Posts tagged mars
Top 10 Weirdest Mars Illusions and Pareidolia
More pareidolia! We have Mars rats, faces, elephants and trees (plus a lot more). Which is your favorite?
Is Mars Infested With Pareidolia Rats?
…speaking of Mars. What the heck is THAT? Mars rat? A Red Planet gopher? A… rock?! Yeah, it’s a rock.
Mars Explorers Face Huge Radiation Problem
A radiation sensor inside NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows that even under the best-case scenario and behind shielding currently being designed for NASA’s new deep-space capsule, future travelers will face a huge amount of radiation.
Rough Roving: Curiosity’s Wheels Show Damage
Recent photos from Curiosity show dents, scratches and suspect punctures in the wheels’ aluminum skin. Is it a serious problem? Discovery News finds out from Curiosity’s lead rover driver Matt Heverly.
3-D Printed Pizza to Feed Mars Colonists?
Well, the prototype 3-D pizza printer won’t actually feed the colonists — nice idea though — but the technique to print food has attracted a $125,000 NASA grant for a mechanical engineer to further develop his idea. Could it feed astronauts and the future Earth? Possibly.
Weird Geological Features Spied on Mars
The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera carried by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has spotted a strange geological feature that, for now, defies an obvious explanation. Found at the southern edge of Acidalia Planitia, small pits with raised edges appear to hug a long ridge. So far, mission scientists have ruled out impact craters and wind as formation processes, but have pegged the most likely cause to be glacial in nature.
Curiosity, Interrupted: Sun Makes Mars Go Dark
NASA has stopped sending commands to Mars rover Curiosity and will soon follow suit for rover Opportunity, Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). But don’t worry, government cutbacks haven’t severed interplanetary communications, you can blame the sun. Read more.
Curiosity’s Parachute Flaps in the Martian Wind
Apart from being a minor curiosity and a lovely reminder that we have satellites capable of observing temporal weather events on another planet, these flapping events may help explain why the Viking landers’ parachutes still remain visible from orbit since their landing in 1976 — windy events dust-off the bright parachute material. Also, the motion of a large piece of fabric on the surface of Mars provides a direct view of the weather conditions on the ground, much like a windsock on an airfield provides pilots with general information about wind direction and speed.
Why a Mars Comet Impact Would be Awesome
...the aftermath of a cometary collision would be a scientific smorgasbord. If we ever needed to be “pushed” to send a manned mission to the surface of Mars, I can think of no better time than in the years after a massive comet strike.
Mars Was a Suitable Environment for Life
The first analysis of powder drilled out from the inside of water-soaked rock shows Mars was a suitable place for microbial life to evolve, scientists with NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity mission said Tuesday.
The ingredients may be there… but was life? Read more
Ancient Flood Channels Cut Deep into Mars
Relatively recently, water blasted out from an underground aquifer on Mars, carving out deep flood channels in the surface that were later buried by lava flows, radar images complied from an orbiting NASA probe shows.
