These pages chronicle the work and ruminations of Carolyn Collins Petersen, also known as TheSpacewriter.

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I am CEO of Loch Ness Productions. I am also a producer for Astrocast.TV, an online magazine about astronomy and space science.

For the past few years, I've also been a voice actor, appearing in a variety of productions. You can see and hear samples of my work by clicking on the "Voice-Overs, Videos and 'Casts tab.

My blog, TheSpacewriter's Ramblings, is about astronomy, space science, and other sciences.

Ideas and opinions expressed here do not represent those of my employer or of any other organization to which I am affiliated. They're mine.

Visit my main site at: TheSpacewriter.com.

**Comments are welcome; I do moderate them to weed out spam.

Contact me for writing and voice-over projects at: cc(dot)petersen(at)gmail(dot)com

I Twitter as Spacewriter

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Check out my favorite space music artist: Geodesium at Geodesium.com

Cycles of Life

November 24, 2004 at 17:54 pm | Leave a Comment

Mauna Kea from Space (Courtesy NASA and GoHawaii)

Eight years ago this month I had the happy privilege of doing an observation run at the University of Hawai’i 88-inch telescope on Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawai’i. For eight nights I explored comets and asteroids with a small team of UH astronomers. It was a giddy experience, partly because it was my first “Big Astro” esperience, but also because we were working at 13,792 feet above sea level—a rarefied environment indeed! The image above is a great view of Mauna Kea from the space shuttle, and a wonderful reminder that no matter how high up we go to use our observatories, there’s always a higher vantage point.

At the time I did my observations, the Gemini North telescope was still under construction, so we could go out on the catwalk on our telescope and look down on the site as the workers were knocking off for the day. In fact, two of us (James Bauer and I) managed to get our picture taken by a web cam that snapped images of Gemini as it was being constructed. If you look closely at the image below, you can see two dark dots on the far right limb of the catwalk girdling the 88-inch facility (the horn-shaped building up the hill from the Gemini site). That’s us, waving at the camera about 30 minutes before sunset and the beginning of our “work day” on the mountain.

View of Gemini Observatory, November 1996

Well, life moves in interesting cycles. Today, the Gemini North Observatory is a complete, functioning facility, cranking out good science every day, along with its twin observatory in Chile. And, I’ve moved on from my comet research days. Nowadays I’m working as an astronomy writer, bringing the wonders of the cosmos to my audiences (whether they’re reading my books and articles or attending planetarium shows that I’ve written). In a most wonderful development, I’ve also been working closely with the Gemini Observatory public relations office, helping them get the word out about all their achievements. Sometimes the cycles of the cosmos are logical, indeed!

Exploring Mars

November 24, 2004 at 15:49 pm | Leave a Comment

Crater Hale in the Argyre Basin on Mars Courtesy European Space Agency and the Mars Express mission

The planet Mars gives us such a panoply of different terrains to explore with our spacecraft and rovers. The European Space Agency mission Mars Express has been returning a number of fascinating images based on mapping data from the spacecraft’s instruments. Some of these are so detailed you can see features like sand dunes rippling across the floor of the impact crater Hale in the Argyre Basin of the Martian southern hemisphere. In other places we can spot flow features that look for all the world like the aftermath of a flood or a region cut by a fast-moving river of water sometime in Mars’ distant past.

So, why explore Mars? The most common answer is “because it’s there” is a good one, although it’s tough to convince skeptics of the value of serendipitous exploration. In truth there are dozens of answers. We explore so we can learn. What do we learn from Mars? Its dry and dusty surface holds the keys to a fascinating past that included dramatic planetary reversals of fortune from wet to dry. Can we extrapolate anything we learn at Mars to our future on Earth? Possibly, but it’s not clear that what happened to Mars is waiting in store for Earth. We can, however, take what we know at Earth and apply it to Mars. We know how flowing water changes surface characteristics here on the home planet, and when we see it on Mars, we know how it happened. Same with volcanic flows and impact cratering and wind-driven erosion. All those things happen here on Earth, and we know what they look like here. Find the same kinds of structures on Mars and you have a good lead as to what happened ON Mars.

That’s the beauty of exploration—you learn and then you take what you know and apply it elsewhere to understand how things work in the cosmos. Mars is giving us a lot of mysteries, but it’s also allowing us to do some practical planetary science, all for the price of some useful missions!

Peeking Under the Shroud

November 22, 2004 at 10:46 am | Leave a Comment

Titan

Saturn’s shrouded moon Titan is coming in for an in-depth study by the Cassini-Huygens mission currently exploring the Saturn system. In order to image what lies beneath this tiny moon’s gigantic atmosphere, astronomers image it in different wavelengths of light. Using ultraviolet- and infrared-sensitive instruments to gather data about Titan’s surface, they were able to piece together this “peek beneath the veil.” Red and green colors represent infrared wavelengths and show areas where methane in Titan’s atmosphere absorbs light. Blue represents ultraviolet wavelengths and shows the high atmosphere and detached hazes.

Titan’s atmosphere extends hundreds of kilometers above the surface. What lies beneath those clouds is the target of the Huygens probe, set to descend to Titan’s surface on December 25, 2004. From this radar image, what we can see so far appears to be smooth, made of radar-absorbing materials, or possibly a region that slopes away from the direction of illumination.

A synthetic aperture radar image of Titan's surface. Courtesy Cassini-Huygens Mission

The striking bright feature that stretches from upper left to lower right across this image, with connected ‘arms’ to the East could be some sort of flowing material, possibly where water-rich liquid has welled up from Titan’s warm interior. Scientists are hoping that the probe will survive long enough to give an idea about exactly what’s happening on the surface of this shrouded world. Keep your eyes turned to Titan on December 25th!

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This blog a wholly pwnd subsidiary of Carolyn Collins Petersen, a.k.a. TheSpacewriter.
Copyright 2008, Carolyn Collins Petersen
Inama Nushif!
Image of Horsehead Nebula: T.A.Rector (NOAO/AURA/NSF) and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA/NASA)

“It is by Coffee alone I set my day in motion. It is by the juice of bean that coffee acquires depth, the tongue acquires taste, the taste awakens the body. It is by Coffee alone I set my day in motion.”

TheSpacewriter