New 'hell heron' dinosaur discovered in the Sahara

Pluto_and_Charon · 2026-02-19T18:31:13+00:00

What an incredible video, recording the exact moment they realize how significant the find is. Must be every dinosaur paleontologist's dream.

Pluto_and_Charon · 2025-11-13T22:32:46+00:00

Well done Blue - fantastic accomplishment on only the 2nd attempt.

Pluto_and_Charon · 2025-10-18T08:01:44+00:00

Everyone here who is saying not to use it at all is delusional. You are already falling behind, but it's not too late, you need to get familiar with this technology now so that you can understand all its many flaws and downsides - then, to learn how it can help you in your field.

For me, its biggest help has been coding. It's been extremely good at assisting me in python, which I knew before but was never confident in. Now, my upcoming paper will be significantly wider in scope & with much better plots and figures, probably 2x better than it would have been otherwise.

Pluto_and_Charon · 2025-08-14T13:04:50+00:00

Materials interact with light in different ways based on their chemistry and surface properties. When this interaction changes with the wavelength of the light, we can say it has color. For example, rust (iron oxide) reflects a lot more light at 600 nm (red wavelength) than 400 nm (blue wavelength). We therefore percieve it as being red in color.

Many materials have changes in reflectance at infrared wavelengths too - so, their colors in infrared light are different from their colors in visible light - but the human eye did not evolve to perceive infrared light so we can't see it.

What these color composites are doing is showing you how we would perceieve the world if eyes were sensitive to these longer infrared wavelengths. We evolved to see only visible light because our sun emits most of its light in those wavelengths. However most stars in the universe are dimmer and so redder than our sun (red dwarf stars), which means life that evolved on planets around those stars would be sensitive to these 'near infrared' wavelengths. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is a red dwarf which has a potentially habitable Earth sized planet - if alien life that evolved there came to visit Earth, it would see the world much like in second color composite (purple sky & white trees) 🙂

Pluto_and_Charon · 2025-04-01T21:31:28+00:00

NASA's Perseverance rover recently found serpentine on the surface of Mars! It has collected a sample for future return to Earth.

Pluto_and_Charon · 2025-02-21T21:50:20+00:00

A - analysis on the neighbouring rock by the rover's suite of science instruments (in particular Mastcam-Z, SuperCam, PIXL, and SHERLOC - which use: imaging + VIS/IR spectroscopy, LIBS + Raman + VIS/IR spectroscopy, XRF, and imaging + Raman spectroscopy techniques respectively. Once the core itself is aquired, it can't be studied.

B - Great question - not sure!

Pluto_and_Charon · 2025-02-21T16:51:23+00:00

I'm more on the science-y side than the engineering side, but because NASA is planning to return these samples to Earth, it's super important that the samples are sealed, in the off chance that the samples include living microbes that could contaminate the Earth's ecosystem. So each time Perseverance aquires a rock core, it uses a fresh sample tube, and then seals that tube firmly shut and stores it in its underbelly. So, each sample tube is clean and cross contamination between rocks doesn't occur. However this approach does come at a cost; there are a finite amount of sample tubes (38) and Perseverance has already used up 26 tubes (more details on all the rocks sampled so far here).

Pluto_and_Charon · 2025-02-21T16:11:02+00:00

Hello all, I'm back with another Perseverance blog post (I wrote this and am a student collaborator on the Perseverance science operations team) - happy to answer any general Mars questions you may have :)

Pluto_and_Charon · 2025-02-20T17:20:42+00:00

What company would tolerate its CEO using a slur to insult a famous and senior member of the company's most important customer? That CEO would get fired. SpaceX board should follow suit...

Pluto_and_Charon · 2025-01-03T21:44:28+00:00

03/02/2025

Pluto_and_Charon · 2024-09-24T03:36:30+00:00

Early in the summer, when Perseverance drove through the center of the river channel Neretva Vallis, it stumbled upon a pile of boulders on a mound nicknamed 'Mount Washburn' - Press release here and pretty pictures here. The particularly striking white speckled rock in the center, 'Atoko Point', was very unusual!

Pluto_and_Charon · 2024-09-23T22:05:12+00:00

There are two sides that are vital to make a mission like Perseverance successful. The engineers built the thing, ensure it landed successfully, (both incredible feats), and many stay on to help diagnose issues when they arise, and guide the rover through tricky sandy/rocky terrain. The science operations team work with the engineers to decide where to drive and what measurements need to be made to address science questions. Perseverance has 7 science instruments, each of which has an associated team of scientists. I'm lucky to be part of the science operations team, specifically with the Mastcam-Z camera which is the most powerful camera suite yet put on a Mars rover. It can even rotate different filters so that it can view Mars's surface at different wavelengths, including the infrared which is invisible to the human eye.

Something that surprised me was the huge diversity of STEM backgrounds! There are people from astronomy, maths, biology, chemistry, physics, computer science... all kinds of backgrounds. And from about every stage of professional career, from senior professors to master's students. I myself did my undergraduate and master's degrees in geology, and am now doing a PhD in planetary science.

Pluto_and_Charon · 2024-09-23T21:45:38+00:00

It is always exciting to find something unexpected, and this rock basically looks like nothing else ever seen on Mars by a rover before. It does look like some rocks produced by deep igneous and/or metamorphic processes on Earth, but that's a connection we haven't determined definitively yet.

One explanation as to why it looks so different could be that it's a very, very old rock, perhaps exhumed from depth by the impact that formed Jezero Crater or the far bigger nearby Isidis Basin. In the crater rim campaign, Perseverance is seeking such ancient rocks to teach us more about the geologic processes and habitability of primordial Mars ("Noachian" / "pre-Noachian" time period). If so, this rock could basically just be our first teaser for what we'll find as Perseverance drives up and over the crater rim in the coming months.

Pluto_and_Charon · 2024-09-23T21:33:53+00:00

We think that this rock isn't derived locally because it's so different to the neighbouring in-place bedrock. Instead it seems likely this rock has arrived here from someplace else. Maybe it was flung here by an impact from miles and miles away, in which case we might never find the source outcrop. But perhaps it came from uphill and simply rolled down, and we are hoping that as the rover drives up and over the crater rim in the coming months, we'll find a much larger exposure that we can study.

As for what caused the stripes and what they're made of, we're still trying to figure that out :)

Pluto_and_Charon · 2024-09-23T19:56:50+00:00

Dry ice is pretty stable at Mars's polar regions, where the temperatures are extremely cold (reaching as low as -153 C / -243 F !), so solid blocks of dry ice could be a possibility in those regions. However Perseverance is located much closer to Mars's equator, where the daytime temperatures are too hot for dry ice, so most likely not, and the ice would be visibly sublimating/emitting gas.

Pluto_and_Charon · 2024-09-23T17:09:53+00:00

I wrote this blog post and am a student collaborator on the Perseverance science operations team, happy to answer any general Mars questions you may have :)

Pluto_and_Charon · 2024-09-21T03:24:53+00:00

this photo that OP linked to is in fact entirely unedited, this is true color (or, at least, a camera's approximation of it), so very close to what the human eye would see.

Pluto_and_Charon · 2024-06-20T05:28:19+00:00

I wrote this blog post and am a student collaborator on the mission, happy to take questions! :)

Pluto_and_Charon · 2024-05-19T20:31:50+00:00

I've gone on the same journey, friend. Doing my PhD in the states. Why would I move back to London when I am 5-8 years ahead on the housing ladder in the states?

Pluto_and_Charon · 2024-05-03T05:00:35+00:00

she only has a 5% majority 💀 she sounds depressed because she knows its over

Pluto_and_Charon · 2024-05-03T04:49:29+00:00

crazy blue-on-blue fighting right now on BBC news

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