Solar System

This is a pretty spiffy day.

• The Phoenix landed safely and is already sending back amazing photos.
• Clayton Kershaw had his major league debut for the Dodgers, and while he didn’t get the win, he acquitted himself quite well, and the Dodgers wound up winning in the 10th inning off of Andre Ethier’s first career walkoff hit. Luis Maza also hit his first career homerun.
• This is Towel Day, honoring Douglas Adams, the hoopiest frood ever.
• It is the one-year anniversary of my epic Star Wars Day marathon.
• It also marks the beginning of a one-year countdown to the even-more-epic Alien vs Predator Saga movie marathon in 2009.

It looks like the Phoenix lander has touched down on Mars!

Radio signals received at 4:53 p.m. Pacific Time confirmed that the Phoenix Mars Lander had survived its difficult final descent and touchdown 15 minutes earlier. In the intervening time, those signals crossed the distance from Mars to Earth at the speed of light.

Congratulations to NASA and the Phoenix team!

(As I appropriately post this from MarsEdit ;)

Paul Rincon, BBC science reporter, has been busy in Houston at the 2007 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC).

Yesterday he posted a story about what appears to be a 5.5-km wide, newly discovered space impact crater under the Central Valley in California.

Data from a 3D seismic survey of an ancient sea bed clearly shows a circular structure buried 1,490-1,600m (4,890-4,250ft) below sea level.

The Victoria Island structure, as it has been named, has a concentric rim surrounding a “central uplift” - a peak at the centre - which are both characteristic of impact craters.

Today, Rincon had another story from the conference about some possible caves found on Mars by NASA’s Odyssey spacecraft.

The candidate caves are on the flanks of the Arsia Mons volcano and are of sufficient depth their floors mostly cannot be seen through the opening.

What’s most interesting is the potential for these providing a haven for life.

The caves may be the only natural structures capable of protecting primitive life forms from micrometeoroids, UV radiation, solar flares and high energy particles that bombard the planet’s surface.

Sounds like a cool conference. :)

The Planetary Society Weblog has the amazing story about Pluto making its presence known by occluding a star (sort of like an eclipse) — and for once, it’ll be be visible around here, assuming no light pollution. What does occluding mean? See the quoted section below, but to me the coolest thing is that it’s visible to the naked eye. Pluto occultation coming up March 18:

On March 18, just before 11:00 UTC, tiny Pluto will wander across a background star, an event called an ‘occultation’ by astronomers. The event will be visible and in full darkness from the western half of the United States and from almost all of Mexico. The background star will be blocked from sight for about six minutes. An occultation isn’t just a fun coincidence; there is extremely valuable science that can be performed by watching this….

No word on if this is some sort of Plutonian protest about its demotion. ;)

In related news, the current Celsius1414 poll “What’s your favorite planet?” has Earth just beating out Pluto by a few percentage points. I feel sorry for Mercury, which has no votes — thus putting it behind Planet Hollywood with its one fan. :)