Mars
aardvarchaeology | January 25, 2017The Opportunity rover landed on Mars thirteen Earth calendar years ago today, and it still works fine after driving ~44 km! This is the farthest any off-planet vehicle has gone so far. Oppy's mate Spirit was mobile on the Red Planet for over five years and then functioned as a stationary science platform for another year before getting killed off by a Martian winter it couldn't avoid. Amazing engineering that keeps working year after year without a technician so much as touching it.
At the moment Oppy continues to explore the western rim of Endeavour crater, where it's spent several years.…
aardvarchaeology | January 25, 2016The Opportunity rover landed on Mars twelve Earth calendar years ago today, and it still works fine after driving ~43 km! This is the farthest any off-planet vehicle has gone so far. Oppy's mate Spirit was mobile on the Red Planet for over five years and then functioned as a stationary science platform for another year before getting killed off by a Martian winter it couldn't avoid. Amazing engineering that keeps working year after year without a technician so much as touching it.
At the moment Oppy is still exploring the rim of Endeavour crater, where it's spent several years. It's in…
aardvarchaeology | January 25, 2015The Opportunity rover landed on Mars eleven Earth calendar years ago today, and it still works fine after driving ~42 km! This is the farthest any off-planet vehicle has gone so far. Oppy's mate Spirit was mobile on the Red Planet for over five years and then functioned as a stationary science platform for another year before getting killed off by a Martian winter it couldn’t avoid. Amazing engineering that keeps working year after year without a technician so much as touching it.
At the moment Oppy is still exploring the rim of Endeavour crater, where it's spent several years. The rover…
gregladen | December 5, 2014Watch the Orion test flight:
Splashdown:
Why is it great? Well, speaking as a Gemini (not my horoscope sign, but the space program going when I first gained sentience) ...
First, it is big, fast, cool looking. It actually looks like a rocket that might have been designed a decade before they ever actually made any rockets. It is almost Deco.
Second, they got a guy from the 1960s -- with that slightly, nasal, black and white voice people spoke in back then -- to call the race launch.
Third, Orion is really good at taking selfies.
Fourth, it didn't take long. The whole thing was like…
gregladen | January 21, 2014Look at the rock on the right, and the lack of rock on the left. (Our left.) It is being reported that this jelly-donut size rock appeared out of nowhere on the Martian surface between photographs.
There are several possible explanations for this.
1) It grew there.
2) It was ejected from a steam vent or something and flew there.
3) This is what a Martian looks like. It will eventually move on.
4) The robot that took the first picture tossed the rock up while driving by.
5) It is a jelly donut.
6) The rock was placed there to cover up a footprint.
What do you think?
I love it when stuff…
esiegel | November 21, 2013"Mars once was wet and fertile. It's now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth." -Neil deGrasse Tyson
Oh, it's true alright, something bad did once happen on Mars. And although there isn't any real danger of that happening to Earth, a little conversation I had earlier this week made me think that it's time to tell all of you a story about our red neighbor, and why it is the way it is today.
You see, when we think about Mars, we think about the smallish, red, desolate world that fascinates us today…
esiegel | April 17, 2013“We are much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than we were to being able to send men to the moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later. Given the will, we could have humans on Mars within a decade.” -Robert Zubrin
Of all the planets in the Solar System beyond our own, none has captured our imagination quite like Mars has.
Image credit: NASA, via http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA02570.jpg.
From science-fiction fans to scientists and everyone in between, our understanding of the red planet is presently greater than it ever has been in the past. With multiple…
illconsidered | January 30, 2013NASA's JPL division has an interesting article on thawing dry ice (frozen CO2) near the polar regions of Mars.
Aside from its being interesting, I only bring it up as it reminds me of the faux skeptic talking point about Mars warming, ergo the sun drives warming here on earth. It is about as far from a truly skeptical argument one could imagine as it rests (or at least it did when it originated) on the flimsiest of evidence that there is climate change on Mars at all. A truly skeptical approach would not make the leap from two photos of one spot to a global trend. Even if you establish the…
esiegel | January 27, 2013"In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it." -John Archibald Wheeler
Sometimes, things get difficult. Sometimes, there are challenges you have to face that you never even expected, much less were prepared for. And sometimes, it seems like there's no point in even holding on to hope that things will get better. But as long, as The National would tell you, as you're no
Runaway,
you've still got something worth striving for. Even if there's something newer, shinier, and more powerful than you.
Image credit: NASA / Hubble Space Telescope.
Even on Mars.
Nine years (and three…
gregladen | December 3, 2012Despite rumors to the contrary, NASA actually does real, non-Parody science! And the famous press conference about Mars Rover happened today, and it was exactly as I predicted. Very, very interesting.
PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has used its full array of instruments to analyze Martian soil for the first time, and found a complex chemistry within the Martian soil. Water and sulfur and chlorine-containing substances, among other ingredients, showed up in samples Curiosity's arm delivered to an analytical laboratory inside the rover.
Detection of the substances during this…
milhayser | October 8, 2012
Some people can't see beyond the tip of their nose.
Mars appears to be our twin in some ways—it is rocky, nearby, and of similar size. But after many a hopeful prodding, Mars remains a dead body. The rover Curiosity made a happy discovery last month, photographing river rocks in an ancient Martian streambed. This led Claire L. Evans to straighten out the legendary “canals” of Mars, popularized by astronomers such as Percival Lowell in the nineteenth century. Lowell’s carefully mapped waterways were much nearer than he thought—likely “projections of the vein structure of his own eyeball, a…
gregladen | September 14, 2012Remember Rover? Rover is still finding stuff, and this latest find is strange, enigmatic, interesting, and worthy of further investigation. So far there is only a press release from NASA, here:
NASA Mars Rover Opportunity Reveals Geological Mystery
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's long-lived rover Opportunity has returned an image of the Martian
surface that is puzzling researchers.
Spherical objects concentrated at an outcrop Opportunity reached last week differ in several ways
from iron-rich spherules nicknamed "blueberries" the rover found at its landing site in early 2004 and
at many other…
gregladen | August 27, 2012Today, NASA did something never before done, and well, not all that impressive.
Charles Bolden of NASA spoke some words into a microscope, and this voice stream was sent to the Curiosity Rover on Mars, which then sent it back. Hey, I just spent the last 15 minutes swapping monitors around on my computers, and those monitors had cables that had been secured with cable ties and that ran through conduits and stuff. I’m thinking what I did was harder.
According to NASA, Bolden said:
The knowledge we hope to gain from our observation and analysis of Gale Crater will tell us much about the…
milhayser | August 8, 2012
Despite NASA's teasing prospect of a crash landing, the Curiosity rover touched down on Mars without a hitch. It is the biggest, most expensive, and best-equipped scientific instrument to ever reach the Red Planet. On Thoughts from Kansas, Josh Rosenau writes:
With its plutonium-fueled power plant, its robotic arms, and its rock-destroying lasers, Curiosity’s goal is to survey Mars and dig into the planet’s past. It will track the geology of the planet in greater detail than any previous rover or lander has done. It will take pictures with higher resolution and greater sensitivity than…
esiegel | August 7, 2012"I am looking at the future with concern, but with good hope." -Albert Schweitzer
As you all know, the most ambitious interplanetary mission ever attempted -- Mars Science Laboratory -- successfully landed its Curiosity rover on Mars earlier this week. Last night, I had the opportunity to go on my local news and speak a bit about it, and as always, it was an absolute pleasure.
(Video credit: KGW / Ben Lacy / Carey Higgins / Steph Stricklen.)
Of course we got to talk about the rover itself and its science potential, and exactly how much more sophisticated it is than any of its martian…
esiegel | August 6, 2012“We are much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than we were to being able to send men to the moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later. Given the will, we could have humans on Mars within a decade.” -Robert Zubrin
This is what we can accomplish when we invest in something big.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Mars Science Laboratory.
I'm not talking about the Olympics, of course. I'm talking about investing in science, in exploration, in robotics, in engineering, in technology, and in humanity, and what can we accomplish?
Image credit: Mars Curiosity / NASA / JPL…
esiegel | July 20, 2012"The achievements of Apollo were so bold and our subsequent efforts so timid that the energy of those years seems like a youthful dream." -Buzz Aldrin
43 years ago today, humanity took our first steps on another world, venturing nearly 400,000 kilometers from home and walking on the surface of the Moon.
Image credit: NASA, Apollo 11, photo by Neil Armstrong.
Of course, what we found there was a world whose soil was very similar to our own, but devoid of any atmosphere, liquid, or signs of life, present or past. But out beyond the Moon, visible in the distance even when viewed from Earth,…
esiegel | July 9, 2012"You better lose yourself in the music, the moment
You own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime yo" -Eminem
Here on Earth, a cold, frozen winter lasts three months, with the Sun's rays pointed a maximum of 23.5 extra degrees away from your part of the Earth from normal.
On Mars, however, winters are even more severe.
Image credit: Calvin J. Hamilton.
With a slightly more severe axial tilt than Earth, an extra 78 million kilometers separating it from the Sun than our planet, and the coldest season of…
esiegel | June 30, 2012"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." -Mark Twain
So, you've been around a while, seen all sorts of things, and learned an awful lot about the world, solar system and Universe that we live in. But how well do you know it, really?
Image credit: NASA / Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
To scale and in order, these are the eight planets you know so well. There are the four rocky worlds of our inner solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, and the four gas giants that dominate the outer solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and…
esiegel | June 22, 2012"Some prophecies are self-fulfilling
But I've had to work for all of mine
Better times will come to me, God willing
Cause I can't leave this world behind" -Josh Ritter
You sure can't leave this world behind. At least, not very easily. The reason for it, of course, is gravity.
Image Credit: Physclips, via the University of New South Wales' School of Physics.
Here on the surface of the Earth, the gravitational potential well is pretty large; large enough that there's no easy way off. Sure, you can pour a huge amount of energy into a rocket to try and overcome this gravitational potential…