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An Avalanche On Mars

Here’s the most violent event ever observed on Mars, tons of rock, dust and ice plummeting down a 700-meter cliff at 15 meters per second. It’s one of four avalanches the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars orbiter observed on the north polar scarps of Mars. The white material at the … Continued

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Sulfuric Acid Floods Created Martian “Grand Canyon”

Unusual fan-shaped features cut into the Martian surface were caused by sulfuric acid “water” exploding from underground and sweeping across the surface of the planet. Yesterday a team of European and US scientists announced this finding, which is based on satellite data from a European Space Agency satellite in orbit around the Red Planet. Want … Continued

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Looking for Life on Mars with the Next Generation Rover

Definitely one of the coolest symposia at AAAS was the one this afternoon devoted to the Martian rovers — past, present, and future. On the panel were NASA’s Richard Cook, who helped design Spirit and Opportunity as well as the next Martian rover; Steven Squyres, a Cornell geologist who has been working with Spirit and … Continued

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Mars Busts Out In 3-D

Here’s an orthoimage of the famous Olympus Mons on Mars, with the different colors representing different elevations. It’s just a taste of the 3-D goodness to come. The European Space Agency is getting ready to release a new high-resolution Digital Terrain Model dataset that will let researchers build their own 3-D models of Mars’ topography. … Continued

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Meet The Man From Mars

Is that a little man on Mars in this picture from NASA’s Mars Spirit explorer? We didn’t even bother to blog this image when we saw it the other day, but tons of British newspapers have seized on it. Sample headline: “Crikey! There’s A Little Green Man On Mars!” Actually, my favorite is the one … Continued

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Dust Devils Of Mars

The Martian wind has cut deep crevasses into this crater in the Terra Cimmeria region. The edges of these dunes look sort of like fins in this new image from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. But the fins are actually double “horns” where the wind from the East hit the dunes. You … Continued

Tech News

New Worlds To Radically Alter (1981)

The 1981 book Out into Space (World of Tomorrow) by Neil Ardley features this image of Venus, “bombarded with containers of plants that will begin to change its atmosphere into oxygen, which people can breathe.” An excerpt from the children’s book appears below. Plans have been proposed to change Mars and Venus, the nearest planets, … Continued

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Santa Claus vs. Neo in the Martian Matrix

The 1964 holiday film Santa Claus Conquers The Martians has the distinction of constantly being named one of the worst films ever made. It also contains the acting debut of Pia Zadora, although that may be unrelated to its critical status. Instead this film was all about bringing “freedom” to poor Martian children who have … Continued

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Mars, Up Close And Glowing

Mars came its closest to Earth in years last night. The Hubble Space Telescope snapped this image using a series of exposures over 36 hours, when Mars was just 55 million miles away. If this image gets you all fired up, you can discuss Mars with Ray Bradbury and (maybe) Arthur C. Clarke at a … Continued

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Martian Spiders Launch Dark Jets

New images give clues to the reasons for the “spiders” and “dark fans” that appear on Mars’ south pole every spring. Sunlight filters through the layer of dry ice covering the pole and turns the bottom layer to gas. The gas forms spider-shaped channels trying to escape the ice, and then erupts in fan-shaped jets … Continued

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More Evidence for Water on Mars

Spirit, one of the Mars rovers, accidentally kicked up some dust with its unsteady wheel the other day, and revealed a possible history of water-saturated land on Mars. The wheel-kick laid bare some white sand deposits whose mineral composition is nearly pure silica — the kind of thing normally left behind by hot springs. Image … Continued

io9Television

Class War Between Mars And Venus

A new web TV show could pick up where Firefly left off, telling gritty stories of class warfare on human colonies. Venus Rises is filming now in New Jersey. Four episodes will be available next year on national video-on-demand cable channel Illusion TV as well the show’s own site. One glance at the first episode’s … Continued

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Building An Ice Castle On Mars

Martian architecture will have to be different from any existing styles on Earth, say 53 percent of respondents in this poll at NewMars. But weirdly, 15 percent believe that we’ll build in “a mixture of Greek and Roman style” on Mars. And another 9 percent each believe we’ll build in an “Egyptian” or “Celtic” style. … Continued

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Witness The Evidence For Life On Mars

This Martian meteorite, which goes on display today at the Natural History Museum in London, crashed in Egypt nearly a hundred years ago. It was part of the great Martian rockfall of 1911, which started with the appearance of a cloud and some detonations. Local residents were terrified when they were hit with a rain … Continued

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Wind Power Sucks But Brain Damage Is Okay

I’ve got some good science news for you, and some bad. Wind power may not be a clean energy source of the future after all. Though Sweden has just built a massive wind farm at sea, most countries have found wind an inefficient and unreliable energy source. [New York Times] Why brain damage is okay … Continued

Tech NewsGadgets

MARS Programme Simulates Living on the Red Planet Here on Earth

We might not be all that close to sending a manned mission to Mars, but that isn’t stopping people from preparing for the journey. The Mars Analogue Research Station (MARS) Programme sets up simulations of the Martian atmosphere here on Earth, allowing people to “test out protocols and procedures that will be required for human … Continued

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Mars Astronauts Will Have Smooth Moves

The first astronauts on Mars will most likely wear smoking fetish gear that draws on the designs of MIT professor Dava Newman. Time magazine just named her ultralight BioSuit one of the top 100 inventions of the year. The current generation of spacesuits weighs up to 300 pounds, thanks to gas pressurization, life support and … Continued

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Humans To Reach The Moon – Of Mars – In Ten Years?

Proving that the space race isn’t entirely dead, scientists have announced that while manned missions to Mars may still be some time away, manned missions to Mars’ moons could happen within the next decade According to Pascal Lee of the Mars Institute: They are the most accessible planetary bodies in our solar system. It’s counterintuitive, … Continued

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New Images Show An Ancient Lake Bed On Mars

It’s easy to believe there was water on Mars when you can see the evidence so vividly. The high-resolution camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (known as HiRISE) has finally started sending color images, and the results are startling. In the image to the left, you can see the dark basaltic sand, and patterns … Continued

io9Books & Comics

Space Is More Fun Without Space Travel

The end of the Space Age was the best thing that ever happened to science fiction, claims author Gerard J. DeGroot: When the space age ended, the alien age began. In the early 1990s, the Disney Corporation decided to close down its Mission to Mars ride, itself a direct descendant of the Rocket to the … Continued