Topic: Pamela Gay
Closer Look: An 18-Mission Fleet Monitors Earth (For Now)

Closer Look: An 18-Mission Fleet Monitors Earth (For Now)

There are currently 20 NASA Earth observing missions circling our world, either as singular flagship spacecraft or as constellations of small sats that work together to do their science. These missions collectively observe everything from the chemistry of our atmosphere, to the flux of solar radiation on our world, to the planet’s thermal behavior and changing sea levels. Together, these spacecraft provide continuous monitoring of out evolving world over time. Unfortunately, many of these missions are already working on borrowed time. Ace, CYGNSS, Jason03, Landsat 7 & 8, and SMAP all...

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Dark Energy Search Gets Dynamic

Dark Energy Search Gets Dynamic

At the beginning of our last episode, I mentioned that we’d just learned that new work by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, had provided hints that our universe has a changing density of dark energy, but I needed time to look over the research. Well,...

Ancient Crater Found Hiding in Australia

Ancient Crater Found Hiding in Australia

I want to bring you a story that looks to rewrite a bit of our world's history. Researchers studying the geology of an Australian feature called the North Pole Dome, despite being located in Western Australia, found evidence that the feature is associated with a 3.5...

Venus Volcanism is Erupting in the Literature

Venus Volcanism is Erupting in the Literature

Another big topic of discussion at LPSC seemed to be Venus. I say "seemed" because I’m sure the actual big topic of discussion was proposed budget cuts, which could be as much as 50%, but there was no definitive information on budget cuts, so that is more a big topic...

Closer Look: Mars Occupies the Science Journals

Closer Look: Mars Occupies the Science Journals

Talk of Mars has been seeping into just about every area of media, as rumors swirl that NASA’s current plans to return humans to the Moon will be replaced with plans to fly directly to Mars. Given that we can’t currently keep people alive on Mars, I’m really hoping...

Europa Clipper Joins in on the Star Observing

Europa Clipper Joins in on the Star Observing

It doesn’t take a lot of telescope to make the number of visible stars radically increase, in it turns out even the Europa clipper, with its several centimeter star tracker cameras, has been regularly making its own observations.  The Clipper launched  October 14,...

One Star Cluster, 80 Million Pixels

One Star Cluster, 80 Million Pixels

Nebula encasing RCW 38 (credit:ESO/VVVX survey) Our modern, highly efficient cameras and massive telescopes allow us to not only do massive surveys, they also allow us to see specific objects in previously unimagined detail. The 4-m Visible and Infrared Survey...