I’ve already written a bit about Phoenix and mentioned that it’s heading for a site near Mars’ north pole, but where exactly are we heading? Doug Ellison has the details over at our Mars Live site.
Essentially, we’re heading for Northen Canada, but without the trees. Emily has the latest maps of the region, and [...]
Posts in the "Mars" Category
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I’ve really missed podcasting since the demise of Living Space’s previous incarnation, and the odd interview just isn’t the same. I’m delighted to say that I’ve managed to cajole the very busy and very knowledgeable Douglas Pierce-Price from ESO, the European Southern Observatory to join me. You can listen to our first show here :
or [...]
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Following my post over the weekend about the dangers of satellite building, here’s JPL’s excellent video about the Phoenix landing.
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For those of you who’ll be online watching and waiting for Phoenix’s safe landing, I hope you’ll be able to join Doug Ellison (from [...] -
It’s exam season in Oxford, and I’ve made my first sightings of scared looking undergraduates in formal academic dress heading for the exam schools. I’m used, at this time of year, to waking up in the middle of the night tormented by dreams of the years that I sat through exam after exam after exam. [...]
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Next time I have a month spare (!) I’m going to spend a large chunk of it going through the HiRISE images. HiRISE is the main camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and it produces stunning images of the surface. In fact, the images are so good that if they were of Earth they’d be classified. [...]
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… it’s a rock. Remember the Martian bigfoot from last week?
It seemed that my anger struck a chord, and I’ve been literally deluged with a email asking me to commemorate the fact that it’s a rock. I couldn’t resist marking the momentous discovery of a rock, so you’re welcome to wander over to cafe [...]
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Emily over at the Planetary Society blog is often full of wisdom, and I’m impressed she managed to keep calmer that I did when faced with ’Bigfoot’ on Mars. (It’s STILL a rock!) She says :
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You may find it annoying that after months of virtually ignoring the rover missions, there is finally a much-discussed news [...] -
I really believe that the correct way to talk to people about astronomy is to assume that they’re intelligent and interested and move on from there. Yes, explain things simply, but you don’t have to talk as if your audience has the attention span of a stupid goldfish. There are times when I wonder, though. [...]
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Today marks the third anniversary (in Earth years) of Spirit’s landing on the Martian surface. It bears repeating again and again that this is a mission whose design lifetime was 90 days, and yet both Spirit and Opportunity are still going strong, despite dust storms and all that Mars has thrown at them. It’s hard [...]
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If you listened to the latest Living Space podcast you’ll have heard us talking about the then breaking news that a little asteroid called 2007WD5 had a small chance of hitting Mars. At the time the chance was given as 1 in 75, but new observations which have more tightly constrained its orbit raise that [...]
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