On Jan. 27, Mars will be closer to Earth than any other time between 2008 and 2014. A mere 60 million miles away, the red planet will be a great target for backyard telescopes, and will appear bright to the naked eye as well.
Every 26 months, the two planets’ orbits bring them closer together, sometimes closer than others. In 2003, Mars came within 35 million miles of Earth, a 60,000-year record.
Observers with a telescope will be able to see changes over the north pole of Mars as the carbon dioxide ice cap is nearing summer and evaporating into gas that affects the polar clouds.
January 26th, 2010
Best Display of Mars From Earth in 6 Years on Wednesday Wired
January 26th, 2010
Strange Places on Mars: What Do You Want to See Next? Wired
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured more than 13,000 images of the red planet’s surface. And now, the space agency wants your input on what images to acquire next.
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera is currently the most powerful camera on any NASA spacecraft. The images it has collected are truly amazing. They highlight how similar the Martian landscape is to Earth in some ways, as well as how otherworldly other parts of Mars can seem.
We’ve collected just a few of the oddest and most beautiful shots. If they inspire you to want to pick the next strange location for HiRISE to focus on, NASA has created a website where you can scan the planet’s surface and make suggestions.
January 21st, 2010
Stereo Speakers Can Levitate Dust for Mars Colonists Wired
Using the vibration from a stereo speaker to levitate dust off surfaces may one day help keep colonies up and running on Mars and the Moon.
Blasting a high-pitched noise from a tweeter into a pipe that focuses the sound waves can create enough pressure to lift troublesome alien dust from equipment, suits or vehicles, according to a study published January in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
Dust is one of the biggest obstacles for long-term lunar and Martian space colonies. On the moon, there’s no atmosphere and no water, so the dust particles don’t get moved around, worn down and rounded like they do on Earth.
Consequently, dust kicked up by rovers and astronauts is “very abrasive and sharp, like freshly broken glass,” said University of Colorado Boulder physicist Zoltan Sternovsky, who was not involved in the study.
December 30th, 2009
Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke Wired
Published in 1958 under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission as part of its Atoms for Peace program, Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin Weinberg. What caught Kirk Sorensen’s eye was the description of Weinberg’s experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium. After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.
November 23rd, 2009
Earth Destroyed By Large Hadron Collider; Martian Questioned Wired
In a stunning piece of astronomical news, the planet Sol III — better known as “Earth” — has been completely obliterated. In connection with this sudden catastrophe, authorities have questioned a resident of neighboring planet Sol IV (Mars), who is known to have made threats against Earth in the past. This questioning is thought by many to be a formality, as most sources indicate that the destruction was caused by a foolhardy group of scientists in central Europe.
November 2nd, 2009
Artificial Intelligence Spacesuits Turn Astronauts Into Cyborg Biologists Wired
Equipped with wearable AI systems and digital eyes that see what human eyes can’t, space explorers of the future could be not just astronauts, but “cyborg astrobiologists.”
That’s the vision of a research team led by Patrick McGuire, a University of Chicago geoscientist who’s developed algorithms that can recognize signs of life in a barren landscape.
“When they look at scenery, children gravitate towards the thing that’s different from the other things,” said McGuire. “That’s how I looked at the cyborg astrobiologist.”
At the heart of McGuire’s system is a Hopfield neural network, a type of artificial intelligence that compares incoming data against patterns it’s seen before, eventually picking out those details that qualify as new or unusual.
September 22nd, 2009
Could a Gravity Trick Speed Us to Mars? Wired
Putting a human on Mars might be easier than anyone thought. A flight to the Red Planet currently takes at least six months, which is why we send robots—the trip is boring, fuel costs are astronomical, and cosmic radiation is nobody’s friend. But NASA engineer Robert Adams has a solution: the two-burn maneuver, an all-but-forgotten secret of orbital mechanics that could cut travel time in half.
October 3rd, 2008
AMC Mines Red Mars for New Sci-Fi Series Wired
AMC is going to Mars.
Hot on the heels of its Emmy wins for Mad Men and Breaking Bad, the cable channel is making its move into sci-fi by developing a new series based on Red Mars, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Writer-producer Jonathan Hensleigh (Armageddon, Die Hard: With a Vengeance) will be in charge of adapting Kim Stanley Robinson’s classic 1992 novel, which describes a team of humans as they attempt to colonize the planet.
August 5th, 2008
The Dirt on Mars Phoenix Lander Contamination Wired
Could the Mars Phoenix lander have been contaminated by bacteria from Earth?
The possibility was raised by rumor-multipliers feasting on an Aviation Week report that the White House had been briefed on “major new Phoenix lander discoveries concerning the ‘potential for life’ on Mars.”
The report has since been retracted, but it raised the prospect, if only wildly, that the Phoenix found Martian soil so habitable because transplanted microbes flourished there. But that, say researchers, is highly unlikely.
Mars explorers have a profound self-interest in ensuring that bacterial hitchhikers don’t confound their results: imagine asking for NASA funding after claiming a plucky strain of underarm bacteria as extraterrestrial life. And if Earthly bacteria survives a trip and then flourishes, it could upset an alien ecosystem — the equivalent of finding something rare and priceless by stepping on it.
October 12th, 2007
I Love Mars, and I Vote Wired
It’s barely 8 a.m. as Chris Carberry stands in the middle of a field in the early morning sunlight, shivering slightly. He’s waiting for Barack Obama, who is due to speak in about two hours. Obama volunteers are wary. Could Carberry be a researcher from the Clinton campaign? Or a dangerous nut? No, Carberry is a motivated man determined to see through his mission: to find out where each of the presidential candidates stands on Mars.
Carberry is the political director of the Mars Society, a nonprofit group that pushes relentlessly for human exploration and settlement of the red planet. He’s the point man for Operation President 2008, in which Mars Society members lie in wait for presidential candidates at campaign stops in the early primary states, then leap out to pop the question: As president, would you send a man to Mars?