She moves! "First drive sequence in 145 sols" for Spirit
It's been an awful long time since we've seen one of these from Spirit:"Drive" animation from Spirit sol 2078Spirit returns thumbnail images from the navigation camera to Earth to document drives. This animation documents Spirit's first drive sequence in 145 sols, on sol 2,078, as her engineers prepared to attempt to extricate her from her sandy pit at Troy. Credit: NASA / JPL / animation by Eduardo Tesheiner It's an animation of four Navcam ....

Space Image Processing Classes are Go!
I got a huge response from readers interested in me conducting some online classes on space image data -- how to access and process it. Some of you are interested just in being armchair explorers, but I also received a surprising number of responses from college and graduate students who are looking for some introductory material on image processing to help them in their fields of study. So I am going to go forward with conducting these ....

Reviews of several space-themed books for young children
While I was on maternity leave I suddenly decided to see what books were out there that could help me teach my daughters (one's three years, and the other six months old) about the science and the thrill of space exploration. I bought a pile of them, finding a few that I really enjoyed. I reviewed two of them (Faces of the Moon and Cars on Mars) for the most recent issue of The Planetary Report (we always run a bunch of book reviews in our ....

Planetary Radio Q and A: Saturn's Hexagon
Before I get to this week's Q and A, I should mention that the Carnival of Space can be found over at the Next Big Future. This week's Planetary Radio features Lou Friedman on the Augustine Human Spaceflight report. On "Questions and Answers" I answered this question: "How do they explain the hexagon near Saturn's north pole?" Actually, the reader said more than that; they seemed to be under the bizarre impression that the Cassini team was ....

Planetary Radio Q and A: Not-so-gassy giants
I've forgotten to post Planetary Radio Q and A for the past few weeks, so I'll post a couple today. Planetary Radio for October 19 featured Bruce Murray on the persistence and importance of water ice on the Moon. On "Questions and Answers" I answered this question: "I read that Uranus got its tilt when it was hit by another object. What does it mean for a ball of gas to be hit -- wouldn't another object just pass through it?" Uranus in the ....