An exciting week in planetary science, as the Phoenix Mars Lander team announced that they had positively identified calcium carbonate


From the above image you can clearly see why this discovery was important.

Even cooler yet, virga (precipitation that falls from a cloud but evaporates before it reaches the surface) was discovered by the lander as it gazed up into the clouds with its laser. This is what virga looks like, though this was probably rain virga and on Mars it is most likely snow.


Here's a little animation of how it would look to sit on the surface of Mars and watch the clouds go by:


In other news, we got our first new picture of Mercury as our spacecraft prepares to make its second flyby of the planet scheduled for Sunday night/early Monday morning. I guess this means that Mercury wasn't destroyed since January. I requested not to go down to the science operation center at the NASA applied physics laboratory this time so that I could catch up on my homework and my javanese gamelan, but I was appointed as the leader of the "home" team. We might make t-shirts.

Wow, calcium carbonate! That's swell! (Now what does it mean?)

Maybe there'd be like, a US expo and an Asia expo or something... an international one would be hard to do.
» randomjunk on 2008-10-03 09:41:10

Great! Now we can artificially create hard water when we colonize Mars. Because, really, nothing says "Welcome home" more than a warm shower with hard water.
» ranor on 2008-10-03 10:02:39

Neat
Some of the songs here sound familiar...
» middaymoon on 2008-10-03 10:40:03

cool :D
» jolenesiah on 2008-10-04 03:11:30

Calcium carbonate... I can't recall that Science class about it.
» Nuttz on 2008-10-04 10:15:26

About to soil myself through excitement.
Hey, can you read this article,

http://www.geraldschroeder.com/age.html

and tell me how much you trust it? Also if it makes you bounce off the walls. I'm going nuts over here.
» middaymoon on 2008-10-04 05:48:39

I knew about the "infinte universes thing"
Because I've read Douglas Adams's books. Hahaha. That guy was crazy. I avoid this as religious proof simply because it's inconclusive. Still amazing, though.

I've heard of Flatland, but never read it. In middle school, I read a book called "The boy who reversed himself", which is similar. A girl befriends a boy who is part of a secret society that knows all about worlds with more or less spacial dimensions than ours, and can in fact "peel himself" off of our plane of existence into the 4 dim. world. The main conflict is when the pair gets lost in the 4 dim world. The title comes from the tendency of people to come back "reversed". Imagine a B-shaped person in Flatland; they can move through two dimensions, and can only rotate around one. If you peeled him off and flipped him over, he'd be...reversed. In our world, nobody would really notice except for scars being on the wrong side of the body. The 4 dim creatures that reverse themselves in the 5dim world are outcasts because one of their eyes is in the wrong place relative to the other two (or something of that sort).

When ketchup is reversed, it becomes a narcotic. Hahaha.

I've never been able to find that book again. It was really good, and probably made me the way I am today.

I'll look into that lecture later. I'm supposed to be super busy right now.

Have you read "The Language of God" by Francis Collins? I have yet to finish it, but it's pretty good so far.
» middaymoon on 2008-10-04 10:40:33

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