dark they were and golden-eyed

Our faithful antiquarian, JF Ptak’s Science Books, finds some lush, poetic language in the debate that spanned from the time when astronomer Percival Lowell’s assistant Carl O Lampland described the exacting photographs taken of the surface of Mars by Eugene Michel Antoniadi.

Lampland came by this poetic license by way of an Italian false-friend (falso amico) but the mistranslation sparked a vigorous back and forth about Martians and design that lasted from 1886 to 1909, when the photographer accounts for the optical illusions in the channels that captivated the public and attempts to finally dispel the persistent illusion. There’s an excerpt below in translation but be sure to visit the source up top for more verses and more finds from old books and journals.

Our observations lead us to divide the channels into several categories, namely: In diffuse shadows, more or less irregular, some of which appear double in a fleeting way; In gnarled blobs; In gray masses, shapeless and disjointed; In irregular, thin blurring, in the construction of a hedge of Martian seas, and widen into a vast and confused shadow further on, like new with their tributaries, seen at a great distance.

planetary terrestrial analogues library

The European Space Agency has collaborated with numerous museums and university geological departments to curate a collection of rocks and minerals, BLDG Blog reports, as a heuristic tool for future exploration, reasoning out properties of extra terrestrial surfaces and strata by relating it to more mundane and familiar correspondents.
Jarosite, for example, is a rare volcanic rock that is testament to the presence of water on Earth and was found on Mars early on before any evidence of water had been discovered. The growing catalogue of space-prospectors consists of around forty-five hundred known Earth minerals, complimented with three hundred isolated from meteorites, one hundred thirty from the Moon and about eighty Martian samples.

sandbox

NASA has announced the winners of its assembled in-situ Centennial Challenge competition to design and deliver advanced three-dimensional printed habitats for the Red Planet’s first colonists. The top honour goes to team Zopherus (we were team Marsha, one of the honourable-mentions, pictured above) whose construction concept strikes us as rather like the propagation cycle of a virus, with a lander scouting out an optimal print-area on the Martian surface and then deploying rovers to retrieve building materials to form a host of connected, modular units. Learn more and see conceptual demonstrations of the winner and runners-up at the link above, these picks being the second phase of a multi-year contest that commenced with exploring the technical viability of working with natural building materials (more here) in an arid and alien environment.

canali

Using a sounding technique that revealed the existence of a sub-glacial sea under the Antarctic ice sheet, European Space Agency researchers believe that they may have detected a shallow lake of liquid water beneath the ice-capped Martian south pole. The telemetry gathered by the Mars Express, a satellite laboratory that’s orbited the planet for the past fifteen years is still being interpreted but it’s definitely something and bear the signature of a briny sea, some twenty kilometres across but buried under a kilometre and half of frozen ice.

red rover

Kottke directs our attention to a small but truly breath-taking gallery of photographs that the semi- autonomous Martian rover Curiosity (previously) has amassed in the first two-thousand sols (the measure for the time it takes for the fourth planet to orbit the Sun, slightly longer than our mundane equivalent). It does given one pause to appreciate how sharp and clear these images (approaching half a million) beamed back are and that we can explore an alien world with such a degree of awe and intimacy that we might expect for remote yet very terrestrial terrains.

meridian planum

Though only meant to survey the Martian landscape for a mere ninety days, thirteen years on the rover Opportunity is still exploring the Red Planet and sending back telemetry and some pretty stunning vistas.
This view from the Endeavour impact crater is absolutely astounding, and the twenty-two kilometre in circumference canyon was named for a Canadian township officially, but it is itself an homage to the ship of Lieutenant James Cook’s vessel of exploration to Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. There’s a lot to be said for such technological resiliency and the audacity of a few select engineers is something to respect. Visit the link above for a curated gallery of Opportunity’s amazing photography.

6x6

miracle on thirty-sixth street: the tangled story of the popularisation of Christmas lights by a Thomas Edison hanger-on, via Strange Company

ground level ozone: following Rotterdam, Beijing has installed an air-pollution scrubbing tower that is improving atmospheric quality and reducing smog, via Nag on the Lake 
gentlemen only, ladies forbidden: for a taste of what a Trump administration might mean for America, one should look to his golf resort in Scotland, via Boing Boing

biomediated structures: Martian rover Spirit has stumbled across a landscape that looks a lot like terrestrial hot springs and may be a sign of ancient life

facepalm: an illustrated 1644 treatise aims to codify the universal language of hand gestures

eat an apple every day then see the doctor anyway: an appreciation of the art of the fruit sticker plus a calendar for this ephemera that might encourage healthier eating habits

yestersol, solmorrow

My Modern Met expertly curates a gallery out of the cache of a thousand just recently transmitted from the Mars Recon- naissance Orbiter that really highlights the diversity of the terrain. This dunescape, incidentally, is provisionally called Tleilax, after the fictional planet from the Dune Universe where rogue Mentats were trained in forbidden, machine-like thinking. This alien geometry of the Red Planet is surpassingly beautiful without even considering the unknown forces behind it. Be sure to check out the link to discover more images or explore the entire HiRise catalog.

here there be robots

I am pouring over this highly detailed map of the topography of Mars, deftly executed by hand by the graphic artist Eleanor Lutz, in the style of late Middle Ages surveyors—like the Mappa Mundi of Hereford Cathedral.
“Here there be robots” refers to the landing sites (or ranges) for the various probes sent to explore the Red Planet, echoing the phrases “here there be Dragons” (hic sunt dracones—which only appears once and on a globe) or the more common “here there be Tygers” and the widespread practise of fulling in terra incognito with sea serpents and other terrible beasts, though the surface of Mars seems to be a place relatively accessible to us. The map even includes histories on the place names and a table of geographic terrestrial equivalents, off-world features generally taking Latin nomenclature.

offworld or freemasonry

The always fascinating BLDGBlog reports that a group of researchers have discovered how to create construction materials for future colonists on Mars using native building blocks in an environment apparently devoid of water. Heating sulphur to the point of liquefaction, it is mixed with soil to produce Martian concrete. The resulting bricks are relatively easy, light but sturdy, to use and are infinitely recyclable—in addition to being far less of a logistics investment in bringing supplies from home. Earthling settlers, given the weaker gravity of the planet, might be free to create impossibly ambitious cathedrals to exploration and discovery.

life on mars or gulp and gulf

Researchers are intrigued by little belches in highly localised areas of the Martian crater that the Curiosity Rover is exploring. This venting may be due to some unknown geological arrangement or could be an indication of the methanogenesis of ancient or existing microbial life just under the planet’s surface. Scientists are cautiously optimistic and indeed this is exciting news, but I wonder how an alien researcher might observe our own gassy world.

campus martius or thunderbirds are go

The successful landing of the Martian rover, Curiosity, is an outstandingly impressive accomplishment in itself, but the speculation and wonder to follow are to boast, I think, even bigger triumphs of the imagination and engineering. Despite all the creative practice that writers of fantasy and science-fiction have delivered over the decades, a wonderful range and vocabulary to describe what alien life might be like, the universe is still not granting to humans the license to be prepared or even to not overlook, not recognize it when it is there. It would be equally novel and significant, surely too, if there was no evidence of life, past or present.

 A full complement of sensors and gauges is there to divine for water and peer closely into the soil, after our own biases, and this array of equipment represents the best that technology can produce and ought to certainly find some trace and something unexpected. Not to discount the capacity for imagination and resourceful, but we’ve really nothing of precedent to compare this to—European explorers, perhaps, mistaking the Americas for the coasts of India or dinosaur fossils for dragons, other personifications and prejudices, and it’s hard to hold the human mind to any standard and disabuse anticipations. There may be no shadow or pale in evidence, a footprint or channel, visible, sequences and chemistries may not happen in human-sized time, and it could be a dreamy, escaping contagion, possessing or inspired, that do resemble the supremely unaccountable and unexplainable lunacies that are described in myth and lore and their modern incantations of magical-thinking or science-fiction, like the Colour Out of Space (DE) or the Andromeda Strain (DE). I also wonder about how scientific systems of classification might be re-enforced or upset: would a genus or family be a coherent and valid idea elsewhere? Would like kinds necessarily be present and identifiable, or only individuals or colonies? What would that do for our sense of order and predictability and want to catalogue and name things? Come what may, this mission promises discovery and may show that curiosity is insatiate.

flying dutchman or space ghost coast-to-coast

As the BBC reports, astronomers from the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg have discovered the first exo-planet that seems to have originated outside of the Milky Way galaxy. Researchers believed that this planet, found in orbit around an ancient star in a stellar stream, formed before its host dwarf galaxy was absorbed by our own. These wispy bands of red giants are the remnants of once independent galactic bodies. Nothing yet, as with all distant planets, can be determined about is composition, nor is there reason to believe that it would betray any kind of departure from the imagined and the expected, as if anything could be safely assumed about alien worlds--rather, it is more evidence of the abundance of stars hosting planets. It also reminds me of the Martian meteor found in the 1980s in Antarctica. Without even addressing questions of extra-planetary biogenesis and whether the imprints on the rocks surface are fossils, just the fact that material could be ejected or otherwise shrugged off of Mars and travel through space and be captured by Earth's gravity to be found later by rock-hounds at the bottom of the world, just seems amazing and almost lyrical, purposeful and mysterious all at once.

jamming good with Weird & Gilly

Last week NASA released some photographs of the Martian terrain on sand dunes that look like they are covered with sagebrush.  This, however, is the result of shadows of sublimating crystalline pillars of dry ice frost now that it is spring time on Mars.  Even if it is sort of an optical illusion, it far surpasses the shadow that looks like a human face on Mars or a contrived Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich.  It seems a shame that there is all that unused real estate, by man or beast or sometging unimaginable on the other planets.  The only news on Mars, we would say, is when we send out rockets and robots there, or when those comets hurled into Jupiter.