Now that it’s spring and we’re starting to travel again, our local deserts have become popular nearby attractions. Joshua Tree, Death Valley, and the Mojave Desert are at their best this time of year and you might even catch some wildflowers if they got enough rain. At NASA, in addition to enjoying seasonal wildflowers, we […]
Climate change has been in the news a lot, what with extreme weather, wildfires, and the recent international negotiations in Scotland. What I thought I could do here is go into the science behind what’s happening to the climate system and to leave the policy implications to my fellow citizens and their representatives; kind of […]
Most people know that Earth’s climate has changed periodically over the last couple of million years. Ice ages have come and gone along with wetter and drier periods in the more temperate zones. Picture two miles of ice on top of Canada and the northern United States, glaciers snaking down from the Sierra Nevada, lakes […]
On my first geological field trip as a new geology major at Caltech, I was amazed as we drove out into the Mojave Desert on Interstate 15 when my professor, who was driving, would point through the window at a distant rock outcropping and say: “There’s a Miocene (five to 20 million years of age) […]
When you want to know where you are or how to get there from here, you just check your smart phone and there you are — but did you ever think about how that gets done? The Global Positioning System of satellites was put in place by the U.S. Air Force (now Space Force) and […]
Almost everybody who’s looked at a map of the Atlantic Ocean has noticed that South America and Africa fit together. Alfred Wegener noticed too and proposed in 1915 that they indeed were together long ago. He was laughed out of the room. The reason was that he couldn’t say how and why they had split […]
Late the other night my friend Joan called from the Cachuma Lake campground and asked excitedly what the string of lights was that had just tracked across their sky. Was it a UFO? Luckily, I had heard about Elon Musk’s latest launch of about 60 small satellites as part of Starlink, a satellite-based internet. I […]
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”— TS Eliot After surveying our solar system, as well as thousands of others beyond our own, we can now look back at our home planet with a new perspective, that […]
Twenty years ago, there would have been nothing to write about under this topic. There were no known planets circling stars beyond our own. But in 2009 a revolution happened with NASA’s launch of the Kepler telescope. Within a few years, Kepler had found so many planets that scientists realized that there were more planets […]
We all learned in school that there are eight planets (well, nine if you’re as old as I am), but our solar system is messier than that. There are millions of leftover rocks called asteroids; bits of ice and rock that come and go called comets; and objects out there beyond Neptune called, in dry […]
Uranus and Neptune, the twin ice giants of the solar system, are so far out there that they’ve only been visited once by Voyager 2 in 1986 and 1989. They’re so far away that light from the Sun takes two-and-a half hours to reach Uranus and over four hours to touch Neptune. For those reasons, […]
30 June 2004, 7:30 pm. The VIP room at JPL is quiet as we all watch a thin line trace horizontally across the big screen at the front of the room. It’s the radio signal from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft as it speeds toward Saturn Orbit Insertion (SOI) after seven years in transit. JPL invites some […]
March 9, 1979 and Voyager 1 had just left the Jupiter system en route to its rendezvous with Saturn. Linda Morabito, the cognizant engineer for the navigation team, noticed something odd about one of the images of Jupiter’s moon Io: There was a ghost image protruding from the side of the moon. She was using […]
On July 20, 1976, seven years to the day after humans first walked on the moon, a bunch of us new employees of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory trooped over to Caltech’s Beckman auditorium (the one that looks like a circus tent) to see the first landing of a spacecraft on another planet. Viking 1 was […]
I was already in the Science Team room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory when the second cycle of radar images of the surface of Venus were beamed down in May of 1991. I waited impatiently for the five-inch print roll to start spooling out. The first cycle had gone well and most of Venus’s surface […]
As a kid I was always picking up rocks and wondering at the diversity of them all. Where did they come from? And family camping trips gave me a sampling of the varied landscapes of California and the West. When I found out I could combine my love of the outdoors with the study of […]
Even as a kid growing up in Southern California, I was always wondering: Why do things look the way they do? Why is the sky blue, but grass is green? I got into rock collecting and wondered at the variety of colors and textures – how did they form? As I studied geology in college […]