The Face on Mercury

As I was perusing the fabulous new pics from Mercury last week, I was thinking about how I heard somewhere long ago that it is hard-wired into our brains to pull out faces from random patterns when I came across this little guy, who, to my eyes is the spitting image of Gizmo (don't feed him after midnight!). (The original image is here)

If you haven't seen them yet, I highly recommend taking a peek at some of the fabulous pics returned by MESSENGER in its highly successful first flyby of Mercury, or visiting my friend Emily's blog at the planetary society where she has been doing a great job of pointing out some of the cool things to be seen (although not as cool as Gizmo, in my opinion).

Life update

Sorry for the extended hiatus. Over the holidays I moved both physically and in cyberspace.

In real life, you can now find me in Washington DC, where I will be working in the Planetary Science Division at NASA HQs.

Online, my homepage can now be conveniently found at www.interplanetsarah.com. Unfortunately, the only thing that's been updated is the url, but I'm working on slowly getting things up to date.

Because of my new position at HQs, obviously, I have to limit the sorts of things that I can share on this blog (i.e. my personal opinions regarding anything having to do with NASA). Never fear, I still have opinions, and I'm sure that I will have ample opportunity to express them within the confines of my job, and let's face it, discussing these topics with my colleagues at HQs is probably considerable more effective than ranting about them on the web. So wish me luck!

Merry Christmas

moar funny pictures


moar funny pictures

This made me laugh today...

The 12 days of Christmas, NASA style (courtesy NASAwatch)

New Painting

My latest work...

HDTV movies of the Moon from Kaguya

The Japanese Kaguya (formerly Selene) mission has captured the first high-def movies from the Moon. Pretty impressive stuff, even if it does lose some of that high-def impact when it's a tiny little movie on your computer screen. Still pretty though.

The captions are all in Japanese, but the movie consists of two sequences:

The first sequence is a movie flying over the western region of Oceanus Procellarum. Starting point is approx. 25 N, 275 - 282 E and ending point is 49N, 275 - 283 E. The contrast of mare and highland are clearly recognized.

The second sequence is a scene flying over the north pole region. Starting point is approx. 66 N, 274 - 288 E and ending point is 87 N, 26 - 161 E. Kaguya is flying from the northern part of Oceanus Procellarum to the north pole. As it is in high latitude, incidence angle becomes lower and it makes shadows longer. Thanks to lower angle, we can see craters and other cobbly surface features very clearly.

These sequence captured on 31 Oct, 2007 (JST) with altitude of approximately 100 kilometers.

Congrats to our Japanese friends!

China's 1st lunar probe Chang'e-1 blasts off

Congrats to China on entering the lunar fray with the successful launch of their first lunar orbiter!

According to the Chinese English-language news, the orbiter is slated to develop "a three-dimensional survey of the Moon's surface", to analyze "the abundance and distribution of elements on lunar surface", to characterize the lunar regolith and the "powdery soil layer on the surface", and to explore the "circumstance between the Earth and the Moon."

This is supposed to be just China's first step in lunar exploration. A lunar lander or rover is slated for about 2012, and they are working towards sending humans in a time frame similar to our own. In fact, NASA's administrator Mike Griffin made headlines recently when he commented that they may beat us there. China though (at least officially) claims that this is not a race: "China will not embark on any lunar probe competition 'in any form with any country' and will 'share the results of its moon exploration with the whole world' in its pursuit of a policy of peaceful use of airspace, said a chief commander of the country's first lunar satellite project."