Category Archives: Mars

astronomy, Mars, Mars full moon, mars full moon hoax, saturn

OMG!!! Mars Will Be as Big as the Moon!!!! (NOT)

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The Mars/Moon Hoax Rears its Ugly Head

Well, the hysterical claims are starting up yet again. Yes, it’s the annual Mars/Moon madness again. Only this time, the folks claiming that the Moon and Mars will be the SAME SIZE OMG!!! NEVER AGAIN IN THIS CENTURY!!!! are claiming that on August 27th, 2014, we’ll be treated to a view of the Moon AND Mars both the same size in the sky.  The stories are accompanied with an image that implies they’ll be *thisclose* in the sky.  The whole idea is so screwed up it’s not even close to reality.   But, before I get to work dismantling the latest flight of fancy about this subject, the good news is that there is something neat to see in the sky that night (and indeed, for the next couple of weeks).  I’ll talk about that in a minute (below the jump).

Mars and Saturn appear close together as dots of light in the August 27th, 2014 post-sunset sky. The moon is a very slim crescent close to the horizon.
Mars and Saturn appear close together as dots of light in the August 27th, 2014 post-sunset sky. The moon is a very slim crescent close to the horizon. (Click to get a bigger version.)

Here’s a star chart that I made using Stellarium for the period of time just a few minutes after sunset on the 27th. This shows the sky with indicators for where the Moon and Mars will be. They are roughly 45 degrees apart — nowhere near each other, as it turns out.  So, that immediately puts the lie to the images I’ve seen showing two Full Moons next to each other (apparently one of them is supposed to be Mars). The insets show about how these objects will really look. The Moon will be a very young crescent (NOT FULL, as is shown in some of the graphics I’ve seen). Mars and Saturn will appear as dot-shaped  objects in the twilight. As it get darker, they’ll look brighter (since we won’t be contending with the twilight glow), but by that time, the Moon will have set. The chart doesn’t lie. You can go to Stellarium, download the free program, run it and see for yourself. It’s easy to do. Where did this huge misunderstanding come from?

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Mars

Mars and Lebanon (The Meteorite)

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Curiosity Finds an Iron Meteorite on the Red Planet

 

This rock encountered by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is an iron meteorite called “Lebanon,” similar in shape and luster to iron meteorites found on Mars by the previous generation of rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Lebanon is about 2 yards or 2 meters wide (left to right, from this angle). The smaller piece in the foreground is called “Lebanon B.” (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP/LPGNantes/CNRS/IAS/MSSS)

I’m just putting this picture out here for you to look at. Go ahead, check it out. I’ll wait.

For some reason, I find great beauty in looking at a piece of asteroid that landed on Mars, and that I can SEE it because of the Curiosity Mars rover. It never fails to amaze me that we have what amounts to a scientifically advanced Web cam on Mars, delivering up scenes like this pretty much every darned day!

This looks like a typical meteorite with a surface that has been changed (heated and pitted) by its trip from its parent asteroid to the surface of Mars. It’s very similar to the type of iron meteorites we find on Earth, right down to the way it is shaped and its gray-black luster that looks almost like a dull metal.

What you’re looking at here is a composite of several images taken (in the center, with circular rings around them) by the rover’s Remote Micro-imager, which is part of the rover’s Chemistry and Camera instrument (which helps planetary scientists study the chemical make up of materials) combined with images from the mast camera that helps the rover give us those wonderful distance shots on Mars.

This iron meteorite fell to Mars at some point in the past and, like meteorites that fall to Earth, it was shaped, grooved, and heated by its passage through the atmosphere.  Areas on the rock that were not as heat-resistant as iron simply melted away, leaving behind rounded holes called regmaglypts. Planetary scientists are now debating just what caused some of the other cavities to form on the surface of this bit of space rock. One possibility is that the rock was somehow eroded along boundaries of the crystals in the rock. Did Mars weather place a role in shaping this rock after it survived its ride to the surface?  No way to tell without picking it up and looking at it. Another theory is that the rock may have had embedded olivine crystals that formed inside the parent asteroid, close to the core. Something destroyed them, leaving behind some of the odder pits on this rock.

On Earth, if we found this type of meteorite, we’d hustle it off to a lab for more testing. But, since this thing fell to the Mars surface, Curiosity will have to tell us the tale, and astronomers will have to diagnose this from a distance. It’s a pretty cool discovery, and is actually the first for Curiosity. The Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity have each discovered meteorites, too. Mars appears to be a treasure trove of these space rocks!