en-us http://planetary.org/blog/ A guide to interesting stuff going on in space science, space exploration, and space advocacy. 15 Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:38:25 GMT Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:38:25 GMT http://www.planetary.org/_img/rss/logo.jpg 127 111 http://planetary.org/blog/ blog@planetary.org (Emily Ladakawalla) Copyright © 2012 by The Planetary Society. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003359/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003359/ By Bill Nye Audacious— that's how I describe the Arecibo radio telescope. For me, it was just hard to believe what I was seeing. I have just returned from my first Planetary Society-sponsored trip to Puerto Rico and this historic, remarkable, big idea of a telescope. The Arecibo Radio TelescopeCredit: The Planetary Society If you're not familiar with this machine designed to explore the cosmos and our own ionosphere, it was conceived in .... Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:09:34 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003358/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003358/ Patrick Donohue is a fourth-year Ph.D. student working with Clive Neal at the University of Notre Dame, whose primary research focus is on the origin and evolution of high-titanium lunar basalts. He writes a geology blog and is active on Twitter under the username poikiloblastic. He's also an amateur photographer, shooting sports, and wildlife, and of course interesting geology! The following is the first in a series of posts based on field .... Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:02:54 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003357/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003357/ This weekend is SpaceUp unconference in San Diego, and I'll be attending on Saturday. I've never been to an unconference before, so I'm very curious to see how it all works! You can still register if you want to attend, but if you can't, some part of the unconference will be webcast on Spacevidcast. As per the unconference format, there is no set agenda yet, except for Saturday evening from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. Pacifc, when there will be a .... Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:06:18 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003356/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003356/ JPL issued a news note today with that most dreaded of press release titles: "Mission Status Report," which I dread because it's usually a euphemism for "something bad has happened to one of our spacecraft." But this time it contains nothing but good news. It briefly notes that the Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft has successfully completed the first of twelve trajectory correction maneuvers it'll perform between launch last year and Jupiter .... Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:33:59 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003355/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003355/ Fraser Cain has organized a weekly Space Hangout that happens at 1800 UTC on Thursdays, and kindly invited me to participate. This week's lineup included him and me as well as Pamela Gay, Nicole Gugliucci, Alan Boyle, and Ian O'Neill. In this week's space hangout, we talked about the search for super earths, the non-discovery of life on Venus, new images from the far side of the Moon, nature versus nurture in star formation, and the tests of .... Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:20:01 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003354/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003354/ I could watch this video a hundred times. It's basically a cell phone video shot by a spacecraft in orbit around the Moon. It's the first release from MoonKAM, tiny cameras included on both GRAIL spacecraft whose only purpose is public outreach. Classrooms can sign up for opportunities to propose sites to image. Here's the video:Here's a still:Click to enlarge >The Moon's farside from Ebb's MoonKAMThis is a still from a movie captured by .... Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:49:38 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003353/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003353/ For my regular readers: this post does get around to space eventually. Bear with me. A recent tweet by @AlYankovic tipped me to the fact that the children's book author, songwriter, and illustrator Sandra Boynton recently established a presence on Twitter. As I'm a huge fan of her oeuvre, I immediately followed her. Most of her Tweets are funny one-liners, often accompanied by drawings, but the other day she tweeted the following:2012. The .... Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:17:50 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003352/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003352/ By Mat Kaplan We're just a week away from the first lecture in this class that will introduce you to the wonders of astronomy. The Planetary Society's Director of Projects, Dr. Bruce Betts, is ready to return to the virtual classroom at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Catch Bruce in action beginning Wednesday, February 8, from 3:00 to 4:30pm Pacific Time. No registration needed! Watch it live on DHTV and you'll be invited to .... Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:35:36 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003351/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003351/ By Louis D. Friedman Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, has released its official report concerning the failure of the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, which fell back to Earth from orbit on January 15 after failing to ignite the engines that were to take it to the largest Martian moon. News agencies are reporting that the investigating commission blames the failure on space radiation from charged particles, which damaged poor-quality "imported" .... Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:32:57 GMT http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003350/ http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003350/ I think the word for the month of February is: "routine." The 21 missions that I'm tracking (amounting to 24 spacecraft) are nearly all in routine science operations or cruise behavior, gathering data from across the solar system or journeying to new destinations. Of course, this is a smaller number of missions than I was tracking last month, with the end of Phobos-Grunt and Yinghuo-1's brief appearances in these updates. And it's also .... Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:12:13 GMT