds like they are going to press on and try to achieve the October 2009 launch date.

Ryan Anderson

This image from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, shows cracks in the rocks on Mars that once formed the underground plumbing through which groundwater traveled.

Ryan Anderson

The Mawrth Vallis landing site is actually a set of four possible landing ellipses in an area with huge clay mineral signatures that is cut by a meandering outflow channel.

Ryan Anderson

The Eberswalde site is interesting because it is unarguably the best example of a delta on Mars.

Ryan Anderson

The next landing site that we heard about was Holden Crater. Holden is a 154 km diameter crater formed early in martian history that happened to fall smack in the path of an extensive fluvial system.

Ryan Anderson

For those of you playing along at home, I thought I should point out that most of the presentations so far are posted at the

Ryan Anderson

I am sort of breaking my own protocol here by posting about Gale crater before I hear the presentations today, but since we will immediately go into discussion and decision making after it is presented this morning, I figured that it would be good to familiarize you with it now.

Ryan Anderson

It looks like the top three sites are Eberswalde, Holden and Gale.

Ryan Anderson

The discussion and arguments are over! We are just waiting for the last few ballots to be submitted, and then the project science group will start counting them.

Ryan Anderson

This morning we hit the ground running and heard about a very interesting site: the Nili Fossae Trough. This site would land in a big canyon formed when a block of crust dropped down.