Skywise Unlimited

One whole year ago my fellow NASA tweeps and I were at JPL in Pasadena listening to Allen Chen give us live play by play updates as Curiosity descended to the Martian surface and the famous seven minutes of terrible possibilities unfolded. Even Neil deGrasse Tyson has since admitted he had severe doubts about the […]

Euphoric Trepidation I kept checking the clock because it felt like 10:30 was barreling down on us like a freight train. Spacecraft launches can often be delayed but this landing was mostly being coordinated by Isaac Newton. He tends to keep to the schedule. I kept imagining the sky crane with Curiosity tucked away inside, […]

Celebration Internet rumors had been flying around before we tweeps even arrived in Pasadena for the Curiosity Rover landing that “surprises” were in store for us. Somehow we all intuitively knew that this meant a celebrity or two would be stopping by. The two names that I remember being passed around the rumor mill most […]

To My Tweeps I have a message to those thousands of space geeks who wanted to go to the JPL Mars landing tweet-up, to those who wound up on the waiting list hoping for an opening, and especially to those rogues who showed up anyway and tweeted the event from off-campus. I sympathize with you […]

The Ultimate Tweet-up When NASA tweeted about the JPL social I didn’t even really understand what it meant. I clicked on the link and it became apparent that a rare opportunity was being presented for a handful of people to spend a few days touring JPL and to be on site at the facility during […]

Published: Thu, 07/19/2012 Matthew Anderson WESTERN TODAY EDITOR Brad Snowder, manager of the Western Washington University Planetarium and lecturer in Western’s physics and astronomy department, has been selected by NASA to join a team of 25 social networking mission specialists working to create buzz about the landing of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover on […]