And Paul Spudis explains what it means for selenology.
Category Archives: Space Science
Painting What Can’t Be Seen
Some thoughts on the history of space art, with some excellent examples of the prescience of many of the artists.
Mimas
…is not boring. New details on the “death star.”
Back To The Drawing Board?
I’ve never been a big fan of nuking asteroids, but this test should cause some concern:
Don Korycansky of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Catherine Plesko of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico simulated blowing up asteroids 1 kilometre across. When the speed of dispersal was relatively low, it took only hours for the fragments to coalesce into a new rock.
“The high-speed stuff goes away but the low-speed stuff reassembles [in] 2 to 18 hours,” Korycansky says. The simulations were presented (pdf) last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.
So you have to have a big enough bomb to really do the job. I think there are better, more controllable ways.
Too Busy To Blog
I’ve been talking to a lot of people at the conference, and not capturing much of it, but Clark Lindsey has been monitoring the blogs and twitter feeds.
Don’t Feel Sorry For Spirit
Here’s another take on the previous sob story. And here’s what’s really going on.
[Via Alan Boyle]
Punished For Success
Isn’t it always the way with NASA?
This is poignant on at least two levels. If you accept the anthropomorphizing, it’s like something out of Catch-22.
Gravity Wells
A nice graphical presentation.
[Via reader Brock Cusick]
The Case For Pluto
Alan Boyle is going to be at The Grove in LA tomorrow night for a book signing. I may try to make it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of Alan, he has a roundup of the latest prospects for fusion — cold, medium and hot — over at Cosmic Log.
Orionids Peak Tonight
It should be a good show, because there will be no moon, and peak will be about 3 AM on the left coast. I don’t know if I’ll manage to get out of town, though. We both have to work in the morning, and it’s at least an hour drive to get far enough from LA to get a dark sky.