For nearly a century Mars has been the blue screen onto which we project, in scientific speculation as well as literature, two powerful concepts: the West and the Other.
August 20th, 2002
Planning Your Mars Vacation Wired.com
Where would you stake your claim on the great desert planet? Oliver Morton, author of the new book Mapping Mars, asks the experts. Choosing a place to land on Mars should be easy. The planet’s surface area is as great as that of all Earth’s continents combined, and thanks to 30 years of space missions, it has been mapped in bewitching detail. Unfortunately, spacecraft are delicate constructions, and finding a safe spot to land them on rocky ground is a colossal headache. NASA researchers have been nursing that headache for years as they analyze hundreds of sites, trying to decide where a pair of rovers should arrive for a Mars mission in early 2004. Just as they were to make their final choices this spring, new wind modeling data sent the scientists back to their databases. But what if you weren’t constrained by engineering and treacherous terrain? What if you didn’t have to worry about rocks that would gut your lander’s belly, or slopes it would roll down, or those pesky winds? What if you could simply choose any one of the 1,470 places on Mars that now have a name
August 19th, 2002
Mars crater is named after Bend Bend Bulletin
Bend, apparently, has universal appeal. A local author researching a book on the exploration of Mars found that folks with NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) named a crater on the red planet after Bend. The crater was named in 1976 and is located at 22.6 degrees south and 27.8 degrees west on the planet. But don’t break out the telescope looking for it. The crater is only 3.6 kilometers in diameter and can be seen only in pictures taken by spacecraft with high-powered cameras. Comparatively, the Bend crater is about one-third the size of Crater Lake.
August 5th, 2002
China in Space The Globe and Mail
China’s lofty plans to send a man into space are causing a stir in the United States that could, eventually, launch another international space race. ‘Within 50 years, China will be No. 1,’ an academic told GEOFFREY YORK. All it has to do is keep the money coming and figure out the technology. Zhang Yibao, a 20-year-old university sophomore in baggy shorts and oversize basketball shoes, clicks a few commands on his computer. A pirated copy of a U.S. space robot grinds into motion, crawling across an imitation of the surface of Mars. “The battery is running out, so we’re only doing simple things,” he apologizes. Never underestimate Chinese ingenuity. When an aerospace university in Beijing decided to build a knock-off of the U.S. robot that had explored Mars, it knew that it could not hope for access to the space secrets of its American rivals. So its students simply went onto the Internet and borrowed the design from an old photograph.
July 30th, 2002
Orlando Figueroa: NASA’s Mars Czar Gives a Status Report on Red Planet Plans
NASA is shaping plans for the next decade to dot Mars with highly capable robotic craft, including a probe that rockets back to Earth samples of Martian terrain. Recent exploratory talks between NASA and Russian scientists may also lead to joint experiments using Mars penetrators and other devices to expand exploration of the red planet. Space agency Mars planners, however, currently face a cloudy financial picture beyond 2009. But building on the output of data gleaned by spacecraft already at Mars will demand fresh funds. Images NASA’s “Mars Czar”, Orlando Figueroa, Director of the Mars Exploration Office at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. CREDIT: Bill Ingalls More Stories Russia Proposes Sending Team to Mars Water Ice Discovery on Mars May Be ‘Tip of an Iceberg’ Mars Airplane Soars on Earth. Flapping Robotic Insects Could Extend Range of Rover Missions Gearing Up to Harvest Mars’ Water Resource In an exclusive SPACE.com interview, NASA’s “Mars Czar”, Orlando Figueroa, Director of the Mars Exploration Office at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., discussed the challenges ahead.
July 12th, 2002
Book Review: Mapping Mars: Science, imagination and the birth of a world New Scientist
This is a splendid book and a major achievement in the study of Mars. It’s also much more than a book about mapping, as the subtitle suggests. Although Oliver Morton pays due homage to generations of patient sky watchers, the real story of mapping Mars began in July 1965, when the Mariner 4 fly-by gave us a score of grainy black- and-white images. The missions that followed, with orbiters, landers and more fly-bys, provided more coverage at ever higher resolution. As scientists gradually stitched the images together to generate a pole-to-pole mosaic, the complex cratered surface of this world emerged.
May 30th, 2002
Breaking the Surface: How Scientists Could Use Mars’ Water-Ice
On Mars, water ice may be both biological buried treasure and a rich resource for future Mars explorers. NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft has found enormous quantities of subsurface water ice. Scientists using the spacecraft’s gamma ray spectrometer instrument have detected hydrogen in the upper three feet (one-meter) of soil. That hydrogen is believed likely to be in the form of water ice. The spacecraft spotted enough Mars water ice to fill Lake Michigan twice over in what may be a “splash” of data, with the deluge yet to come.
May 29th, 2002
Ice on Mars opens sea of inquiry Chicago Tribune
A NASA orbiter found evidence of a vast frozen sea lying just below the powdery surface of Mars’ southern hemisphere, an icy expanse that could extend from a few inches below the planet’s surface to hundreds of meters deep. The discovery hints at the potential for life in the planet’s past–or even present–and raises the stakes for future Mars missions by offering the promise of cheap water for cooking, hydroponic agriculture and make-it-yourself rocket fuel, all key variables in proposed manned expeditions to Mars. It also appears to answer a mystery that has been posed with every Martian photograph showing dry rampart craters, river outwashes and ancient canyons: What happened to the water? Apparently, a good deal of it is still there.
May 29th, 2002
Water everywhere on Mars
huge sea of ice lies just under the surface of Mars, ready to be tapped by future explorers as a source of fuel and maybe even drinking water, scientists report. It might also harbour life, and certainly explains where some of the water went when Mars went from being a warm and wet place to the cold, dry desert it is now, the researchers report in this week’s issue of the journal Science. “It turns out it is really quite a bit more ice than I think most people ever really expected,” William Boynton of the University of Arizona, who led one of the studies being published this week, said. Spacecraft sent to Mars in the 1970s probably missed the ice by just a few inches (cm), Boyton said. “The interesting thing is, it looks like the Viking 2 lander actually landed in a region that we think probably had the same ice beneath it,” he said. “If they could have dug down a meter (three feet) deep instead of 10 to 20 cm (four to eight inches) they could have found this ice. Isn’t that interesting? They were probably right on top of it all the time and never had the slightest idea it was there.”