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Search Results for 'lro'
Moon bounce
Of all the amazing pictures returned from the moon by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter – and I may include the Apollo landing sites among them – I think my favorites are the ones showing boulders that rolled down slopes. Did I say rolled? I mean bounced! [Click to enselenate.] This shot from LRO shows the [...]
Excavating a long-dead lunar fire fountain
Although it may seem rather obvious now, for a long time there was a debate over craters on the Moon. Were they from impacts, or big volcanoes? We now know that the vast majority are from objects slamming into the Moon. There’s a lot of junk floating around out there in space, and without an [...]
A lunar crater is graben the spotlight
I am endlessly fascinated by the Moon. There may be an inherent bias there because it is, after all, the closest astronomical object in the sky. Still, it has an amazingly varied surface with lots of really odd features. One of my favorite types of things to look at are overlapping features. It can produce [...]
Dragon*Con 2012
Now that I’ve properly recovered from Comic Con in July, it’s time for Dragon*Con! Woohoo! D*C is another huge fan convention, held in Atlanta, and this year it’s Friday August 31 to Monday, September 3. As usual, I’ll be running around doing a million things and wondering if a human can survive on Tootsie Rolls [...]
… and the flags *ARE* still there!
One of the more enduring questions about the Apollo Moon missions is seemingly simple: after 40+ years, are the flags the astronauts planted on the lunar surface still there? It’s an interesting question. Buzz Aldrin claims he saw the flag blow over when the ascent module carrying him and Neil Armstrong lifted off from the [...]
Peaking into lunar craters
Large impacts are fascinating. There’s the thriller-movie aspect of them, of course, spiced with enough reality to make them legitimately scary. But the physics of them is equally enthralling, and complex enough that it will be a rich field for scientists to study for years to come. The good news for both these aspects is [...]
A ray of coincidence
I love a good coincidence! Yesterday, I posted this for the daily #BAFact: It says, "#BAFact: Face east just after sunset. That dark band across the horizon? The Earth’s shadow on the sky." It also has a link to an article I wrote that mentions this shadow of the Earth on the sky. It’s called [...]
Desktop Project Part 6: Psychedelic topographic Moon
[Over the past few weeks, I've collected a metric ton of cool pictures to post, but somehow have never gotten around to actually posting them. Sometimes I was too busy, sometimes too lazy, sometimes they just fell by the wayside... but I decided my computer's desktop was getting cluttered, and I'll never clean it up [...]
Desktop Project Part 1: A weird Moon crater
[Over the past few weeks, I've collected a metric ton of cool pictures to post, but somehow have never gotten around to actually posting them. Sometimes I was too busy, sometimes too lazy, sometimes they just fell by the wayside... but I decided my computer's desktop was getting cluttered, and I'll never clean it up [...]
The Moon's history of violence
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a NASA space probe that’s been orbiting the Moon since June 23, 2009. On March 19 it will mark its 1000th day in orbit! To celebrate, NASA released this cool animation showing the history of the Moon: According to current thinking, the Moon itself formed after a planet roughly the [...]
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