Put science back in the driver’s seat Put science back in the driver’s seat

Don't miss my new op-ed on how space science is getting demoted to hitchhiker status at NASA:

spacenews.com/put-science-...

Me "Oh my god - thank you...we've had a ticket to try and figure out how to make that real for months". Christina "Consider it closed!". She helped us make 'Eyes...' better, didn't embarrass me infront of her classmates, and was utterly lovely. I've been a massive fan ever since.

They all laughed. Once they all left, she quietly came back into the room and went 'Your joke about the station arrays....that's actually what they do. It's just slip rings and bearings - they keep rotating'. Me "Really?" Christina pointing at the screen "Yup - it looks JUST like that"

I got to meet her very briefly in '13 when she was a new ASCAN visiting JPL with her classmates. I made a silly joke about how the ISS solar panels rotated unrealistically in Eyes on the Earth because we made them just rotate end over end simplistically and that would 'rip all the cables out'

seq_echo "The E in ECAM stands for ENV. The E in ENV stands for ECAM." (why do you think I'm training to be a TUL - we can fit SO many SPENDIs in this bad boy)

The E in ECAM stands for ENV. The E in ENV stands for ECAM.

True story - I’ve been going “so - would anyone like a TARGETED dust devil survey - like - half way between a normal movie and the 8x3?” for years 🤪

The irony....Kevin was supposed to be on shift for ECAM but I ended up taking it instead :P It fun writing new sequences for ENV.....it's REALLY fun when they work out this well.

The FY 2027 budget request for NASA is an insult to the four astronauts currently risking their lives to explore the Moon. The world should be celebrating humanity's return to deep space, as well as the space agency and partners that put them there. [1/2]

A photograph of the whole earth. It is mainly blue with white clouds, beige land masses and tinged with green auroras at the top and bottom

Program Cuts and Eliminations • Science (-$3.4 billion).

The whiplash of seeing these on the same morning.

I’m trying to think of one word to describe these engine regs and how they sound and the utterly predictable nature of this energy first formula. Dismal. It’s all just dismal.

Booooooooooo. Scarecrow is gonna be out there. Gonna squish some park goers with it 🥳

Are you on lab next week and/or at DVNP for the festival next weekend?

A cargoon drawing of boy wearing an astronaut helmet and his dog sitting in a box marked 'NASA'. They are looking at the night sky where clusters of 3, 7 and 7 stars are shining bright. In a speech bubble the boy is saying "SOME STARS ARE JUST MEANT TO SHINE BRIGHTER THAN OTHER....TO HELP LIGHT OUR WAY"

After the first inspired amazing folks like @amyraehill.bsky.social to make THIS... amyraehill.com/bowlsandplat... ....well....we just got to keep doing them, right? And yes - that bowl lives on my desk at work now.

The same mosaic but now in a set of orange and teal tones in a gradient from left to right.

The same mosaic but now in a set of orange and teal tones in a gradient from left to right - but there are no seams between the images and it's a smooth texture of orange, grey and light grey-blue.

And if you say "well - let's split the difference for the green" you get this. If you start with the calibrated data and give it a little more hair and makeup ....well...you end up with our third bi-color postcard.

A mosaic of a mars terrain where it looks lit red from one side and blue from the others. Rocky foreground on the left, the hardware of a mars rover on the right - a hazy horizon in the middle and a rover shadow. It's blotchy showing it assembled from several images.

If you take the afternoon one and call it red, the morning one and call it blue.....you get something a little like this...

Black and white mosaic of a mars terrain. Rocky foreground on the left, the hardware of a mars rover on the right - a hazy horizon in the middle and a rover shadow. It's blotchy showing it assembled from several images.

Black and white mosaic of a mars terrain. Rocky foreground on the left, the hardware of a mars rover on the right - a hazy horizon in the middle and a rover shadow. It's blotchy showing it assembled from several images.

The raw images are here : mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimed... : and if you stitch the two panoramas...you get something a bit like this -

Kudos to our project scientist who helps advocate for these every ~year when I think the view might work and we've got a little bit of energy and time spare in a plan. Doing the science on the day to day is important. Taking a moment now and again to do something just for art is important as well.

You mean the ‘wrong’ room. I see how it is. 😉

Pacific local time :). But the smaller TV on the top right corner of the far wall has rover Mars Time.

It’s more accurate than you think - I bought that clock on Amazon 😂 (screenshot from youtu.be/eH6W39iE5bs )

Rough coloured sketch of a Martian rover control room,with engineers intently staring at multiple monitors.

"No Science Without Them"

Stylussketched on tablet with #SketchbookApp

#ArtAdventCalendar

How we found them ( and their Siamese looking sister now adopted by a colleague ) in our neighbors yard in June.

This is Dusty - and two of her kids Safiya and Bella. We brought them all in (plus one more kitten) as strays when the kittens were 4 weeks old about 6 months ago. We have successfully failed to divest ourselves of the kittens.

I met a surgeon in the 90s called ''John Alexander Williams'....but everyone called him JAWs.

I once had to address someone who was both a military general and a knight of the British empire….. “General Sir Michael”. I’m considering adopting it myself.

The last time I heard of an animal breaking into a zoo, it was a mountain line that broke into the LA zoo to snack on a koala bear

We have more to do. More things to discover. More art to inspire. So much more to do. I hope I get to continue doing it for many years to come, and I'm giving it everything I've got. Those who got us here but don't get to be a part of it any more deserve nothing less. For them, we persevere.

On Tuesday I had to wait half a day to get an email to tell me if I was lucky, or unlucky. I got lucky. Most of my MSL family got lucky. Some were not, and my heart breaks for them. But those of us still fortunate enough to call this project home will keep on keeping on.