The two moons of Mars
July 26th, 2003
Pictures from Mars are out of this world Casa Grande Dispatch
Although impressionistic in a rudimentary way, upon second glance, the scratches begin to take form, suggesting that the artist might have been trying to depict a variety of animal life. Looking at something like this is not unlike gazing at cloud formations and envisioning all sorts of heavenly sculpture. The image in the upper left-hand corner, for example, appears to be that of a parrot holding a large seed in his beak. Just below that, one could perceive the curved lines to be the outline of a tortoise, and below that, a pair of gophers or prairie dogs seem to be playfully running toward one another.
July 25th, 2003
Martian warm spots could be towers of ice New Scientist
Unusual warm spots on Mars might represent “ice towers” similar to those seen in Antarctica, say researchers. They could even harbour life, Nick Hoffman of Melbourne University told a conference on Thursday. Hoffman detected warm spots in the Hellas Basin after scrutinising infrared images taken with THEMIS, the heat-sensing camera on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. The spots are between 20 and 40 degrees warmer than their surroundings both night and day, and irrespective of whether they are being hit by sunlight.
July 24th, 2003
Los Alamos releases new maps of Mars water Los Alamos National Laboratory
Breathtaking” new maps of likely sites of water on Mars showcase their association with geologic features such as Vallis Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system. The maps detail the distribution of water-equivalent hydrogen as revealed by Los Alamos National Laboratory-developed instruments aboard NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft. In an upcoming talk at the Sixth International Conference on Mars at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, Los Alamos space scientist Bill Feldman and coworkers will offer current estimates of the total amount of water stored near the Martian surface. His presentation will be at 1:20 p.m., Friday, July 25.
July 12th, 2003
Mars: Winds of Change Astrobiology Magazine
The successful launches of the two new Mars missions–Spirit and Opportunity–will help to answer questions about the fate of water on the red planet. The debates go back to the first views from the 1976 Viking landers: if water shaped the Earth, wind may have shaped Mars.
July 9th, 2003
Mars Dust
Something is happening on Mars and it’s so big you can see it through an ordinary backyard telescope. On July 1st a bright dust cloud spilled out of Hellas Basin, a giant impact crater on Mars’ southern hemisphere. The cloud quickly spread and by the Fourth of July was 1100 miles wide–about one-fourth the diameter of Mars itself.
July 8th, 2003
Mars team heads to Arctic volcano
Researchers with NASA are looking to the land of the midnight sun to study the red planet, heading to the remote Svalbard Islands next month to test future Mars probes in its barren, frozen climate. The Arctic Svalbard archipelago shares several features of Mars’ environment, such as permafrost, volcanoes and hot springs, the expedition’s leader, Norwegian geologist Hans E.F. Amundsen, told The Associated Press Monday.
June 26th, 2003
Mars Odyssey Orbiter Watches a Frosty Mars
NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft is revealing new details about the intriguing and dynamic character of the frozen layers now known to dominate the high northern latitudes of Mars. The implications have a bearing on science strategies for future missions in the search of habitats. “Once the carbon-dioxide layer disappears, we see even more water ice in northern latitudes than Odyssey found last year in southern latitudes,” said Odyssey’s Dr. Igor Mitrofanov of the Russian Space Research Institute (IKI), Moscow, lead author of a paper in the June 27 issue of the journal Science. “In some places, the water ice content is more than 90 percent by volume,” he said. Mitrofanov and co-authors used the changing nature of the relief of these regions, measured more than 2 years ago by the Global Surveyor’s laser altimeter science team, to explore the implications of the changes.
June 5th, 2003
Mars More Environmentally Active than Expected
A year’s worth of observations by NASA’s Odyssey spacecraft paint a new picture of a more dynamic Martian surface than expected, coupled with what seems to be a changing environment. Preliminary analysis of data from Odyssey’s Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) show that different layers of the planet, including some lava flows, must have been deposited under varying environmental conditions through time. Further, the red planet’s surface bedrock varies significantly in thickness, the data reveal. It is exposed in some spots, and in other regions it’s buried for thousands of square miles by thick layers of dust.
May 13th, 2003
Image of the Day: Possible Former Lake on Mars
This Mars Global Surveyor image, acquired in March and released last week, shows dozens of repeated layers of sedimentary rock in a western Arabia Terra crater. Wind has sculpted the layered forms into hills somewhat elongated toward the lower left (southwest). The dark patches at the bottom (south) end of the image are drifts of windblown sand. These sedimentary rocks might indicate that the crater was once the site of a lake — or they may result from deposition by wind in a completely dry, desert environment, said scientist at Malin Space Science Systems, which operates the Mars Orbiter Camera aboard the orbiting spacecraft.