Category Archives: Mars

Mars

The Quest for Mars

Leave a comment

Mars Again… and Again

Mars Rover Spirit Looks Out Over a Low Plateau

Mark and I just announced the fulldome incarnation of our long-popular show MarsQuest—something that’s been a long time coming. The show itself has had several incarnations, beginning in 1988 when we created a show about Mars called “The Mars Show” and it was basically a slide show with a soundtrack. (Why that title? We could never think of a better one, so it kept that name for quite a while.)

In 1996, we got together with a group of people at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to talk with them about a traveling exhibition they were creating called MarsQuest. They wanted a planetarium show, and by golly, here we were with a planetarium show that we wanted to update. After a few meetings, we had a deal, and the rest, as they say, is history. The MarsQuest exhibition has finished its run around the country and is retired to a museum in Florida. But, MarsQuest the planetarium fulldome show is still very much alive and kicking, bringing info about the Red Planet to all and sundry.

It seems that I write about Mars every few years, and people often ask why. It’s simple: I’ve always been taken with the Red Planet. It all goes back to a game we used to play when I was a kid, about exploring Mars. And that’s part of it. As I got older, I read more about the planet, especially when in 1976 we actually landed a spacecraft there.

So, it was only natural that I’d eventually end up writing a documentary script about it. And revisiting it as more spacecraft send back more images and data about this planet. Not only did the game from my childhood spurred MarsQuest, and a scene in SkyQuest, a show we did for the National Air and Space Museum’s planetarium. So the game I played keeps coming back in one form or another.

And it continues. As more Mars images and data come in, I continue to work on other Mars-related presentations. For me, this dry and dusty desert planet is also one of the most tantalizing places in the solar system, and if I were of the right generation, a place I could have once considered exploring in first person.

Mars, planets

Mars-Asteroid Smackdown Averted; Astronomers Heave Sighs of Relief

Leave a comment

A No-Go Asteroid Collision

Well, it looks like Mars isn’t going to get smacked at the end of this month after all. Astronomers are now giving the asteroid 2007 WD5 a 0.0 percent chance of hitting the planet, based on updated orbital information for the wandering bit of solar system debris. The best guess puts the asteroid on a close fly-by, passing about 7 Mars radii from the surface.Being the bloodthirsty lot we are, some of us at the AAS meeting last week were talking about how “cool” it would be if something DID smack into the surface of Mars, especially while we could watch it with orbiting spacecraft around Mars and the surface-bound rovers. I guess it’s the planetary science equivalent of being a pyromaniac (and watching things blow up).

Planetary Bod Mods

Impacts, which we don’t get to see happen very often, are one of the ways that solar system bodies are modified. Worlds can get smacked into, surfaces can be eroded by weather and other atmospheric processes (like rain and snow (and not just rain and snow made of water, mind you)), they can be paved over by volcanism, or they can be disturbed from below the surface (quakes and subsurface activity driven by internal heat).

Mars has been modified by all these processes over the billions of years it has existed. Take a good look at any picture of Mars, like the one below (taken by the Mars Global Surveyor on August 8, 2006), and you’ll see impact craters, or canyons, or the remains of what look like dry riverbeds tracing their way across the plains.

Every one of those surface features has a story to tell about some aspect of Mars history, and we’re just now decoding what they have to say. So, while I’d have loved to have seen the effect of an asteroid smackdown on Mars, I’m not too upset that it’s missing the planet. There’s plenty of “cool” stuff to study already!