Riding With Robots

@ridingrobots.bsky.social

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Robotic solar system exploration, astrophotography, exasperating earnestness. My day job is impersonating your favorite planets and spacecraft on social media for your favorite government agency. Opinions are my own.

The central core of the Milky Way galaxy crosses the night sky vertically above a field of purple flowers.
The disc of Io against the darkness of space. The surface is mottled with dark pools of lava and isolated mountain peaks. The right side is illuminated with sunlight, and the left side more dimly by reflected light from Jupiter.
A small model of the Viking lander drops onto a desk near a small, shiny meteorite.
Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip. In panel 1, Calvin and Hobbes are walking through the desert. Calvin asks, "See any signs of Martian life?" Hobbes replies, "Not yet..." In panel 2, Calvin points and says, "Hey, look! It's the old Viking spacecraft that landed here in the 70s!" Hobbes replies, "Gosh, I wonder if it's still working." In panel 3, they approach the lander and make funny faces at its camera. In panel 4, Calvin says, "THAT ought to blow some circuits at NASA!" Hobbes says, "Hee hee hee! I've always wanted to do something like that."
Poster commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Viking 1 landing on Mars. The lander occupies the center of the scene, extending its robotic arm into the soil, flanked by rovers and helicopters that came later. Reads: Viking - The lander that broke ground of 50 years of Mars surface exploration.
Moonlight glows between the silhouettes of aspen trees beneath a starry sky in Utah. Good night
An owl (great horned, I think) perched at the top of a bare pine tree in a forest within a deep canyon.
A series of still photos of the planet Mars from space, showing the crescent planet growing larger as the spacecraft approaches, closeups of the cratered and canyoned surface as it swoops low, the the full disc as the spacecraft pulls away.
Black-and-white photo of part of the Curiosity rover (an antenna and a wheel) in a rocky desert with layered cliffs
A group people stand on flat desert plain with barren mountains in the background. Crater Island, Utah, with mountain ranges that may resemble those on Venus. This area was the site of a series of tests (June 23-25, 2026) of the camera system that will one day fly aboard NASA’s DAVINCI mission to Venus. NASA/Mike Guinto
Bag of bandages with a biohazard symbol
A tall sandstone cliff at night, spot illuminated by a headlamp, with ancient carvings of animals and people, the Milky Way crossing the sky in the background. Photo: Bill Dunford
Reddish rock with a sort of honeycomb pattern of white crystal embedded in it
Kevin Harrington (holding a cricket bat) and Sam Neil (smoking a pipe) stand inside a giant antenna dish.
Wildflowers beneath tall pines in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Photo: Bill Dunford
The Milky Way stretches vertically across a mostly clear night sky. The colorful clouds of stars and dust of the galactic core are visible near the horizon of silhouetted mountains. The still waters of a lake dimly reflect the starlight. Photo: Bill Dunford
Video screen capture of NASA's "Eyes on Asteroids" web site showing the current positions of asteroids, comets, and spacecraft as they orbit the Sun. The Psyche spacecraft's orbit is highlighted as it moves away from Mars and toward the asteroid 16 Psyche.
blue grey octopus with big eyes on the sea floor
A rare superbloom in Skull Valley, Utah of sunflowers and other wild flowers, seen under rainclouds lit by the sunset. Photo: Bill Dunford
Animated illustration shows the spiral shape of the Milky Way seen from above. Two of the outer arms shift positions a little and become longer.
ai slop illustration showing a scale diagram of the solar system, wildly mislabeled, with extra planets and Saturn identified as "Mercury"
Diagram showing the current positions of the planets and several spacecraft. New Horizons is well outside the orbit of Neptune, and only out-distanced by the Voyagers and Pioneers.
Earth in gibbous phase against the darkness of space. Clouds and continents. A typhoon swirling near the center of the image.
Moon peeking through a bank of clouds over a field of sunflowers at dusk
This nighttime picture of Earth was taken on April 2, 2026, by an Artemis II crew member aiming a camera through a window of the Orion spacecraft. The image was captured after Orion completed its translunar injection burn, the critical maneuver that sent the spacecraft on its path toward the Moon and back. The visible hemisphere appears awash in sunlight, but it is actually lit by moonlight — sunlight reflected from the lunar surface. Along the upper left (south) and lower right (north) edges of Earth’s disk, green auroras glow against the dark sky, showing charged particles from the Sun interacting with gases in Earth’s atmosphere. Africa is visible on the left, while a translucent cone of light capped by a bright Venus extends into space from Earth’s lower right edge. This zodiacal light is caused by sunlight reflecting off interplanetary dust. A thin white crescent along the lower right edge of Earth marks the planet’s daytime atmosphere illuminated by the Sun, which lies on the opposite side of Earth from Orion’s perspective. City lights are also visible, especially along coastlines. Credits: NASA
Earth seen in full phase, drifting in space, from the Artemis II capsule. Oceans, part of Africa, clouds, and a thin layer of atmosphere with auroras near the pole can be seen.
Time lapse sequence of clouds drifting across the core of the Milky Way as it rises over Skull Valley, Utah. Video by Bill Dunford
Subtle but certain auroral glow to the north, despite the glaring Moon, on a dirt road leading through a pine forest
Panorama of a mountain canyon in Utah with pine forests
A small rock embedded with tiny, jumbled bits of fossilized life, including plant stems and shells
Venus adrift in a particularly beautiful blue. A dark mountainside below clouds catching the last of the summer sunset.
A global map of the cloud tops of Jupiter projected onto a rectangular plane. The planet's distinctive bands and stripes of colorful clouds, and the oval-shaped Great Red Spot storm. This is a cylindrical composite map from PJ09 - credit: NASA / JPL / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt / John Rogers
Panoramic view of a rocky, hilly desert landscape on Mars
The full moon spied through a gap in pine boughs, an owl calling somewhere im the dark
A close-up of a dandelion seed head is silhouetted against a dark blue sky, with the bright, full Moon shining directly behind it, illuminating the delicate seeds. Credit: NASA/Bill Dunford
Flat rock with a polka-dot pattern of crystals in a red stone matrix.
Black-and-white photo of a robotic arm extending science instruments to a surface covered in hexagonal patterns that resemble dried mud formations
The core of the Milky Way crosses vertically through a starry sky, above a line of trees, and a clearing dimly lit by starlight. Photo: Bill Dunford
Small chunk of reddish rock with a pattern of lighter minerals almost like leopard spots
Chunk of gray rock with tiny bits of lighter plant fossils in the matrix and thin veins of lighter mineral
A waxing gibbous moon glows with color from wildfire smoke through a gap in the pine forest at dusk. An owl call can be heard
Pine tree and mountainside under an orange sky thick with wildfire smoke
Video of a moose and her calf feeding in an aspen forest
A bright moon peeks through purple clouds amid a dramatically colorful sunset above a mountainside and its pine forest.
An area west of Jezero Crater, Mars, as captured by the HiRISE instrument aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on June 13, 2026. The terrain consists of a desert landscape with small hills and fields of dunes. The car-sized Perseverance rover is visible as a small, bright, blue-green dot, circled in yellow. The rover's tracks are also visible as a thin gray line winding through the terrain. NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona
The colorful clouds of stars and dust of the Milky Way's core rise above the horizon on a snowy hillside before dawn. Photo: Bill Dunford
A large reservoir of blue water with several inlets among red rock cliffs
Photo of a seemingly grumpy lizard on red stone
Stars of the Milky Way and the Summer Triangle seen directly above through a gap in tree cover. Flaming Gorge, Utah
The Milky Way crossing the night sky, reflected in a still mountain lake. Photo: Bill Dunford
Hand-dawn diagram of the celestial sphere, with a little stick figure person at the center.
A purple boarding pass to send your name with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The boarding pass is broken up the way a ticket might be, with a tearable stub. The left third, the stub, has the stylized telescope name above the silhouette of Roman's 18 square detectors in its iconic arch shape. Space Telescope is written just below the detectors and above a QR code. Below that are nasa.gov and nasa.gov/roman. The right two thirds of the pass have the red and blue NASA meatball logo along the top. “Your “Name Here” are in large text below that. Much smaller text below that reads "Namesake: NASA's first chief of astronomy aka Mother of Hubble," then "Spacecraft: Astrophysics infrared survey observatory," and below that "Mission Focus: Dark energy, dark matter, exoplanets." Along the bottom, text reads "Launch Site: Kennedy Space Center, Destination: Sun-Earth LaGrange Point 2, Total Miles: 1,000,000." An illustration of the telescope sits along the right side.
Very cool owl sticker used as a bookmark
A placard commemorating NASA's "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign was installed on the Perseverance Mars rover at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Three fingernail-sized chips affixed to the upper-left corner of the placard feature the names of 10,932,295 people who participated.
A thin crescent moon, a dot's worth of Venus, and some fluffy clouds in the blue daytime sky.
A marathon "sticker" showing a silhouette of the Perseverance rover, with the text: 26.2 miles - Perseverance Rover - Jezero Crater, Mars and the geographic coordinates of JPL on Earth and the approximate point of marathon completion on Mars. The sticker is superimposed on a map of the ancient river delta in Jezero Crater, with its serpentine route traced over the terrain.
Starburst of a flower on 16th east
A forest and flower meadow beneath a starlit sky crossed by the Milky Way. Photo: Bill Dunford
A marshy wetland beneath a starry late-dusk sky. Two very bright "stars" appear close together in the sky, though they are in actually very far apart. Such longing.