Posts tagged with ‘mars’

Curiosity makes a giant dick and balls on the surface of Mars. NASA you so crazy.

White-balanced photo of Mount Sharp on Mars looks like it could have come out of the American southwest

This mosaic of images from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity shows Mount Sharp in a white-balanced color adjustment that makes the sky look overly blue but shows the terrain as if under Earth-like lighting. White-balancing helps scientists recognize rock materials based on their experience looking at rocks on Earth. The Martian sky would look more of a butterscotch color to the human eye. White balancing yields an overly blue hue in images that have very little blue information, such as Martian landscapes, because the white balancing tends to overcompensate for the low inherent blue content.

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Mars is populated by a single giant thinking vegetable

The Giant All-Seeing Eyeball was hoisted high in the Tribune, given supposed life by the very highly capable astronomer W.W. Campbell (1862-1930, with his biography here at the National Academy of Science), who is quoted by the paper as being the source of this preposterous theory. Campbell was not pleased by this—not at all. And I can well imagine why.

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This is what Mars might look like if it had oceans and an Earth-like atmosphere

Created by software engineer Kevin Gill, using information from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

NASA’s Curiosity rover uses its brush to wipe a section of the Martian surface clean of dust

In order to try and get a certain amount of Martian soil samples as dust free as possible, Curiosity is equipped with a wire brush that scrubs red dust from rocks to get a better look at what’s underneath. A couple days ago, Curiosity tried its brush for the first time on a section of flat rock, and this is what that rock looks like under the red Martian soil.

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Gorgeous photo of the grandest canyon in the solar system

Grand Canyon, meet your match—and then some. Mars’s Valles Marineris (shown in a false-color composite picture released October 22 by the German Aerospace Centre) is the largest canyon system in the solar system.

Stretching across the equatorial Martian highlands for some 2,485 miles (4,000 kilometers), Valles Marineris yawns 124 miles (200 kilometers) wide and up to 6.8 miles (11 kilometers) deep. Earth’s 1.25-mile-deep (2-kilometer-deep) Grand Canyon could easily fit into one of Valles Marineris’s smaller side valleys.

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