Doug Ellison

Booooooooooo. Scarecrow is gonna be out there. Gonna squish some park goers with it 🥳

Are you on lab next week and/or at DVNP for the festival next weekend?

A cargoon drawing of boy wearing an astronaut helmet and his dog sitting in a box marked 'NASA'. They are looking at the night sky where clusters of 3, 7 and 7 stars are shining bright. In a speech bubble the boy is saying "SOME STARS ARE JUST MEANT TO SHINE BRIGHTER THAN OTHER....TO HELP LIGHT OUR WAY"

After the first inspired amazing folks like @amyraehill.bsky.social to make THIS... amyraehill.com/bowlsandplat... ....well....we just got to keep doing them, right? And yes - that bowl lives on my desk at work now.

The same mosaic but now in a set of orange and teal tones in a gradient from left to right.

The same mosaic but now in a set of orange and teal tones in a gradient from left to right - but there are no seams between the images and it's a smooth texture of orange, grey and light grey-blue.

And if you say "well - let's split the difference for the green" you get this. If you start with the calibrated data and give it a little more hair and makeup ....well...you end up with our third bi-color postcard.

A mosaic of a mars terrain where it looks lit red from one side and blue from the others. Rocky foreground on the left, the hardware of a mars rover on the right - a hazy horizon in the middle and a rover shadow. It's blotchy showing it assembled from several images.

If you take the afternoon one and call it red, the morning one and call it blue.....you get something a little like this...

Black and white mosaic of a mars terrain. Rocky foreground on the left, the hardware of a mars rover on the right - a hazy horizon in the middle and a rover shadow. It's blotchy showing it assembled from several images.

Black and white mosaic of a mars terrain. Rocky foreground on the left, the hardware of a mars rover on the right - a hazy horizon in the middle and a rover shadow. It's blotchy showing it assembled from several images.

The raw images are here : mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimed... : and if you stitch the two panoramas...you get something a bit like this -

Kudos to our project scientist who helps advocate for these every ~year when I think the view might work and we've got a little bit of energy and time spare in a plan. Doing the science on the day to day is important. Taking a moment now and again to do something just for art is important as well.

You mean the ‘wrong’ room. I see how it is. 😉

Pacific local time :). But the smaller TV on the top right corner of the far wall has rover Mars Time.

It’s more accurate than you think - I bought that clock on Amazon 😂 (screenshot from youtu.be/eH6W39iE5bs )

Rough coloured sketch of a Martian rover control room,with engineers intently staring at multiple monitors.

"No Science Without Them"

Stylussketched on tablet with #SketchbookApp

#ArtAdventCalendar

How we found them ( and their Siamese looking sister now adopted by a colleague ) in our neighbors yard in June.

This is Dusty - and two of her kids Safiya and Bella. We brought them all in (plus one more kitten) as strays when the kittens were 4 weeks old about 6 months ago. We have successfully failed to divest ourselves of the kittens.

I met a surgeon in the 90s called ''John Alexander Williams'....but everyone called him JAWs.

I once had to address someone who was both a military general and a knight of the British empire….. “General Sir Michael”. I’m considering adopting it myself.

The last time I heard of an animal breaking into a zoo, it was a mountain line that broke into the LA zoo to snack on a koala bear

We have more to do. More things to discover. More art to inspire. So much more to do. I hope I get to continue doing it for many years to come, and I'm giving it everything I've got. Those who got us here but don't get to be a part of it any more deserve nothing less. For them, we persevere.

On Tuesday I had to wait half a day to get an email to tell me if I was lucky, or unlucky. I got lucky. Most of my MSL family got lucky. Some were not, and my heart breaks for them. But those of us still fortunate enough to call this project home will keep on keeping on.

Everything else was replaceable. Even if it got broken by some other person packing my stuff into boxes....it was all replaceable. But the bowl isn't. It's unique. It's one of one. It's a little piece of art inspired by the science we do and the new landscapes we seek with our rover.

A circular bowl decorated with a landscape scene. The inner surface of the bowl is painted to resemble a landscape with mountains. The top portion is a bright, clear blue sky transitioning into a warm yellow-gold sun. The lower portion depicts dark, rugged terrain. The bowl is sitting on a dark surface with a pattern of bright, colorful, geometric dots and lines.

On Monday I braced for this most recent round of JPL layoffs by looking around my office for what I cared about most to take it home in case I never got to return. I grabbed just one thing - the beautiful bowl by @amyraehill.bsky.social inspired by the false color postcard I took with Curiosity.

We are all so incredibly tired. The cuts keep coming, the damage to our teams keeps compounding, yet we somehow keep the missions going. Ashley, Abby and I were all on shift together on MSL today. I hope it wasn’t for the last time.

It still exists. Its ‘modernization’ has made it unusable. It’s criminal what has been done to content like this. :(. I still can’t get over the older mission websites just wiped out of existence.

It was the last functional web presence of the agency - I’m gutted :(

If you, like me, are the parent of a neuro-atypical child dreading this autism press conference, please remember: These are the people hurting our kids. Not us. They are the ones stigmatizing and pathologizing them. They are the ones peddling untested science. And we should be very, very angry.

I think we can all agree that the primary reason she made it is her time as an MER ECAM PUL ;). I'M SO HAPPY FOR HER :D
:D :D :D :D

Winter is giving way to Spring in Gale Crater. The atmosphere is waking up from its chilly quiescent slumber.

That particular hike is SO GOOD. I’ve done it before sunrise a couple of times :)

We could give it to climatologists to model the environmental impact of that much compute

I wish I’d appreciated it more in the moment. I was a teenager growing up in the peak Blur v Oasis summer of ‘95. It was incredible.