Filmmaker John Carpenter has caught the Mars bug and will write and direct a science-fiction thriller called “Ghosts on Mars.”
October 6th, 1999
2000 Council Asks Students To Imagine Village on Mars Education Week
How do sound waves travel on Mars, and what would happen if music were played there? What would art look like on Mars, since its atmosphere is different from Earth’s? And what kind of government would human inhabitants of Mars need?
October 1st, 1999
What if Flying to Mars was Like Driving to Chicago?
By now, it’s pretty well known what went wrong in the Mars Climate Orbiter Mission: Lockheed gave NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory a computer file with units in the old English notation, and the JPL assumed they were metric. In this case, it was maneuvering data, defining how much thrust was needed out of the maneuvering jets at certain times. The English unit for thrust is called a pound-per-second, the metric unit is called a Newton. So how big is the difference?
September 29th, 1999
South African Children To Head For Mars Panafrican News Agency
Some 14,000 South African school children will make their mark in space later in the year when the exploratory space probe, the Mars Polar Lander, touches down on the “red planet.” The names of the children were collected by NASA officials in South Africa in 1998 and were transcribed onto a CD-ROM which has been included in the craft’s cargo.
September 24th, 1999
Congress remains behind NASA’s Mars missions Space Today
Capitol Hill lawmakers who oversee NASA programs reacted supportively Thursday to word the agency’s Mars Climate Orbiter may have crashed into the red planet’s surface.
September 24th, 1999
Mars Missions: Many Have Failed
Mars has been a major target of exploration since the beginning of the space age. It also has been an elusive target, as demonstrated once again by Mars Climate Orbiter’s failure this week. Overall, about two in three missions to the red planet have failed.
September 23rd, 1999
Experts say Mars failures are worth every last dollar
The temperature on its rocky surface is below zero. At its farthest point in orbit, it is 249 million miles away from Earth. And, so far as anyone knows, there isn’t a McDonald’s restaurant on the place.
September 21st, 1999
Australia Provides Martian Stand-In
Australia’s flat, red, rock-strewn Outback is proving an ideal backdrop for a film starring Val Kilmer about the first piloted mission to Mars. For the past two weeks, cast and crew of the Warner Brothers film “Red Planet” have been shooting in the desert roughly 15 miles from the mining town of Coober Pedy. The bleak, desolate, near featureless terrain has hardly any vegetation.
September 13th, 1999
Mars meets anti-Mars
After approaching one another for months, Mars will pass just north of the bright red star Antares on Wednesday. Separated by less than 3 degrees, the two will resemble a pair of red embers smoldering above the southern horizon.
September 8th, 1999
UI Team To Search For Martian Water
University of Iowa professor and space physicist Don Gurnett has won a $4 million NASA contract in collaboration with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. to develop and use radar in a search for underground water on Mars.