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The Planetary Society Blog
Archive
Archived posts are listed in reverse chronological order.
Jan. 18, 2011 | 10:48 PST | 18:48 UTC
A Worldwide Game of "Telephone" Distorts NASA Meeting
By Charlene Anderson
From the category, "Stuck in My Craw:"
In the last couple of weeks, media outlets around the world have been reporting that NASA recently convened a private meeting at JPL to identify the worst movies ever made, scientifically... More»
Jan. 17, 2011 | 11:20 PST | 19:20 UTC
Radar topographic view of a volcano
Quick -- where is this? Is it one of Venus' iconic volcanoes? Or maybe Mars'? Click to enlarge >The first bistatic radar image acquired by TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-XCredit: DLR Nope. It's Mount Etna on Earth, with its vegetation mostly stripped... More»
Jan. 14, 2011 | 11:16 PST | 19:16 UTC
Another scientific clarification: Vanth probably not half the mass of Orcus
So here's my other correction for today: earlier this week I got all excited about the Orcus-Vanth system, a Kuiper belt binary system containing two bodies of very different color and therefore likely different albedo. It turns out there was a... More»
Jan. 14, 2011 | 09:50 PST | 17:50 UTC
Scientific clarification: "inverted topography" is more general than "esker-like features"
In the past couple of months I've received several emails from scientists offering clarifications, corrections, or alternative points of view to previous posts, which is awesome and something that I enthusiastically encourage. Here's one of them:... More»
Jan. 13, 2011 | 10:42 PST | 18:42 UTC
2010 JL33: How to see an asteroid from quite a long way away
A terrific set of Goldstone radar images of a good-sized near-Earth asteroids named 2010 JL33 was posted to the JPL website yesterday. They also posted a movie version but something about these pixelated radar image series absolutely begs for them... More»
Jan. 12, 2011 | 21:44 PST | Jan. 13 05:44 UTC
Goodies from the January 11 Rhea flyby
Cassini got some incredibly tricky shots during its January 11 Rhea flyby! I've spent the last couple of hours drooling over the raw images website. Here's one great composition, a color shot that was part of an enormous mosaic of Rhea that just... More»
Jan. 12, 2011 | 15:09 PST | 23:09 UTC
Video: The Frontier Is Everywhere
by Charlene Anderson
No one ever said it like Carl Sagan. No one else could capture in a few words the power and glory of humankind's efforts to reach other worlds. A young and enthusiastic NASA supporter has married Carl's writing with images to... More»
Jan. 12, 2011 | 09:32 PST | 17:32 UTC
365 Days of Astronomy Podcast: Unmanned Space Exploration in 2011
Today the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast aired my contribution, Unmanned Space Exploration in 2011, about what to look forward to in solar system exploration this year. Regular readers will know that I do these updates in the blog once a month;... More»
Jan. 12, 2011 | 09:09 PST | 17:09 UTC
"A genuinely weird experience": A video of Steve Squyres explaining a photo of Steve Squyres
In a lovely talk, in his uncommonly engaging way, Steve Squyres presents the portrait of him that now hangs in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Of course his portrait is a panoramic photo! After his five-minute introduction, it goes on... More»
Jan. 11, 2011 | 12:49 PST | 20:49 UTC
Orcus and Vanth
EDIT Jan 14: A reader has pointed out that there was a math error in the ArXiv version of the paper that I summarize in this blog post, which resulted in them estimating a possible mass for Vanth of half that of Orcus. The error was corrected in... More»
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