Head in a Cloud

Have you ever wondered how much other planets in our solar system are like Earth? Venus is especially much like Earth because they have similar characteristics such as chemical make-up, mass, distance from the sun, and size. Many Scientists have theorized that Venus and Earth started out the same and over time, have changed into [...]

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Last week, I attended a Planetary Atmospheres Workshop (PATM) in Greenbelt, MD. The conference was only two days long, but the rate of information exchange most definitely surpassed the rate at which I was able to absorb it! This was probably particularly true since I am a laboratory experimentalist, and the focus of the meeting [...]

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Has methane been detected in the Martian atmosphere? Some sources say “Yes, we’ve detected it!” (ground-based Krasnopolsky, 2004 and the Mars Express Planetary Fourier Spectrometer – Formisano, 2004). While others say, “Uh, no you didn’t.” If methane is on Mars, then there’s a lot of explaining to do! Taking into account the only known sink [...]

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