Life on Mars: Relocation, Relocation, Relocation!

Every single morning, when my alarm drops a hydrogen bomb into the middle of my sexy dreams, I lie in bed entertaining fantasies of further sleep. What would I do to be able to sink back into the cotton wool comfiness of my sub-consciousness for another half hour? In my irrational sleep-addled state, a lot! So, sign me up for the first commercial flight to Mars because with days that are not 30 minutes, but 40 minutes longer than on Earth, my desperate desire for extra sleep would be granted!

Curiosity Weighs 899 kg

Luckily There Aren’t Any Cats on Mars

On the 5^th August of 2012, the Mars rover ‘Curiosity’ made a successful landing on the powdery, rock-strewn surface of the Red Planet. A part of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, Curiosity’s primary objective is to explore the real estate on Mars and the possibility of humans inhabiting it at some time in the not-so-distant future.

A self-portrait of the Mars rover, Curiosity. #Selfie.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems. Derivative work including grading, distortion correction, minor local adjustments and rendering from tiff-file: Julian Herzog – http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16239

This sophisticated piece of machinery (see above image) cost NASA $2.5 billion to build and is designed to investigate features of Mars’ geology and climate during the course of its two-year long investigation. More specifically, the aptly-named ‘Curiosity’ will be looking for “ancient organic compounds,” according to NASA Ames Research Centre’s planetary scientist, Carol Stoker. This would help us understand the history of Mars, Earth’s sister planet,’ as a previous or even current supporter of life

All of the high tech gadgetry aboard the ‘Curiosity’ is essentially geared to measure the presence, nature and concentration of organic compounds that are possibly locked within the planet’s dry soils. After two years of exploration, ‘Curiosity’ will hopefully have answered our many pressing questions about the habitability of Mars. This could bring us closer, much closer, to planning an alternate future on the Red Planet… just in case we gas ourselves out of our own home in the solar system.

Or, you know, Bruce Willis chickens out of his mission to blow up an Earth-bound asteroid.

Meet The Red Planet! 

Hey, hi, how are ya?

Astute academics such as Dr. Richard Zurek, Chief Scientist in the Mars Program Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), have strong reason to suspect that Mars was once home to living organisms and that the Curiosity mission will indeed yield fruit. The presence of frozen water at the poles, an atmosphere that consists almost entirely of carbon dioxide, geological features that appear to have been carved and shaped by running water and a climate that is not wholly intolerable, indicate that out of all other known planets and moons in our solar system, Mars is or at least was the most accommodating of life.

What we want to know is whether we too could one day inhabit this arid red landscape… and if so, what would life on Mars be like?

Planet Profile: Mars

Etymology: Thanks to its blood-red colour, Mars was named by ancient civilizations after the Roman God of War.

Diameter: 6,787 kilometres

Average distance from Sun: 227,936,640 kilometres.

Rotation period (length of day): 1.026 Earth days

Orbital period (length of year): 686.98 Earth days

Menstrual period: huh?

Tilt of axis: 25° (Earth’s is approximately 23.4°)

Maximum surface temperature (tanning weather): 37°C

Minimum surface temperature (cuddle weather): -123°C

Best view from Mars: Olympus Mons, which is 27 kilometres higher than surrounding lava plains.

Atmospheric constituents: (1) 95% carbon dioxide, (2) 3% nitrogen, (3) 1.6% argon and (4) other trace gases. Methane was recently discovered there, too.

Your Martian Calendar and Climate

Because of Mars’ distance from the sun, 227,936,640 km on average, it takes quite a bit longer for it to bumble its way around the fiery focal point of our solar system. This means that a Martian year is much longer than an Earth year; approximately twice as long, in fact. There are 687 days in a year on Mars. Thanks to the planet’s tilted axis, however, there are still two primary seasons: summer and winter. This doesn’t really matter though. With average year-round temperatures of -60°C (-80°F) you’re still going to need to take a very warm jacket and maybe a pair of mittens, too. There are a few balmy days to look forward to… in summer, the mercury in Mars’ equatorial regions can actually hit 20°C (70°F), punctuated by days of a roasty toasty 37°C (98°F).

In spite of the cold, Mars is a desert planet, much like Tatooine, the one Star Wars’ Anakin Skywalker comes from… wait, hold on… did I just say that out loud? It never rains on Mars’ rust-red landscape and the only break you get in the distant and diluted sunshine is high level, coruscating congregations of ice-crystals; similar in fact to the cirrus clouds we get here on Earth. Bitterly cold winters aside, Mars would seem to be a rather affable place to settle.

Wouldn’t it?

Not always! When the horizon darkens and the wind picks up, it’s time to hit to road, Jack. Mars’ raging dust storms are the most tempestuous in the entire solar system.

In 2001, the Hubble Space Telescope captured the complete transformation of Mars as an enormous dust storm swept over the entire globe’s surface. These storms are driven by winds of up to 160 km/hr and can last weeks or even months. On the up-side, with nothing else to do other than stay inside, this would hurry along the population of Mars…

Martian Tourist Attractions

Once you get bored of admiring endless vistas of red nothingness and of tripping over the legions of sharp rocks that are ubiquitous to Mar’s dusty, empty landscape, you will need to take in a few of the planet’s more redeeming features. Thankfully, there are plenty of those. Mars offers some spectacular natural attractions that make the Grand Canyon look like a butt crack and Earth’s biggest volcano, Mauna Loa, look like a bug bite. Albeit a bad one.

Olympus Mons is Mars’ largest mountain/volcano/OMG-look-at-THAT!! At a lofty 27 kilometres (17 miles) high and an expansive 600 kilometres (372 miles) across, this megalith is three times as tall as Mount Everest, Earth’s largest mountain. It’s also the largest known volcano in the solar system.

What was once a suppurating abscess of death is now a brooding blackhead on the face of Mars’ blood-red landscape. Olympus Mons sits conspicuously in the top-right hand quadrant of this colorised topographical map of The Red Planet, from the MOLA instrument of Mars Global Surveyor.

Photo Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Arizona State University – JMARS

You might also like to include the canyon network in your travel itinerary (see image below). At its deepest, this great cleft in Mars’ crust plummets a dizzying 10 kilometres (6 miles) and stretches in the vertical for 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles).

The Valles Marineris canyon network as captured by the Viking orbiter. Photo Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / USGS – http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00422

Then there’s Mars’ pock-marked landscape to explore. Since craters – evidence of meteorite strikes – are quickly eroded away or overgrown with vegetation here on Earth, Hellas Planitia, Mars’ largest impact crater, would be an especially novel sight for us Earthlings. Oh! It’s 2,300 kilometres (1,400 miles) wide.

A colorised topographical map of Hellas Planitia. Photo Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Arizona State University – JMARS

Mars boasts more than just these mega geological features to “ooh” and “aah” at. There’s the gorgeous orange sky and blue sunsets to admire! And if you ever get tired of staring a red landscapes, you can always pack up your skis and go on holiday to the polar ice caps. This is greatly recommended in winter when Mars’ frosted latitudinal extremities become covered with an additional layer of ice composed of carbon dioxide, AKA dry ice: the most fun thing to play with in the universe! Okay, second only to boobs.

Last, but certainly not least, Mars tourists will be staying up past bed time to admire the night time sky. The Red Planet has two moons called Deimos and Phobos. Their sinister names mean ‘panic’ and ‘fear’ respectively (the tourist guide would never tell you that.)

Er, Minor ‘Challenges’

Life on Mars would be rad and wholly different. The scenery might get a bit samey after a while, but with a bit of ingenious technology, we could definitely make it habitable. There are, however, some challenges one should be prepared to meet:

1. Sub-zero temperatures most of the year.
2. Dust everywhere.
3. Sun burn: Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field to deflect incoming solar radiation. Without a special suit, you’d blend right into the landscape after a few minutes.
4. Dust, like, everywhere.
5. No 7/11’s or Wal-Marts
6. Difficulty looking cool in front of your girl: Mars is littered with rocks just waiting to trip you up. Worst of all, when you do trip up, the planet’s low gravity will make you fall on your guava in slow motion.
7. Giant raging dust storms that last for months on end.
8. Dust in your underpants
9. Dust
10. Dusty dust

On the upside, no matter how fat you are, you’d still weigh less on Mars because of its weaker gravity. This also means that our primary mode of transport could be gummy-bear bouncing.

Class Dismissed: Your Take-Home Message

Life on Mars is a very real possibility. The biggest challenges we would face in a move to colonize our sister planet would be getting the incredible amounts of equipment we need there and establishing a self-sustaining station complete with a renewable source of water and oxygen. But before you start saving your pennies to book yourself a place amongst Mars’ first human inhabitants, let’s not forget just how lucky we are to have the planet we’re standing on. Earth, our Blue Planet. Two thirds of its surface is covered in water, its atmosphere is rich in oxygen and it is the most interesting and biologically diverse planet in the solar system, possibly even the galaxy and maybe even the Universe.

Let’s try to keep it that way.

Home sweet home!

Copyright © Thea Beckman 2015

If You Think You’ve Got Problems…

If You Think You've Got Problems…

Holy Hit!

If you’ve seen the movies Deep Impact, Armageddon, Asteroid or The Land Before Time, chances are you’ve entertained the idea: what would I do if a meteor was on a collision course with Earth? What would happen? Would NASA send out a space shuttle to intercept the galactic gate-crasher? Could North Korea be coaxed into donating its caches of nuclear warheads to the task of obliterating the Earth-bound asteroid? What’s the post-apocalyptic weather like? Will you need to pack an extra jersey?

All of these are important questions. But not all meteorite strikes need to result in global catastrophe, although the dinosaurs would beg to differ. Some are actually responsible for sculpting some of the most beautiful landscapes and fascinating geological features here on our planet and on every planet.

Meteors, Meteorites, Meteoroids, Asteroids, Comets, Shooting Stars… What’s the Difference?

There are more names for space-travelling rocks than Elizabeth Taylor has had surnames. But there is a degree of difference between these names that needs to be appreciated, whereas I’m sure that each of Ms Taylor’s successive marriages was just as dull as the previous.

Comet ~ A comet is (relative to a planet) a small chunk of dirty ice-clad rock that orbits the Sun: think Halley’s Comet or Comet McNaught. When it comes close enough to the sun, blasts of solar radiation send particles of ice streaming off its surface to form a long visible train called a ‘coma’.

Image Credit: Miloslav Druckmuller (Brno University of Technology)

March 30th, 2007: Comet McNaught blazes a beautiful trail across a star-studded sky. The Milky Way, which you can see as a dense streak of stars in this picture, is actually one of the spiral arms of our galaxy. You can also see two irregular dwarf galaxies, known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (right hand side of the image).

Asteroid ~ An asteroid is a small chunk of rock that is also in orbit around the sun. Only, asteroids are composed of rock, metal and sometimes even organic compounds. Not ice. As a result, they don’t get to wear a bridal train.

Meteoroids ~ A meteoroid is, relative to an asteroid, a much smaller chunk of rock. Where asteroids can be kilometres in diameter, meteoroids are no more than 10 meters across, although they can also be as a small as a pebble. Anything larger officially joins the terminological ranks of asteroids.

Meteor ~ A meteor is a meteoroid that has made it into Earth’s atmosphere and is visible to us humans. Remember that one sexy night you spent with that guy in his crappy car, staring up at the stars? Suddenly, there was a brilliant streak of light across the night sky, and then he looked deep into your eyes and said that it was a sign you’d be together forever. And then he dumped you the week after for some tart with bigger knockers.

Yes! A shooting star and a meteor are one and the same thing.

Quick, make a wish!

Meteorite ~ This is where things start getting interesting. A meteorite is, just like a meteor, also a meteoroid (c’mon keep up!) But a meteorite survives its entry into the Earth’s atmosphere and actually makes it all the way to the ground where it causes all sorts of inconveniences for the local biology.

Now, we know that our local biology has been inconvenienced on several occasions by rocks galavanting around the galaxy. But how come our moon is more pock-marked than a pubescent teen and we seem to be relatively unscathed? Where are the big impact craters on Earth?

As it turns out, they’re everywhere.

Earth’s Impact Craters

Barringer Crater, Arizona, USA. Formed 50,000 years ago.

The largest confirmed impact crater on Earth is right here in my own back yard in a small town called Vredefort, South Africa. This appreciable dent in our planet’s facade (a 300 kilometre-wide dent to be precise) was caused by a meteor impact that happened over two billion years ago. This impact crater, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is even bigger than the crater left by the dinosaur-demolishing Chicxulub asteroid.

Take that, Mexico.

“Vredefort Dome STS51I-33-56AA” by Júlio Reis (User:Tintazul)

Arial view of the Vredefort impact crater, Free State, South Africa. Formed more than 2 billion years ago.  – [1]. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

According to the Earth Impact Database, there are:

• 21 confirmed impact craters in Africa,
• 3 in Antarctica,
• 18 in Asia,
• 26 in Australia,
• 37 in Europe,
• 8 in South America and
• 30 in North America (31 if you count Chicxulub off the Yucatán peninsula, but last I heard the U.S. wasn’t very welcoming of Mexicans.)

These are confirmed impact craters, which have met the rigorous qualification requirements laid out by the Earth Impact Database; our official scientific pageant for meteor-strikes (world peace is most certainly not one of them). If we were to consider the list of unconfirmed impact craters, these numbers would easily double.

So you see, unscathed we are not. Our planet is just as pock-marked as the moon. We just have the benefit of plate tectonics, wind erosion, water erosion and a biosphere to cover up evidence of our acne scarring.

Somewhere off the Yucatán Peninsula in a Galaxy Surprisingly Nearby

65 Million years ago, a large extraterrestrial hunk of rock approximately ten kilometres (6.2 miles) in diameter raged into Earth’s atmosphere and smashed into the ocean off the Mexican coast. Sunbathing dinosauritas didn’t even have a chance to reattach their bikini tops before a shockwave so f&*king inconceivable in size and rage hit, I am forced by sheer necessity to use a curse word as an adjective to describe it.

“Within microseconds, an unimaginable explosion released as much energy as billions of Hiroshima bombs detonated simultaneously, creating a titanic fireball hotter than the Sun that vaporized the ocean and excavated a crater 180 kilometres (110 miles) across in the crust beneath. Shock waves blasted upwards, tearing the atmosphere apart and expelling over a hundred trillion tonnes of molten rock into space, later to fall across the globe. Almost immediately, an area bigger than Europe would have been flattened and scoured of virtually all life, while massive earthquakes rocked the planet. The atmosphere would have howled and screamed as hypercanes five times more powerful than the strongest hurricane ripped the landscape apart, joining forces with huge tsunamis to batter coastlines many thousands of kilometres distant.”

– “A Guide to the End of the World”, Bill McGuire (2002)

The ‘Chicxulub’ impact was the catastrophic event that forced the extinction of much of Earth’s biology. The life that wasn’t instantly extinguished upon impact would die in the weeks and months of acid rain, falling debris, plummeting global temperatures, shuddering earthquakes, tempestuous weather and raging wildfires to follow.

Or in the subsequent years of icy nuclear winter.

Or in the years of solar radiation exposure caused by the Earth’s disintegrated ozone layer.

Yeah, sucked to be prehistoric.

Class Dismissed: Your Take-Home Message

Diagram showing the orbits of potentially disastrous Earth-crossing asteroids. The four white circles indicate the orbits of our solar system’s four inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The sun lies at the centre.

Our universe, galaxy and solar system are swarming with lost and wandering bits of space rock. Some have managed to find a gravitational focal point to orbit around and we see these visitors from our vantage point here on Earth with accurate predictability. A perfect example would be Halley’s Comet, which we see once every 75, 76 years. Others wander our solar system far more eccentrically, although the gravitational pull of our Sun and planets do affect the path they travel.

The take-home message is that we, just like every other planet or moon in our solar system, are just as vulnerable to a catastrophic meteorite impact. We are not safe on our little blue planet. We have suffered in the past and we will suffer again in the future. Life here is precious. So make sure you appreciate it the way it is now, because tomorrow you might not have time to reattach your bikini top before a shockwave so f&*king inconceivable in size and rage hits, I will be forced by sheer necessity to use a curse word as an adjective to describe it.

Image Source: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/9332701/Massive-asteroid-to-fly-past-Earth.html

Sciencey LOL of the Week

Sciencey LOL of the Week

Sciencey LOL of the Week

I’m almost certain this kid knew the answer and, at the expense of one mark, decided this joke was too good to pass up on.

For those enquiring minds who really do want to know the answer…

Saturn is one of the largest planets in our solar system, in mass and size. It is known as a gassy giant because of its penchant for Mexican cuisine. I’m kidding. Because it is so massive and its gravity so great, that everything from giant space rocks to gass molecules were drawn in towards its centre at the formation of our solar system, approximately 4.5 billion years ago. If Saturn was just a little bit bigger (“a little bit” being an approximation for a whole lot), the intensity of its gravitational pull would have generated the central pressure and heat necessary to initiate nuclear reactions. And THIS would have made Saturn a star! The same applies to Jupiter, which is also a flatulant giant.

So, in other words, Saturn and Jupiter are failed stars… or that is what my astronomy professor always referred to them as.

Saturn in all its real colour glory. This image was taken by the Cassini satellite in 2004. As a matter of interest, Saturn appears a sickly yellow colour due to the great glittering clouds of ammonia crystals held aloft in its atmosphere. I can only imagine what smells one would have to endure on a stroll around Saturn. Similar to your single toilet after you and 15 of your beer-soaked friends have relieved yourselves, I’m guessing.

Saturn’s rings are composed of orbiting particles of rocks and ice, some no bigger than snowballs and others the size of a bus, according to NASA’s fun cosmology website. Each of these particles, gargantuam and minute, are by definition moons, all in gentle orbit around the giant planet. They share this orbit with 63 other more “traditional” moons, the largest of which is the aptly-named Titan.

While it is unclear as to why all of this orbiting debris has accumulated into almost perfect geometric circles around the planet, the answer is suspected to lie in gravity. Over the many millions of years subsequent to the formation of the solar system (or seven days subsequent to creation), each particulate, snowball, moon and hunk of rock has had the time to settle into a position that reflects, in part, the force of attraction between itself and its giant parent planet. One might suspect that the larger, heavier particles will be arranged in belts closest to the planet, while the lighter and less dense particles will be in belts further away.

And you might suspect this because the force of attraction between two objects is proportionate to their respective masses and disproportionate to the distance between them. In other words, the heavier you are, the more attractive Earth finds you, which is why your bathroom scale groans every morning. You can refer to this spectacular blog entry for elucidation on this point: Gravity And The Laws of Attraction, Somewhat Revised.

This is precisely what I thought, but the picture is more complex than that. Each particle in orbit around its central giant – each particle of dust and each bus-sized space rock – is travelling at a certain speed. And while gravity acts to pull these particles in towards Saturn, they continue along a path that is perpendicular to it, rather than careening inwards. The force that propels these “moons” forward is called the centripetal force and you would have experienced that as a child when you were flung off a merry-go-round, because your douchebag brother seemed to think the word “stop!” meant “faster!”

Saturn’s rings are therefore organised into belts of particles that are travelling at different velocities. I have a very helpful reader to thank for this relevation and you will find his comment below.

And so, this gasy giant finds itself swathed in many beautiful, carefully arranged rings all consisting of particles, rocks, snowballs and moons travelling at varying velocities; trapped in an eternal dance around itself. Here’s something else: so does Jupiter and Neptune! The only difference is that the two latter planets’ bridal trains are thinner and far more translucent and so Saturn, with its ostentatious display, has become the planet in our solar system famed for its rings.

Sciencey LOL of the Week

The (alternative) truth behind crop circles…

Sciencey LOL of the Week

About this Awesomeness…

I met Superman through WordPress blogging. He found my humble blog and decided that he liked it enough to pester me with comments. Those comments turned out to funny and clever enough for us to establish a rapport. Before I knew it, we became Facebook friends. With the name “Christopher Reeves” how could I not?

In an effort to coax me out of my hiatus – which I’ve had to take because I’m studying an online course – he has written this exceptional blog post on the literal awesomeness of the oceans. I loved every word of it and I now reblog it so that all of you can enjoy it. I am tickled pink to learn that my absence is noted by my readers (or at least one of them)… and that Superman took the time to write this brilliant and humorous article, which applies the overarching philosophy of Why? Because Science so very well.

That philosophy is: if you make people laugh about science, they’ll understand it.

Seemed Like Good Science at the Time

 

Mars blows. With so much recent hype and excitement about popping a rover on over to our rusty neighbor, we seem to be overlooking a couple of important points. First, Mars is crappy. It’s cold; the air is, well, not air; and most importantly, there are no attractive scientists actually on Mars. Sure, there are the massively important technologies that we have developed as a byproduct of space exploration to get excited about. Space program spin-offs have given us LEDs, temper foam, grooves in the road, and freeze-dried food.  OK, that last part sounded really exciting before I read it out loud. Anyhoo, Mars exploration could provide a mess of dimly lit, red-desert landscape photos for computer desktop backgrounds. It may divulge powerful revelations about our place in the universe. It might even give us evidence of life on other planets, which would be awesome because, well, ALIENS! But…

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