New Painting

The third, and probably last, at least for a while, in my lunar-landscape-from-orbit series. This is "Daedalus in orange"- Daedalus being that big crater in the middle.

If you like my art, you can find more here.

Cool video of the Huygen's probe landing on Titan

Wow! This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. It is a very carefully pieced together video of some 3500 images from the Huygens probe decent imager as it landed on Titan. The four hour landing has been compressed into a fabulous four minute movie.

Awesome video here: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/videos/video-details.cfm?videoID=126

Cassini homepage here: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The descent imager/spectral radiometer team is based at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

New Painting

This piece, titled "Not Quite HD" is my homage to one of the first HD images released by JAXA from the Kaguya spacecraft.

The original can be found here, along with some really cool movies of the Earth rising and setting over the Moon.

If you like my art, you can find more here.

Gordon McKay

The planetary science community had lost a friend and colleague. Gordon McKay passed early yesterday morning.

Gordon was truly a gentleman and a scholar. He was a talented scientist, a fabulous manager, and a good friend to many. I am lucky to have been able to call him a friend. I learned a lot from him, about science, about NASA, and about life. I found I could always count on him for a few encouraging words, usually over a beer at Boondoggles. He will be missed by many.


Update: Letter from NASA HQ on Gordon's Passing

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