Blogs / Bad Astronomy

1) The new Carnival of Space is up at Lab Lemming’s tent, and it’s a BIG tent.

2) Emily has news that Phobos is a bit lighter than previously thought. What a pile.

3) Emily also has some nifty new MESSENGER images explained. I’ve been too lazy to deal with that.

4) Tom notes that HiRISE spotted Spirit on Mars. Massively embiggenated version is here.

4) This is dumb. So why did it make me smile so much? Oh right: I’m a dork.

So here I am, hosting my second Carnival of Space (the first one was over Thanksgiving in 2007). Weirdly, almost all the entries this week are Mars-related. Well, if they weren’t Mars-related, I made them Mars-related. I’m a professional writer, full of tricks. I have semicolons, and I know how to use them.

But first, I want to note that Mang’s Bat Page has created a search tool for the Carnival of Space! It’s experimental, and evidently created by a bat, so use it at your own risk.

And second, if you like these blog posts, then I suggest you bookmark them or put their feed into your reader. You might also check out their blogrolls, because a lot of these blogs do link to other interesting space-related blogs.

So. To Mars! And a wee bit beyond.

Update: three entries for this Carnival got trapped in my mail filter. One is a beautiful lunar eclipse sequence from APOD, another is about using polarized glasses to look at Venus during the daytime, c/o Astroblog, and a third is about regulations and the free market when it comes to space from SpaceCynic. My apologies to all for not getting these in sooner.

Stuart Atkinson at Cumbrian Skies takes a look at the ever-changing landscape of Mars, and relates why we all found the Martian avalanche so intriguing.

While you’re busy standing on Mars and avoiding landslides, you might want to heed Ian O’Neill who, on his blog Astroengine, posits an early-warning system for solar flares that might zap future Mars colonists.

That’ll be useful, since Colony Worlds speculates this week about radiation hazards on other planets.

To make matters worse, at Starts with a Bang, Ethan Siegel tells you why Mars colonies will go thirsty.

Of course, if you feel like taking your chances anyway, you might want to jump on board Nancy Atkinson’s view at Universe Today and take a one-way, one-person trip to the Red Planet.

Perhaps you don’t mind sailing your way to Mars. Next Big Future has just the solar sail material for you: a big ol’ sheet of carbon nanotubes.

A solar sail has to be built in space, and A Mars Odyssey makes the case the building the International Space Station has been good practice for building a ship to Mars.

But who will be the first people to Mars? Reading RLV and Space Transport News, it sounds possible that it may be someone from India, or a South Korean riding a methane engine.

After reading Music of the Spheres this week, I wonder if the first human to Mars will be a woman?

Note, as Emily at the Planetary Society did, that for the first time, we had an all-woman team driving the Mars rovers.

Maybe, on the way there, she’ll hear some Toscanini, which is what aliens from farther away can hear, according to Centauri Dreams.

They’ll have to be careful steering their ship. Visual Astronomy outlines the orbital anomalies that have been plaguing interplanetary spacecraft.

If our Mars-bound crew gets bored, then Out of the Cradle has an anime movie they can watch: Moonlight Mile: One Small Step.

And in a meta-carnival, New Frontiers has a wrap-up of some space news in A Day in Space.

One of these things is not like the other: Astroengine talks about haze seen by the WMAP mission that may be from dark matter.

And another of these things is not like the other, too: speaking of WMAP, yours truly wrote about some new findings from the five-year-old probe: the Universe is 2.746 billion times older than WMAP.

The instant I saw the avalanche image from the HiRISE camera on-board MRO orbiting Mars, I knew I would have a contender for my Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008.

But then they released this one at the same time:

Yeah, that’s us. That’s home. We were 192 million kilometers (115 million miles) from Mars when HiRISE turned around and took this picture. Right away I could tell that was South America’s west coastline… which is incredible. I also was just starting to wonder about the Moon in the image when I read that it had been brightened artificially to make it easier to see; in general the Earth is 3-4 times more reflective than the Moon, so it’s a lot brighter.

The Mars-Earth-Sun angle was just about 90 degrees when this was taken, which is why the Earth and Moon are half-full. Note that in reality, the Moon is about 30 Earth-diameters away from the Earth, so we’re seeing some perspective here. The Moon was a day before third quarter when this was taken, so it was actually a bit closer to Mars than the Earth was when HiRISE snapped this picture.

Beautiful.

This is TOTALLY HAWESOME: an avalanche on Mars was caught in the act by the HiRISE camera.

This picture shows the billowing dust cloud from an avalanche of ice and dust along scarps — sheer cliffs — near the north pole of Mars. To give you a sense of scale, the cloud is about 180 meters across, and about the same distance from the base of the cliff.

Holy cow.

You can see the cliff in the middle of the picture. It’s 700 meters high (2300 feet!) and slopes at about 60 degrees; that’s pretty close to vertical. To the left you can see white carbon-dioxide frost (which is evaporating as spring ensues in the Martian northern hemisphere) at the top of the cliff.

If my (very) rough calculations are accurate, it would take a rock about 20 seconds to fall from the top of the cliff, and would hit the bottom at about 70 meters/second, or about 150 miles per hour. Look out below!

You can read lots more about this on the HiRISE page.

Sidenote: after the disappointing news from HiRISE this weekend, I feel a lot better about this. Totally amazing. I might even say ground breaking.

Update: The HiRISE blog has a more personal take on this as well.

Welcome Farkers! Well, everyone but aerojockey.

Wow, some antiscience claims are so weird it’s a wonder anyone can take them seriously.

Take this blog post about the image here, for example. In just a few words, it manages to get nearly everything wrong. A lot of it is in Japanese, but some is in English:

A man is in the photograph which the Mars explorer Spirit (it stopped transmitting data in 2004) sent.

First, puhlllleeeeze. A man? It’s a tiny rock only a few inches high. It’s only a few feet from the rover! Here’s the image from NASA. As usual for antiscience nonsense, they point to a press release image with no indication of when it was taken, or what the original image is. There are thousands of Spirit images, and I have little desire to comb through them looking for this one (though it appears to be early in the mission; it’s still on the landing accouterments).

Second, Spirit stopped transmitting data in 2004? Well, kinda. It did stop, but then it started again. We’re still getting good stuff from both the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars. The blog post seems to phrase it that way on purpose, to make it sound like Something Mysterious Happened.

Now, I don’t read Japanese, so this may be a misunderstanding on my part. Are they just pointing out something funny looking? Maybe. FWIW, the site appears to be about weird images and such. But I see so much of this, and there is no lower limit to the dumbosity of such claims, that it just makes sense to figure on the lowest common denominator.

Anyway, the image itself is, of course, yet another example of pareidolia, our ability to see patterns in random shapes. That does look like a guy hanging out on Mars, enjoying the 0.01 Earth atmospheric pressure, the 98% CO₂ air, the subfreezing cold, and of course, just being four inches tall. Martians are pretty short, it seems. And patient, given its pose.

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to BABloggee piotr slisz.