Wolf Moon, Largest of 2010, Appears Tonight With Support By Mars
For those of you not in a part of the world too cold (or too far) to go outside and take a look, today brings a rare appearance of the year’s largest full moon, with a bonus appearance by planet Mars, just to the left of the moon. This report from National Geographic:
The biggest full moon of 2010 will rise in the east tonight, and it’ll appear with a bright sidekick: Mars will cozy up just to the left of the supersize moon.
January’s full moon is also called the wolf moon, according to Native American tradition associating this month’s full moon with wolves howling in the cold midwinter.
The 2010 wolf moon will appear 30 percent brighter and 14 percent larger than any other full moon this year, because our cosmic…
Proof Of Martians ‘To Come This Year’
From Paul Sutherland on Scientific American:
Final proof that Mars has bred life will be confirmed this year, leading NASA experts believe. The historic discovery will come not on Mars itself but from chunks of the red planet here on Earth.
David McKay, chief of astrobiology at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, says powerful new microscopes and other instruments will establish whether features in martian meteorites are alien fossils.
He says evidence for life in the space rocks could have been claimed by the UK if British scientists had used readily-available electron microscopes. Instead, images of colonies of martian bacteria were collected by American scientists.
The NASA team is already convinced that colonies of micro-organisms are visible inside three martian rocks that landed on Earth. If so, this would have profound implications for our…
Mars Had Liquid Water in Recent Past, Rover Finds
From National Geographic:
Even while snared in a sand trap, NASA’s Mars rover Spirit has hit “wet” pay dirt: evidence of relatively recent groundwater activity on the red planet. For almost six months the rover has been precariously perched on the edge of a shallow crater in an equatorial region of Mars. The area is filled with cooled lava flows pitted by meteorite impacts.
While on a routine drive, Spirit broke through a thin crust of hard soil that capped a filled-in impact crater, and its wheels became half buried in the soft sand.
Since early November the rover team has been remotely spinning Spirit’s wheels to try and maneuver the rover out of its trap.
During one of these rescue attempts, Spirit churned up the soil and uncovered an intriguing layer of bright,…
New Map Suggests Mars Was Wet And Humid
A new detailed map of Mars shows what was likely a vast ocean in the north and valleys around the equator, suggesting that the planet once had a humid, rainy climate, according to research published Monday.
The computer-generated map, based on topographic data from NASA satellites, also shows that the network of valleys on the red planet is at least twice as extensive as previously estimated.
“The relatively high values over extended regions indicate the valleys originated by means of precipitation-fed runoff erosion — the same process that is responsible for formation of the bulk of valleys on our planet,” said Wei Luo, geography professor at Northern Illinois University who co-authored the report.
“A single ocean in the northern hemisphere would explain why there is a southern limit to the presence of…
Mission(s) to Mars, visualized
from FastCompany:
Maybe ever since the Moon landing, it’s been pretty easy to overestimate the success of our space programs–when we want to go somewhere or launch something, we just do it, right? In actuality, space exploration remains a high risk endeavor, as the various Space Shuttle disasters have proven. And going to Mars? Maybe it’s out closest planet, but going there isn’t as easy as it seems.
To prove it, here’s a clever graph of all the missions ever sent to Mars. As you can see, it’s basically a bar graph; missions to Mars as listed chronologically, and the mission result is coded by how close the corresponding bar reaches to Mars.
Illustration by Bryan Christie
