Zoom in on Mars
Click on the picture to go to the NASA website, where you can explore a million-pixel photo of Mars. You can zoom in anywhere!
Mars
Curiosity is sitting on a stream bed
The Mars rover Curiosity is driving over a dried-up stream bed. Looking at the gravel under Curiosity, NASA scientists say the water must have flowed about 1 m/s and been somewhere between 10 cm and a metre deep. That’s a lot of water, although it was probably billions of years ago.
Complete Success!
Curiosity is safely down on the surface of Mars, and sending NASA low resolution images. Everything worked perfectly. She can now get on with finding out if Mars was ever friendly for life. The nerds just took gold in the 560 billion metres. La curiosidad esta viva sobre la superficie de Marte, y envíando imágenes de baja resolución a la NASA. Todo funcionó a la perfección. Ahora puede seguir adelante…
Curiosity Landing on Mars
Curiosity, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, will touch down on Mars at 6:31 (BST or La Palma local time). I hope it won’t crash into Mars hard enough to create a new impact crater. Mars is currently on the opposite side of the sun to Earth, and radio signals from Mars take 14 minutes to reach Earth. That’s far too long for the engineers at NASA to…
Diamond Ice on Mars
Sometimes it snows on Mars. In autumn, the snow is probably water ice, and in the depths of winter, when temperatures drop to -125 º C, it’s carbon dioxide snow. The atmosphere is thin and dry, and the temperature drops very fast after sunset, so the snow flakes are tiny, about 7 microns in diameter, like a human red blood cell. In fact, it’s a lot like the diamond ice…
Exhibition comparing Mars and Earth
There’s a great exhibition about the Earth and Mars in Palacio Salazar in Santa Cruz de La Palma until Saturday May 26th. It features scale models of the two planets, lots of great photos of Mars, and explains the similarities and differences in geology, atmosphere and weather, and hydrology. Even better, they have a genuine meteorite from Mars which you can actually touch. The exhibition is open from 9 am…