And, now the Weather on Mars

So, at last the wait is over, and Innovation Canada’s cool new website is online. You gotta check it out for an example of a news media really trying to use all the tools of the internet to best effect.

And, of course, you’ve gotta check it out to read my article on the weather experiments aboard Mars Phoenix. Developed for the Canadian Arctic, the LIDAR and other instruments are now receiving data from the very cold Martian surface.

If you want to see what the weather is like on Mars, you can check out NASA’s excellent Phoenix website. I’ve been dazzled by how open and transparent NASA is being with this mission. It seems as though as soon as the images and data get back to Earth, they are hitting the web. Perhaps the opportunity is there for some smart people online to make some discoveries before NASA.

TiVo for Astronomers

Supernova are some of the most unpredictable, exciting, and short-lived events in space. But, now some researchers are using a pretty cool technique to rewind the explosion and play it back.

It’s called light echoes, and the group I mention in my National Geographic News article used the technique to find out what kind of supernova Cassiopeia A was.

I first learned about the technique a few years ago from Doug Welch at an astronomy conference. His group at McMaster University in Hamilton has also just had a paper approved for publication where they discuss finding the light echoes of Cassiopeia A and Tycho Brahe’s 1572 supernova.