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Emily Lakdawalla Profile picture
Emily Lakdawalla
@elakdawalla
Buy my art! https://t.co/N04O7cJhbB🪐 Planetary scientist, author, journalist, speaker, asteroid 274860. 🏳️‍🌈 Inactive here, now reside in the blue.
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Oct 5, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Nice coffee break at #DPS2022, caught up with a bunch of people and now I'm off to Pluto, where Leslie Young is talking about a recently observed occultation with her habitual dry-as-desert wit. Leslie Young: "One site only got data on egress; they were supposed to be part of the picket fence [a closely spaced line of telescopes] but their RV was infested by ants." #AstronomerProblems #AustraliaProblems #DPS2022
Oct 5, 2022 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Gooooooood morning London! Today at #DPS2022 I'll be checking out Uranus and Saturn's rings, changes at Pluto since the New Horizons flyby, interstellar traveling rocks, outer planet irregular satellites, and keeping an ear out for early JWST results. I barely made it to the rings session in time to see Matt Hedman show off some new results on a big brightening of a dusty ring at Uranus, revealed in part by some terrific reprocessing of Voyager data by an amateur, @IanARegan. Nice work, Ian!
Oct 2, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
It’s always very sad to lose a spacecraft, but MOM was essentially a technology demonstration for India, its first ever deep space mission, designed and built on a shoestring budget. To have lasted nearly nine years is an achievement to be very proud of. India oversold scientific capabilities & achievements of MOM, and undersold and underused its ability to photograph the full globe of Mars in stunning color and detail, which I’ll always be sad about. But getting to Mars and surviving for so long on the 1st try is amazing.
Sep 27, 2022 • 16 tweets • 6 min read
Here's the replay of the DRACO camera view of the #DARTMission impact onto Dimorphos, the moon of Didymos earlier today. Now time for me to play with some images... Well I probably can't beat this #DARTMission
Sep 27, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
OK y'all #DARTmission post-impact press briefing is live now here:
nasa.gov/nasalive "Once we got a look at Dimorphos, we were very confident we were going to hit." (If Dimorphos had been a contact binary like comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko or New Horizons' target Arrokoth, a nearly direct hit on its centroid could've turned into a miss. Fortunately, it was round.)
Sep 26, 2022 • 42 tweets • 20 min read
Thar they are! Right now Dimorphos and Didymos are both this bright dot of light. They’ll separate into two dots in a little while. #DARTMission

I’ll add photos on to this thread periodically as approach continues. At the moment, this is the only source for the approach images. If they have not appeared on a website by the time of the post-impact press briefing scheduled for (I think) 5pm Pacific time, I will ask! #DARTmission
Sep 26, 2022 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Less than seven hours til #DARTsmash! Live countdown and links to official streams are on the mission website here: dart.jhuapl.edu And I’ve got you covered with links to background information on the mission to answer all your questions about #DARTMission #DARTsmash on my Patreon: patreon.com/posts/72349462…
Mar 2, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I just got off WebEx with Justin Maki, who leads of the Perseverance engineering camera team. I've learned a lot and gotten a lot of confused questions sorted out. I'll try to bang out a blog entry with lots of techy detail about raw images tomorrow. The TL;DR: of the interview was: a lot of the things that are weird and confusing in the raw image metadata from sols 1-4 have to do with the rover being on the cruise flight software at the time.
Feb 28, 2021 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
OK, *cracking knuckles* time for me to wrap my head around the Perseverance raw image data set. Thanks to @Miscul for helping me out with a dump of the metadata. Here's a list of other resources: Photos sent from space are pretty enough but they're not science without metadata. I loooooooooove metadata. I'm gonna dig in and see what I can learn & understand about how I'm going to be able to follow this mission through its images. Image
Feb 27, 2021 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Hi! I'm Emily Lakdawalla and I love to talk and teach about space exploration & science communication. I'm now self-employed, available to speak, write, & consult. My website: lakdawalla.com/emily. My blog and Patreon: patreon.com/elakdawalla Image My first book was "The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How The Mars Rover Performs Its Job" published by Springer-Praxis. I'm working on a sequel about Curiosity's science results. springer.com/gp/book/978331… Image
Feb 21, 2021 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
I think the reason I’m so frustrated about the lack of raw images is that they have, until now, been the focus of my post-landing writing. There’s a new mission on Mars and I want to TEACH!! So, okay, I don’t get to do it with pictures. Ask me anything. I’ll answer as I cook. By end of mission Perseverance may drive VERY far from safe landing site. By dropping samples closer to flat crater floor, it will be faster/safer/easier to retrieve & return them to where they can be launched to Mars orbit.
Feb 21, 2021 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
While we wait for raw images, maybe I’ll try to beat down some conspiracy theories.... This image was only partially transmitted from Mars in moments after landing, before relay orbiter sank below horizon. The rounded upper left and right corners are the edges of the lens cap. The rounded edges to the black areas of no image data are JPEG compression artifacts.
Feb 20, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
A couple people who've been reading the Maki et al. (2020) paper describing the engineering cameras have pointed out this passage to me, talking about the EDL cams transmitting MPEG video to Earth. Here, let me explain what this passage says: (thread) 1) Like all Perseverance's instruments, the EDL cams have their own computer(s) inside the rover belly. When they acquire data, the data are stored in uncompressed binary format in the EDL cams' computer (the DSU).
2) The DSU can compress, downsample, & reformat the images.
Feb 20, 2021 • 15 tweets • 6 min read
It is now 2 full sols after @NASAPersevere landed, and still there are no raw images being posted at mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multi… . On every previous Mars mission since the MERs landed in 2004, these pages have given us all views of the daily operations of @NASA's Mars missions. We were able to follow mission events by looking at the raw images feed. By now, @NASAPersevere should have deployed its high-gain antenna. Today is the day its mast should raise vertical, giving the Navcams, Mastcam-Z, and Supercam their first light on Mars.
Feb 20, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Landing plus 34 hours and there are still only 2 1/4 images here. What's going on @NASAPersevere? mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multi… The worst thing is, I've heard nothing official. If an official @NASAPersevere person told me "there will be nothing posted until Monday" I would be upset, but at least I could leave my F5 key for the weekend. Don't you want me to be excited? Can you tell me either way?
Feb 19, 2021 • 19 tweets • 6 min read
Many others will be sharing photos this morning. I'm going to do something different: read through Maki et al. (2020), the paper describing Perseverance's engineering cameras, and provide you some context for those pictures. link.springer.com/article/10.100… First: What and Where are the cameras? From left:
- 3 Parachute Uplook Cameras (PUC), mounted to backshell
- 1 Descent Downlook Camera (DDC), mounted to descent stage, pointing at rover
- 1 each Rover Uplook & Rover Downlook Camera, mounted to top & bottom of rover deck
Feb 19, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Those of you waiting for Perseverance pics: I'm about to do y'all a service. I have a radio interview in 7 minutes. They will certainly arrive while I am busy doing that. Speaking of: listen in!
Feb 18, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Jennifer Trosper: in 2 downlinks this pm, expect EDL up-looking camera movie thumbnails; Hazcams w/deployed lens covers; and maybe one EDL down-look full-res. Rover is about 1 km to the SE of center of landing ellipse in a parking lot with rover tilted 1.2 degrees. Facing southeast at roughly 140 degrees. Power good; RTG was producing 105W before EDL. Battery state of charge 95%. Small ripple field separates rover from delta to NW.
Feb 18, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Ready to watch the post-landing press briefing! And taking full advantage of being at home so I can celebrate properly. Briefing hasn't started yet, but it's extremely normal for the first post-landing briefing to be late. Give them a few minutes to get their image captions posted, folks corralled into safely distanced broadcast locations, etc. In due time.
Feb 18, 2021 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
LDKJGHLADKJGH ;ASDHA; K JGHA;HLKVAWTBPNOAIRTVLO WHPISETHP IAUWHPI WE LANDED ON MARS
Feb 18, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Landing Eve. What a weird Landing Eve. This will be the first Mars landing I have not attended at JPL since 2001. I was there for both MERs, Phoenix, Curiosity, and Insight. Since Phoenix I’ve always brought in coffee, fresh fruit, and granola bars to fuel the non-local media. (I really love being the Press Room Soccer Mom and miss being able to support those who bring news from Mars to the world in that way this year.)