There was a moment this week where I was coming to the end of a long day — GRE studying, then work, then half-falling asleep in front of the computer watching my latest space policy lecture. Tired as I felt, though, I didn’t care. Grad school is a lot of fun. I feel like I’m [...]
Every week, Pars3c profiles an interesting person with connections in the space field. This time it’s Rob Thacker ( @DrRob_Thacker), an astrophysicist at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax and the Canada Research Chair in Computational Astrophysics — as well as a prolific blogger and tweeter. As Thacker tells Pars3c, the danger of science is placing everything [...]
The Internet was abuzz yesterday with news that NASA is reportedly helping health officials in the Chilean government figure out what to do with the miners trapped underground. Reports are the 33 men may be stuck under there for as long as four months, and Chile wants NASA’s expertise on dealing with confined spaces for [...]
The name “3D House of Satellites” was enough to encourage me to keep reading the blog of Paul Schenk, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. But then I saw his videos. Schenk takes the raw data from spacecraft like Cassini (currently winging its way through Saturn’s moons), particularly the stereo images [...]
Yesterday Pars3c reported on a new satellite station opening up in Canada’s north, in the high-latitude town of Inuvik. The venture has a number of Canadian partners, including the fairly new firm PrioraNet Canada. According to their website, PrioraNet Canada — established in 2009 — is a joint venture of the Canadian firm Spatial Holdings Inc. and [...]
Remember a few months ago, when Canadian Space Agency president Steve MacLean talked about the need to provide better satellite access to Canada’s north? Looks like one of the first links has been put in place, with the CSA as a participant. Earlier this month, the Canadian government opened up the first satellite station in [...]
Pull up a chair. You’re about to get a ringside seat to the Pluto-is-not-a-planet brawl that defined the beginning of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s tenure as director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. The Pluto Files (2009) is entertaining, tongue-in-cheek and also quite willing to draw on non-academic sources for much of its material. It [...]
I forgot how complicated it is to register for classes, and being an international space studies student at the University of North Dakota, I have a few extra hurdles to jump through. For example, Canadian cheques just don’t work to pay my tuition. Our numbers don’t match American numbers. And then there’s exchange rates to figure out, [...]
