Jupiter Hansen (Cheng)

🚨 (New High res lunar images) On June 5, 2025, ispace_inc’s HAKUTO-R lander attempted a soft landing on the Moon in the Mare Frigoris region. Unfortunately, the mission ended in a crash landing during its final descent. (1/n)

Planetary Science MS/PhD Positions for Fall 2026 Crowd sourced list of people who are looking for MS/PhD students to help connect prospective students with advisors so we can do even more fabulous planetary science! (Submitting a response indicates ...

I am community sourcing a list of people who are actively in search of MS/PhD students in planetary science/astrobiology/exoplanets for Fall 2026. If you are such a person, please fill out the following google form:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

The fractured, cratered surface of Phobos, moon of Mars.

Phobos, moon of mars from the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera's Super Resolution Channel on August 22, 2004. The crater Stickney, from an impact that nearly shattered Phobos, can be seen toward the top.

Map of the eastern coast of Russ near Kamchatka. There are a lot of white yellow, orange and red dots that mark the location of earthquakes.

There have been more than 600 earthquakes of M4+ off the coast of Russia. Is this unusual? Should people be worried?

No.

Here’s what’s happening…. 1/ 🧪

Missing the Big Island so much. I have to go back there for some more fieldwork in the future 🥲.

Comic. Bad Map Projection #194: Interrupted Spheres. To avoid the distortion inherent to a single flat world map, each continent is projected onto its own globe. [spheres of different sizes with a single continent on each]

Bad Map Projection: Interrupted Spheres

xkcd.com/3122/

orange cat lying on floor with square lights reflected on his flank that resembles lit windows

live action catbus looking pretty sweet

A high-resolution color image of Mars with the small, dark, potato shaped satellite Phobos, seen in sharp contrast as it passes over the massive volcano Olympus Mons. Phobos appears irregular and shadowed against the softly rust colored Martian surface. In the distance, two other volcanic features Ascraeus Mons (upper right) and the flatter Alba Mons (upper left) are visible. Wisps of light clouds and the blackness of space frame the planet’s curved horizon.

1/n 🧵
Just released: NEW images of Phobos over Mars by @esa.int Mars Express 🔭🧪

This view shows Phobos above Olympus Mons!

Full-size (130MP) image & details: flic.kr/p/2rggHKy
Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Andrea Luck CC BY

Captured on May 14, 2025 | Image ID: HQ967
Raw data from: psa.esa.int

It appears that their assumed delta-v available to Juno assumes that it still has 100% of its initial fuel load? Juno did two long deep-space burns and two long burns at Jupiter, so I guess some of Loeb's aliens refueled it?

If you want a weird but true fact to talk about:

Dexter Holland, lead singer of The Offspring, was instrumental in this. His doctorial thesis in molecular biology was sequencing mRNA in HIV. The paper was also heavily cited in creating the COVID-19 vaccine.

Don't forget to join the NASA ROSES 2025 informational webinar. TODAY, 12.30pm EST
nasaevents.webex.com/nasaevents/j...

Just because you all need more archaeological finds and sites in your feed.
The Bronze Age rock art site at Austre Åmøy, north of Stavanger, Norway. The protected heritage site consists of more than 400 figures at 16 different locations on the south side of the small island.

ROSES is out
Which i guess is a win
But list for this year
Is looking quite thin

solicitation.nasaprs.com/ROSES2025

NASA finally posted their annual ROSES call for proposals, five months late. I was hoping to apply for the Astrophysics Theory program, which is offered every other year. This should be an on year, but it’s not there. Of course, Harvard isn’t currently eligible for federal grants anyway.

A checklist for designing and improving the visualization of scientific data - Nature Cell Biology Creating clear and engaging scientific figures is crucial to communicate complex data. In this Comment, I condense principles from design, visual perception and data visualization research in a checkl...

Lots of invaluable advice here for both early stage researchers and well established folk. Well thought out impactful figures are key to getting your points across, and it's all too common to see poor practice 🧪🧬🖥️🌍 #datavis #bioinformatics
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"PhD-level AI" is being marked at companies at $240k a year.

Post-docs make something like $50k.

Alt-ac jobs include scams claiming to tell PhDs how to get alt-ac jobs.

I will undercut all of you for the low, low price of $24k after taxes.

The terminal degree job market is... not coherent.

Triton and Neptune from STIS

Neptune and Triton from the Hubble Space Telescope's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on August 3, 2003.

Enceladus.

The tiny moon with an interior water ocean blasting out into space.

The glint of an alien lake.

Sunlight shining off liquid hydrocarbons on Titan, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft on 8 July 2009.

Reorientation and despinning of 4 Vesta formed the Divalia Fossae The Divalia Fossae are formed by tectonic stresses from reorientation and despinning of Vesta caused by large impacts.

Check out our new paper in Science Advances!
🧪🔭🪐
We show that Vesta’s giant equatorial troughs—Divalia Fossae—likely formed from spin axis reorientation and despinning as a long-term consequence of the two massive impacts near the south poles. 🪨⚒️

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This is figure 2, which shows Bogong moth navigation under natural night skies.

A paper in Nature suggests that the Australian Bogong moth may be the first invertebrate known to be able to use the stars to navigate. Experiments in flight simulators indicate that the insects use stellar cues to help them fly in the right direction. go.nature.com/3ZEaDgG 🧪

Crescent Mars, Full Globe - From Kevin M. Gill (kevinmgill.bsky.social) - https://flic.kr/p/EZjRyn

Mars, looking at the Elysium hemisphere.

Mars from the Hubble Space Telescope on December 30th, 2024.

I am once again begging journals to embed figures in the text and not 50 pages away from their captions for reviewers.

At the point where I am tempted to stop reviewing for journals who don't...

A line chart titled “Annual CO₂ emissions” shows the global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry from 1950 to 2023. The y-axis represents emissions in billions of tonnes (t), ranging from 0 to 40 billion t. The x-axis covers the years from 1950 to 2023. The chart presents a steady increase in emissions from approximately 5 billion tonnes in 1950 to over 36 billion tonnes in 2023. Key features include: A consistent upward trend from 1950 through the early 1970s. A brief plateau and dip around 1980–1983. A strong growth trend resuming in the late 1980s. A sharp increase during the 2000s. A slight drop around 2008–2009, likely due to the global financial crisis. A major dip in 2020, attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. A rapid rebound in emissions after 2020, continuing the upward trend to a new high in 2023. A blue line labeled “World” traces these changes over time. Below the chart, the data source is listed as the Global Carbon Budget (2024), and the graphic is credited to OurWorldInData.org with a Creative Commons license (CC BY). A footnote explains that the data includes emissions from coal, oil, gas, flaring, cement, and steel, but excludes land-use changes such as deforestation.

I get annoyed at the narrative that all the awareness and work on climate change hasn't done anything. Yes, global CO₂ emissions indeed continue to climb, but we don't know the counterfactual. When I was in grad school, we were on track for 5°C of warming. Now it's below 3°C. That's progress.

🚀 I am thrilled to share the final Table of Contents for my upcoming book, Introduction to GIS Programming: A Practical Python Guide to Open Source Geospatial Tools! Currently wrapping up the chapter on Distributed Computing with Apache Sedona. Aiming for a release before in two weeks. Stay tuned!

Finally, admiring the rock garden of other geology departments is a must. 🙂‍↕️

Tinker toys are great in teaching the concepts of coordinate systems and 3D visualization in the field and classroom!