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Mars

Two Briggon Snow Podcasts – Boogieman in Lavender

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Look Up & Roommates – Two Briggon Snow Podcasts Radio drama, the “theater of the mind” is alive and well, in podcast form anyway. Back in the days of “The Shadow” or even the later “Radio Mystery Theater,” there would not have even been a mention of any LGBT people or issues. Not so with modern-day podcasts. Two in particular are produced by actor/director Briggon Snow. “Look Up,” a 2020-21 podcast series from Atypical Artists and created by Snow involves Emmet (Evan Bittencourt) and Lincoln (Snow) in a sci-fi drama. They are two teenagers who encounter each other on the … Read more

SPACE: What Does the Inside of Mars Look Like?

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Mars Core

Like a bruised peach sliced apart to reveal an enormous yellow pit, Mars shares its inner mysteries in the first-ever map of an alien planet’s interior — released as part of three new studies published July 22 in the journal Science. This premiere look at the Martian interior is the culmination of two years of research (and decades of planning) with NASA’s InSight lander — a stationary science robot deployed to Mars in 2018 with the sole mission of studying the Red Planet’s unseen innards. About a month after landing on the flat, smooth plain known as Elysium Planitia, InSight … Read more

SPACE: Could We really terraform Mars?

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Mars - NASA

Almost every sci-fi story begins (and sometimes ends) with the terraforming of Mars to turn it into a more hospitable world. But with its frigid temperatures, remoteness from the sun and general dustiness, changing Mars to be more Earth-like is more challenging than it seems (and it already seems pretty tough). The thing is, Mars used to be cool. And by cool, I mean warm. Billions of years ago, Mars had a thick, carbon-rich atmosphere, lakes and oceans of liquid water, and probably even white fluffy clouds. And this was at a time when our sun was smaller and weaker, … Read more

A history of Martian illusions – Live Science

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Mars

Humans have been seeing strange things on the surface of Mars for centuries. Perhaps it’s because, other than Earth, Mars is the closest thing in the solar system to a habitable planet, or perhaps it’s simply because it’s close enough to get a pretty good look at. Either way, Earthlings have been fooled time and again by the rocky Martian surface and their own psychology. People have at various times reported finding everything from canals to spooky humanoid faces to alien Martian bases on the surface of the Red Planet — though each sighting has been thoroughly debunked. In this … Read more

SPACE: Are Buried Martian “Lakes” Just Frozen Clay?

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Mars

Bright reflections that radar detected beneath the south pole of Mars may not be underground lakes as previously thought but deposits of clay instead, a new study finds. For decades, scientists have suspected that water lurks below the polar ice caps of Mars, just as it does here on Earth. In 2018, researchers using the MARSIS radar sounder instrument on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft detected evidence for a lake hidden beneath the Red Planet’s south polar ice cap, and in 2020, they found signs of a number of super-salty lakes there. If these lakes were remnants of … Read more

SPACE: Did Mars Rover Curiosity Just Detect an Alien Belch?

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Curiosity Rover - NASA

A group of scientists may have just pinpointed the location on Mars of a mysterious source of methane, a gas most often produced by microbes — and NASA’s Curiosity rover could be right on top of it. Methane blips have pinged on Curiosity’s detection systems six times since the rover landed in Mars’ Gale crater in 2012, but scientists weren’t able to find a source for them. Now, with a new analysis, researchers may have traced the methane burps to their origin. To calculate the unknown methane source, researchers at the California Institute of Technology modeled the methane gas particles by … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Ground

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Lot of stuff happening here on Earth. We’ve got all eyes on every corner of out little mud ball and it’s a pretty mixed bag of news. New variants and new launches to the ISS. Tardigrades and Bezos in space. Hell, we’ve even got Disney cycling back to their evil empire ways. So I’m gonna change pace a little and direct your eyes, or thoughts anyway, over to the ground game of two other planets. Yep. Our neighbors, Mars and Venus. Sure, their parties are a little more subdued than ours currently, but they’re still partying. Well, I say subdued, … Read more

MARS: Are There Dozens of Lakes Buried on Mars?

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Martian Lakes - ESA

Much more liquid water may lie beneath the south pole of Mars than scientists had thought — or there may be something going on down there that they don’t fully understand. In 2018, researchers analyzing radar data gathered by Europe’s Mars Express spacecraft announced they’d found evidence of a big subsurface lake in the Red Planet’s south polar region. The lake appears to be about 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide, and it lies about 1 mile (1.6 km) beneath the dry, frigid surface, the scientists reported. The same core research team soon followed up on the find, using the same … Read more

SPACE: A Cloudy Day on Mars

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clouds on Mars

It might look like a postcard from Arizona, but this snapshot shows something much more exotic: the planet Mars, as seen by NASA’s Curiosity rover. The image is a combination of 21 individual photographs the rover took recently to study a strange type of wispy cloud over its Gale Crater home. Scientists realized two Earth years ago that the cloud type was forming earlier in the Martian year than they expected. So this Martian year, Curiosity was watching for the early clouds, and it was not disappointed. The clouds did indeed show up beginning in late January, when the robotic … Read more

SPACE: Is Mars Still Volcanically Active?

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Mars Volcanic Activity - NASA

Evidence of what may be the youngest eruption seen yet on Mars suggests the Red Planet may still be volcanically active, raising the possibility it was recently habitable, a new study finds. Most volcanism on Mars occurred between 3 billion and 4 billion years ago, leaving behind giant monuments such as Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system. At 16 miles (25 km) high, Olympus Mons is about three times as tall as Mount Everest, Earth’s highest mountain. Previous research suggested the Red Planet may still have flared with smaller volcanic eruptions as recently as 2.5 million years … Read more