Thar She Blows!

October 18, 2008

Warning: Serious geek alert

It takes a special kind of person to get worked up about what you’ll see if you click on this link.

But you have to realize that that’s not just any doodad blowing in the wind. That’s part of the Phoenix science station and the wind is blowing on MARS.

I know this isn’t going to solve the financial crisis or help determine who should be the next president, but it’s pretty cool, IMHO, that humans can sit around in their homes and offices on planet Earth and see a picture of Mother Nature doing her thing on another world.

A bit of background: Last week, Phoenix, which is parked near the north pole of Mars, encountered its first dust storm. The pictures were taken with the probe’s Surface Stereo Imager. The bit flapping in the breeze is part of the Canadian Space Agency’s meteorological package.

Thanks to a sister spacecraft in orbit, scientists were able to get a bird’s-eye-view of the storm, which spanned nearly 14,300 square miles. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbit took this shot as the storm blew over the Phoenix landing site.

A World A'Twitter

July 01, 2008

Curious what’s happening on Mars? No need to comb the net looking for news. NASA’s newest robot probe will phone you with its updates.

Phoenix, which is busily analyzing ice and soil samples from Mars’ northern polar cap, is using the social networking site Twitter to text-message the science-minded about its progress. Apparently, more than 27,000 folks are following Phoenix’s words, which can flash across your cell phone, pop up in your Instant Messaging program or passively wait to be read on its Twitter homepage.

Hungry for a direct outreach to the public, NASA has given more than a dozen machines a virtual life. Among Phoenix’s colleagues on Twitter are LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) which hasn’t even left the ground yet, the Hubble Space Telescope, the new gamma ray observatory GLAST and the space shuttles Atlantis , Discovery and Endeavour. Even space shuttle missions are incarnating.

It’s not just the ‘droids who are coming into their ‘lectronic lives. Apparently blogs are Twitter-fodder too so I took the plunge and signed up Free Space. At least I think I did. I’m waiting for my cell phone to ring to let me know if I’ve posted or not.