iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Can’t lie feeling pretty smug about the train situation

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Bye bye London, time to catch the train to #EPSC2026 🚅🇪🇺💫

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Reposted by Dr Roger Blue Stabbins

Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

cutting pure science to prioritize applications is fundamentally like asking farmers not to waste time producing grain, cheese, and tomatoes and focus on making pizzas

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

🟦🔵🔷🦋🐟👖🥏🧢🐳 All kinds of blue going on at the British Planetary Science Conference up in St Andrews last week. 🟦🔵🔷🦋🐟👖🥏🧢🐳 I got to talk about how we map CaSSIS channels to colours we can perceive, and what is gained and what is lost when we do this. 🟦🔵🔷🦋🐟👖🥏🧢🐳

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Seeing all these nice processing efforts on the Psyche Mars images has me returning to Frederic Hanusch's essay on how colour representations of our planet reflect back on our society, and how we could design a new "planetary palette" www.noemamag.com/the-politics...

noemamag.com

The Politics Of Planetary Color | NOEMA

Color once taught us to see and value our planet. It now records how we are altering it.

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Meeting some other robotic explorers of the museum this evening. This is a model of ROV ISIS, that can dive over 6km deep into the blue.

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

I've never met him, but I love Hiro Ono's heart-on-sleeve blogging, where he shares his views from the bleeding edge of robotic solar system exploration. Today he's posted on why he's chosen to leave JPL for Georgia Tech hiroono.com/en/2026/04/2...

hiroono.com

My Next Phase | Hiro Ono's Odyssey

TR;DL: I’ll leave JPL and join Georgia Tech as an associate prof in July. Looking for students and post-docs in robotics, AI/ML, and space systems. If interested, LMK via this form. Dear my six-year-o...

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Today I Learned about David MacKay, his book "Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms", it's influence, and it's dedication. What a guy. www.inference.org.uk/itprnn/book....

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

@cafeotodalston.bsky.social by Dalston Junction is open in the day and has a nice little selection of things that are hard to find elsewhere

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

They’re playing bossa nova from the tannoy, everyone’s lunching in the sun. It’s a beautiful day for writing methods up from the southbank, central London.

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Another reason I love visiting Aber is they always have the BEST MERCH! Check out this goody bag - including v rare ExoMars mission and v cute PanCam Calibration Target pin badges!

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

It was all hands on deck to run these bulk and powdered samples through the suite of goniometer and integrating sphere setups, to make sure we know our diffusive from directional reflectance measurements!

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

A focus of the week was the practicalities rock reflectance spectroscopy. The St Andrews team brought down a diverse collection of clay bearing samples, collected from Mars analogues across Iceland and Scotland, for measurement with some of Aber's spectrometers

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

As for me, I had given a summary of my Enfys contributions the night before, at somewhere called Bank Vault Aberystwyth:

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Only a few months into her PhD, Holly Raynor from Birkbeck, U.o.London, is cutting across all of the ExoMars instruments to understand how their datasets can be systematically integrated for operational efficiency!

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

From St. Andrews, Grace Nielson is tying the small scale point spectra we collect with geologic context at the macro and micro scales, mapping spectral signatures to the geochemistry of habitability that we'll be exploring with the Rosalind Franklin rover!

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Our very own Natural History Museum (joint w/ St. Andrews) student Saskia Hagan-Fellowes is all about the data - she's exploring and trialling a wide range of spectral analysis techniques we can use on Enfys, and even wrapping these in neat user interfaces, so they can be used by all!

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Maths whizz Jack Langston, also at Aber. is wading deep into the problem of Martian dust, to understand how it will accumulate on our Aber. built calibration target, and what we need to do to correct it out of our reflectance calibration!

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Aber. student Harry Marsh has been tackling the dark art of stray-light minimisation in the Enfys baffle design, along with geometric calibration challenges of stand-off spectroscopy, whilst also developing novel new downstream data cleaning methods!

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

UK Space Agency has been great for funding early career researchers to get involved in all aspects of Enfys. Here are some snapshots of these stellar student projects from a group talk we gave to the Aber. Materials and Space Physics groups:

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

I know it's not always feasible, but having subsystems developed in-house is a great way to ensure that the noise limits of your instrument are well-understood, and can be shared freely, as all tax-payer funded science should be!

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Our host for the week was the legendary Matt Gunn, architect and PI of Enfys. Here he's showing me an early prototype of the sensor readout board, designed in-house at Aber Uni.

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Since I last visited Aber *croaks* way back in 20-18 *croaks*, what used to be the rover test pit has been converted into a flight-instrument development lab. A whole team of engineers are running life-cycle tests and charaterizing the optical and electronic components over extreme temperatures.

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Wow what a week at Aberystwyth! There's a whole village of planetary surface spectroscopists brewing in the UK, tackling everything from instrument stray-light through to phyllosilicate formation paths... and last week we came together to understand each others niches and how we all fit together!

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

…as we think about skylight spectral radiance when recovering the bidirectional reflectance beneath a multiply scattering atmosphere…

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

I’m on the long train to Aberystwyth today - my first visit this decade! Looking forward to being by the sea and talking all things Enfys with the UK PhD cohort. Hoping for some more west coast sunsets like this one

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

This week I handed in our first deliverable for our ESA SKP grant, a software simulator for Enfys observations. So I celebrated with an afternoon playing every single Strat on Denmark Street

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Music for Iran Volume 4 is out now - featuring unreleased material from Mary Lattimore, White Fence, Holiday Ghosts and 23 others! Proceeds the Iranian Free Them Now charity, supporting political prisoners and displaced families in Iran wlfmusicforiran.bandcamp.com/album/music-...

wlfmusicforiran.bandcamp.com

Music For Iran - Volume 4, by Music For Iran

26 track album

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Got to be the don’t break my love / why didn’t you save me 10”, think it was 2012, maybe even a record store day special. The live show round this time had really evolved a step from the Space is Only Noise tour too. What a guy.

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

I wasn't part of the live band, but there is this one very late 2000's quality camera phone recording of them playing it out the soundsystem at Koko: www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0Po...

youtube.com

Stonephace @ VideoCrash 4 @ KOKO London

YouTube video by Milos Molnar

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

I remember having a good time trying to recreate this acid bassline bit before the final drop. We just DI'd straight out of a homemade fuzz pedal youtu.be/1odNyAVAoso?...

youtu.be

The Horn Track (The Micky Finn Foghorn Remix 1992)

YouTube video by Egyptian Empire - Topic

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Adrian Utley from Portishead played the cop-theme-car-chase wah-wah guitar, and riffing on that, Dad asked me to listen to King Curtis and play a Jerry Jemmott line

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Did a big thing and sold my P-Bass yesterday. Haven't used it for years, and it will go to a good friends studio. It's for the best. But here's a good memory of playing it, on dad's cover of an acid anthem, Mickey Finn's Foghorn 1992 Remix of Egyptian Empire's Horn Track: youtu.be/GvpJdNg7zNw?...

youtu.be

The Horn Track

YouTube video by Stonephace - Topic

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

I'm a planetary scientist, currently working at the Natural History Museum in London on reflectance spectroscopy and spectral imaging

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Through radiometric calibration we found the exposure regime needed to get an SNR>100, enough to pick out the kinds of subtle (~3% band depth) absorption features we might find at Phobos

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

We built it out of ISO-6 compliant materials, so we've been able to take into the best room in the world - the JAXA Extraterrestrial Sample Curation Centre - to image samples of Ryugu and Bennu!

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

You will of course eventually lose your hearing but you’ll have really enjoyed doing the washing up

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

If you get one of these Bluetooth transmitters and plug it into your hifi output you can listen to your music without any phone/laptop volume limiting trickery and you will feel like you’re listening to The Bends for the first time in your life

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Started 2026 by meeting the southern ocean. Ocean Beach, Tasmania, 2026/01/07

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Had to buy a new suitcase to get the e record haul home

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Had a warm return to Rikkyo University, Tokyo, this summer on a Daiwa Foundation grant, this time looking at images of asteroid Bennu captured by the Laboratory OROCHI Simulator in prep for MMX

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

On the way back from EGU I stopped by the Ries Crater and helped out with some AUPE (Aberystwyth University PanCam Emulator) image processing with the Canadian and UK space agencies. We took a lot of pictures of pre- and post-impact clays in prep for ExoMars Rosalind Franklin

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

Back in May I cycled to EGU in Vienna, and gave a talk about the Supervised Spectral Parameter Learning method we've been developing, and have been applying to the CaSSIS multi-band imager on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

Got to play some city pop on the Brilliant Corners soundsystem last week. First time publicly djing for a long while, and first time on turntables!

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Dr Roger Blue Stabbins @rbstabbins.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

pov you take a break from the Martian solstice party to go see Deimos before the sun comes up

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