If you haven’t heard of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, take a few moments to peruse their newly-updated Web site. SDSS has been painstakingly mapping a big chunk of the known universe – every star, every galaxy, everything we can see with telescopes.

Best of all, they’re releasing all their data to the public – about 6 terabytes so far (or as Steve Jobs would put it, “two million songs”.) That translates to lots and lots and lots of really neat eye-candy, plus a bunch of fun science projects made possible by this much data.

[Feb 2006 UPDATE: Fixed the links to point to the main Sloan site; deep linking seems to break whenever a new version is launched.]

Woo hoo! The results are in, and it looks like Mars once had liquid water on its surface, according to tests conducted by Spirit and Opportunity.

Seriously, if anyone here has suggestions (like some of these) on how to save the Hubble telescope, please let NASA know. Apparently they’re willing to listen, which is good because it would be stupid to let the Hubble die because of Dubya’s new budgetary plans.

I didn’t get a chance to mention it at the time, but SpaceShipOne, the world’s most fantastically beautiful rocketship, had its first supersonic test on December 17th. Note that this is the first privately-built aircraft to break the sound barrier.

The Mojave weblog also has a nice page with photos of the launch, including the heart-stopping (but luckily not show-stopping) landing. I can’t wait to hear about the next flight!

The Washington Post has a good summary article on the NASA Mars rovers and comet mission, with photos. I’m already using the latest photo as my desktop background, but I’m really looking forward to seeing the full panorama when it arrives.