Mssv

Ares Express - I’ve just finished writing the first issue of a new weekly newsletter at New Mars that will highlight the best threads and discussion in the forums, as well as links to Mars news across the Internet. I’m hoping that the bulk of subsequent issues will consist of submissions from forum members.

Bruce Sterling, SF writer, has pointed out that the Gobi Desert is far more hospitable than Mars, so before we ever settle Mars we’ll have settled the Gobi Desert (i.e. not any time soon). He also points out that by the time we have the ability to terraform Mars, we’ll be doing much more interesting […]

How to hit a bullseye on Mars - an article about the lengths the navigators for the current NASA Mars missions had to go to land the Spirit Rover right on target, entering the Martian atmosphere within 200m of the desired point (via MetaFilter).

I haven’t been following the Beagle 2 Mars Mission anywhere near as much as I ‘ought’ to be, but I loved this quote from the lead scientist of the project, Colin Pillinger.
Interviewer: What happens if you find life on Mars?
Prof. Colin Pillinger: I’ll find it a lot easier to get funding for the next mission
Spoken […]

There’s something undeniably romantic about a crescent moon in the clear evening sky, hovering over the rooftops in a scene straight from the cover of a ’50s ‘Amazing Stories’ magazine. Usually they have more than one moon, and the sky is pink, and the rooftops are either a barren wasteland or soaring, spiralling towers, […]

I try to make a point of just reading, not posting to, Star Trek messageboards; there’s some fun stuff that gets said there but I just don’t feel like I have the time or patience to get involved.
However, after I watched the latest Enterprise episode (Anomaly) - which was unusually entertaining and well done, I […]

What Galileo Saw - the New Yorker has a compelling account of the legacy of NASA’s Galileo deep space probe. The article describes the almost fatal problem the probe encountered in transit and the heroic effort of NASA scientists to try and salvage the mission, as well as the unparalleled discoveries it made at Jupiter.

Tonight I saw the planet Mars with my own eyes.
We’ve all been hearing that Mars is as close as it will be to Earth for the next sixty thousand years. Unfortunately, since I live in the UK I haven’t really had the opportunity to look for Mars since our skies have been swathed in cloud […]

NASA’s two new Mars rovers have been named ‘Spirit’ and ‘Opportunity’. I’m just as much for getting schoolkids to name spacecraft as anyone else, but couldn’t they have picked anything more inspiring? It sounds as if the PC brigade had sucked all the life out of this competition well before it begun. They’re not terrible, […]

Never mind the Beagle 2, the Sci-Fi channel is producing a miniseries based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars novel for late 2004. They’d better not screw it up…