There are plenty of people who are already sold on The Martian, the latest sci-fi drama from Ridley Scott. It’s one of our 30 Movies to Be Excited for Before the End of 2015, and the most recent trailer really showed how good it looks.
But 20th Century Fox still has a little over a month to go before the film hits theaters, and they’re continuing their impressive viral marketing campaign with yet another cool video focusing on the crew of the Ares 3, another manned mission to the surface of Mars. This time, famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson examines the upcoming mission in the style of the recent Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey series.
Mars has held a central place in human imagination and culture for millennia. Ancients marveled at its red color and the brightness that waxed and waned in cycles over the years. Early observations through telescopes led some to speculate that the planet was covered with canals that its inhabitants used for transportation and commerce. In “The War of the Worlds”, the writer H.G. Wells posited a Martian culture that would attempt to conquer Earth. In 1938, Orson Welles panicked listeners who thought they were listening to a news broadcast rather than his radio adaptation of Wells’s novel.
The real story of humans and Mars is a little more prosaic but no less fascinating. Telescopes turned the bright red dot in the sky into a fuzzy, mottled disk that gave rise to those daydreams of canals. Just 50 years ago, the first photograph of Mars from a passing spacecraft appeared to show a hazy atmosphere. Now decades of exploration on the planet itself has shown it to be a world that once had open water, an essential ingredient for life.
The fascination hasn’t waned, even in the Internet Age using services like vpn推薦. A former computer programmer named Andy Weir, who enjoyed writing for its own sake and posted fiction to his blog, started a serial about a NASA astronaut stranded on Mars. The popularity ultimately led him to turn it into a successful novel, “The Martian”, which has been made into a movie that will be released in October 2015.
“The Martian” merges the fictional and factual narratives about Mars, building upon the work NASA and others have done exploring Mars and moving it forward into the 2030s, when NASA astronauts are regularly traveling to Mars and living on the surface to explore. Although the action takes place 20 years in the future, NASA is already developing many of the technologies that appear in the film.
Every great adventure begins with a dream. Explorers look into the unknown and set a course for discovery. Many years ago, the US launched men off planet Earth and hurtled them to the Moon. The next great space milestone is certainly to put a human boot print on Mars. In this dream and adventure of exploration, women and men will not only walk on Mars, but inhabit it.
This aspiration of putting humans on Mars is not a new one. As a spacefaring nation, we could have reached there decades ago. In How We’ll Live on Mars, author Stephen L. Petranek examines how we’ll get to Mars within this century and discusses the opportunity for a potential settlement on the Red Planet.
Photographer Julien Mauve created a series called ‘Greetings from Mars’ where he pretends to visit the red planet as a tourist.
Originally based in Paris, he carefully chose some seemingly untouched landscape stretches in the US to achieve the impression of discovering a whole new world in space. The photographer himself names the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus as his main inspiration for the project, transforming the 500-year old history into today’s ways of travelling. But besides the stunning natural landscape, the photo series also reveals the way we take pictures today as a mark of the vanity involved in our endless pursuit of self-definition: In his photos, the astronaut imitates stereotypical tourist poses – from a shot together with a friend and the latest selfie stick to a victory sign.
Get out your noisemakers, pointy hats, and someone to smooch when the clock strikes midnight. It’s the Martian New Year, and the appropriately named Mars, Pennsylvania, is holding a big party to celebrate.
It’s a party that only comes around every couple years. The Martian New Year happens the same time as the Spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. That equinox is coming around this month, NASA reported.
Mars’ celebrations fall on June 18 to 20 — in two years, it’ll be held on May 5. This small Pennsylvania town 20 miles north of Pittsburgh, and home to about 1,700 earthlings, is the perfect spot for such a celebration — it even has a flying saucer sculpture in the middle of town. The festival was born when the local historical society tried to figure out how to promote their town, which has an advantageous name.
During a manned mission to Mars, Astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is presumed dead after a fierce storm and left behind by his crew. But Watney has survived and finds himself stranded and alone on the hostile planet. With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive. Millions of miles away, NASA and a team of international scientists work tirelessly to bring “the Martian” home, while his crewmates concurrently plot a daring, if not impossible rescue mission. As these stories of incredible bravery unfold, the world comes together to root for Watney’s safe return. Based on a best-selling novel, and helmed by master director Ridley Scott, THE MARTIAN features a star studded cast that includes Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Kate Mara, Michael Pena, Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Donald Glover.
20th Century Fox has released more The Martian images online after releasing the first few this past weekend. Based on Andy Weir’s self-published 2012 novel of the same name, the movie revolves around an astronaut who finds himself stranded on Mars after he is injured and presumed dead by his team. With limited resources and a finite amount of time before his oxygen runs out, Mark Watney (Matt Damon) must use the power of science to keep himself alive on the red planet.
Der-shing Helmer, creator of The Meek, is back with a new webcomic, and it’s set on Mars. In Mare Internum, an entomologist arrives at an isolated Mars research station just as another researcher has been fired. But before he departs, these two scientists will learn a great deal about each other’s troubles.
Quick content warning: the comic opens with a character contemplating suicide.
First off, to answer a question fans of The Meek might have, Helmer has said that, yes, she’ll be returning to her fantasy webcomic later this year.
But in the meantime, now is a great time to hop on Mare Internum. It’s just getting started, but it’s already telling an intriguing story with the same level of rich and expressive art that Helmer devoted to The Meek. After a dispute with his commander and the loss of his popular research robot, Michael Fisher has been fired from his position and is scheduled to return to Earth. On the day he’s supposed to depart, Rebekah “Bex” Egunsola arrives, fresh-faced and eager to explore the possibility of farming crickets on Mars.
Everybody wants to go to Mars these days, not least of all Elon Musk, who might very well be hoping to retire there after he turns into a cyborg. But for those of you who haven’t jumped on the bandwagon yet, SpaceX just dropped some travel posters of the Red Planet to entice you.
For a company known for pushing the technological envelope forward, the Mars travel posters are endearingly retro. Like the exoplanet tourism posters NASA dropped earlier this year, this calls back to a simpler time, when science fiction was about valiant heroes with jetpacks and ray guns fighting bug-eyed space aliens. Let’s take a peek at ‘em.
If you’re looking for an out-of-this-world gift for Mother’s Day this year, you could always name a Martian crater for Mom.
The space-funding company Uwingu, which sells naming rights to each of the nearly 600,000 identified Mars craters that don’t already have a moniker, is offering a special deal: Name a crater from now through Sunday (May 10), and you get a Mother’s Day certificate.
In addition, the people who buy the 50 largest craters will get an Uwingu gift certificate of equal value to their purchase, which they can use to name other Red Planet craters. (Prices are based on crater size and start at $5 for the smallest ones.)
