Mars is a lot like Earth in some ways. Sure it’s a barren desert planet now, whereas Earth is not. But, like Earth, it has seasonal changes, and if you look at some of its landforms, they look disturbingly familiar. Take this image that the Mars Curiosity rover sent back.
This panorama is a mosaic of images taken by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on the NASA Mars rover Curiosity while the rover was working at a site called “Rocknest” in October and November 2012. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. Click to enlarge.
Looks a lot like some places here on Earth, doesn’t it? You can see mountains off in the distance (actually part of the crater that the spacecraft landed in), and lots of sand dunes and rock outcrops nearby. When I see a picture like this, I want to go on a geology field trip — which is what Curiosity is doing for us!
The folks at the European Space Agency have a mission called Mars Express, and it’s doing a bang-up job of sending back high resolution images of Mars from orbit.
A High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) nadir and colour channel data taken during revolution 10778 on 18 June 2012 by ESA’s Mars Express have been combined to form a natural-colour view of Charitum Montes. The heavily cratered region in this image is at the edge of the almost 1,000-km-long mountain range, which itself wraps around the boundary of the Argyre impact basin, the second largest on Mars. Courtesy ESA.
The whiter-looking regions here are covered with something most of us are familiar with if we live in climates where winter brings snow and cold weather: frost. In this case, it’s carbon dioxide frost, which forms when the atmosphere gets cold enough to freeze it into particles of ice that coat the ground.
Wondering how cold it is on Mars? It has a very thin atmosphere, so even though Mars does get sunlight, the temps on the ground are pretty darned cold, usually well below zero (-55 C or -67 F for an average). At its coldest, Mars temps can plunge down to -110 C (-170 F). I’ve seen suggestions that Mars temperatures can rise above zero on warm summer days; how far they rise depends on the local heating and how much sunlight the ground is getting.
There are more cool images of this cratered region at the link above. They show just how rugged the terrain of Mars is, and remind us that some worlds can look (and sometimes feel) just like home, even if they’re more than 100 million kilometers apart right now!
Life here on Earth is pretty fascinating. There are so many different kinds of life, and so many different places it can thrive, from the oceans to the mountaintops to the deserts. We can probably be forgiven (us humans) for thinking that Earth is just about the only place where it can do so. That’s understandable… we once thought we were the pinnacle of creation and that Earth was ours to do with what we wanted. And, our planet bears the scars of activities engendered by that kind of thinking.
But, we’re wising up and figuring out that life can exist in all kinds of places and they don’t have to be on our planet. Take Mars, for example. If you’ve been following any of the Mars missions put on or near the planet by any of several countries over the past few decades, you can’t have missed how much some of its landscapes remind us of places here on Earth.
Mars in all its glory. Courtesy STScI/NASA.
Places where life exists on our planet. Some of them are pretty darned inhospitable places to us as humans, but perfectly acceptable paradises for other forms of life. Take the Antarctic, for example, or the relentlessly hot salt pans in Tunisia, or the Rio Tinto where the environment is corrosively acidic. In all these places, life can be found. These, and other spots such as the Utah desert, Devon Island in the Arctic, and the volcanic slopes of Mauna Kea in Hawai’i are among the many places where scientists do research to understand the conditions where life can flourish.
For Mars, scientists visit all kinds of places to study “Mars analogs”, those places that seem Mars-like here on Earth. Groups such as the Centro de Astrobiologica in Madrid range around the planet doing cutting-edge research on life’s origins and ability to withstand conditions that would give humans second thoughts about living in such areas.
I’ve often flown over the deserts of the southwest U.S. and thought to myself, “take away the plants, chill down the atmosphere, and this place could be Mars”. Same with Hawai’i, where I did some graduate field study in Mars analog conditions. So, it’s natural to me that our home planet would help us understand more about places like Mars. And, in the reverse, that Mars may very well help us understand how life on our own planet evolved and adapted. It’s an ongoing planetary exploration story that’s going on right here on the home planet. Stay tuned!
Research Begins Here at Home, Too.
Final Day for Crowdsourcing Research Fund Drive
Uwingu, crowd-sourced science research.
Speaking of research here at home, the final countdown has begun for Uwingu’s fundraising campaign over at Indiegogo. The deadline for contributions is midnight tonight (Monday, September 24th) Pacific Daylight Time.
This project is the brain-child of my friend Alan Stern and several well-known planetary scientists and outreach educators. They’ve banded together to create a cool project that will help fund ongoing science research that isn’t being funded today due to budget shortfalls in the U.S. They’ll also be funding outreach projects to help bring the next generation of scientists up to speed as they proceed through elementary, high school and college.
It’s an admirable effort and I’ve donated to the cause because I am a science outreach type myself and I can see what the Uwingu folks are trying to do is of great intrinsic value. Plus, the money’s spent right here on Earth, helping us grow our understanding of the cosmos.
If you’ve got the cost of a trip to your favorite coffee shop available, or can spare the equivalent of a couple of movie tickets or a computer game or even more, consider sending it to Uwingu. You’ll be eligible for some cool perks, although the best one will be simply the satisfaction of knowing you made a difference in science research. THAT’s seriously cool.
I heard from co-founder Alan Stern that he’s going to be on Coast-to-Coast from 10 p.m. to midnight (PDT) tonight during the final countdown to the campaign’s end, sharing his insights with everyone about science research and how important it is to all of us. So, it could get pretty exciting at the last moment!
