Whilst exploring the foothills of Aeolis Mons, Curiosity took a pause to look into the twilight skies and caught an amazing glimpse of wispy clouds sweeping overhead, conditions being just right to illuminate the microscopic ice crystals that make up this special classification (see also) called a noctilucent (“night shining”) cloud.
During the balance of the day, the Martian sky has a butterscotch hue but at dawn and dusk, it appears blue, the opposite situation than here on Earth, due to dust in the air and the lack of an ozone layer. It’s not the first observation of clouds in the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet and they flank the promontory of towering volcanic mountains and have been seen to gather elsewhere but it is certainly an inspiring, otherworldly sight.
Wednesday 22 May 2019
รฆronomic phenomena
Friday 10 May 2019
mars: the ride
Via the always interesting Kottke, we find ourselves transported to the desert hills of the Gobi where a company called C-Space has recently opened a simulated Martian base as an education and outreach facility and tourist destination, with a space-themed hotel and restaurant. Though perhaps more of an amusement park than practical training centre, vis-ร -vis institutions like Space Camp and similar programmes especially, we ought not to underestimate the power to inspire. Browse an extensive gallery of the base and its features at the links above.
Friday 5 April 2019
6x6
phobos and deimos: Martian Rover Curiosity films two solar eclipses, via Coudal Partner’s Fresh Signals
the words she knows, the tune she hums: Elton John guides a television crew through the lyrical structure of “Tiny Dancer,” written by Bernie Taupin
yang-yig: Tibetan musical notation as visually compelling as the sonic experience
amรฉricains accidentels : an association of French residents with acquired US citizenship are suing financial institutions for discrimination
these kids today with their y2k: the epochal rollover on 6 April for the array of Global Positioning Satellites could result in unexpected glitches for the devices that rely on them
stepping stones: the musical stylings of jazz-funk master Johnny Harris
Friday 29 March 2019
8x8
von neumann probes: perhaps autonomous, self-replicating interstellar explorers are destroying each other, accounting for their lack of evidence
bahnhofsuhr: the iconic Swiss train station clock designed by Hans Hilfiker
dactylography: an interesting survey of ancient latent fingerprints and the scientific rigour of forensics
incidental music: a cocktail party version of the main Star Trek theme exists in the Star Trek universe
parclo interchange: the elegant engineering of Japanese freeway junctions from above
a rabbit’s revenge: a further study of the prevalence of bunnies committing violence on humans (previously) in medieval marginalia
breakfast at mondrian’s: studio Brani & Desi translate the Dutch artist’s geometric works to floors and furnishings in a concept apartment
aerography: huge rivers coursed across the Martian surface for billions of years, via Slashdot
Sunday 30 December 2018
jahrgang xxmviii
As this year draws to a close, we again take time to reflect on a selection of things that took place in 2018. Thanks as always for visiting. We've made it through another wild year together.
january: Turkey enters the Syrian conflict in attempts to wrest control in the north from Kurdish rebels. The US government experiences a partial shutdown over a lapse in funding due to a stand-off regarding the status of immigrants that were brought to the US as children by their parents. We had to say goodbye to science-fiction and fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin.
february: There are further advances in private-sector rocketry that seem primed to usher in a new age of exploration. Another school shooting in America fails to get the country to open up to a dialogue on gun-control. The US Federal Communications Commission repeals net neutrality consumer protections.
march: A former Russian double-agent and his daughter are poisoned in Salisbury, England. In China, term limits for the office of president and general secretary of the Communist party are eliminated. In the US, a nation-wide school walk-out occurs to protest gun-violence and weak gun-control laws. Vladimir Putin is re-elected to a fourth consecutive term as president of Russia. We bid farewell to scientist Stephen Hawking.
april: France, the UK, and the US launch airstrikes on Syria bases following a government sanctioned chemical weapons attack that killed over seventy civilians.
may: The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation goes into effect in an attempt to wrest back some modicum of control over individuals’ digital dossiers. Donald Trump precipitates a trade war by imposing punitive steel tariff on exporters with other countries responding in kind.
june: At the G-7 summit in Toronto Donald Trump pushes for the reinstatement of Russia before embarking to meet with the leader of North Korea in Singapore for talks on denuclearisation.
july: A series of climate-change driven heat-waves devastate North America and Europe, causing many deaths and torrents of forest fires. A boys’ football team and their coach are rescued from a cave in Thailand after a harrow, seventeen-day ordeal. Researchers confirm the existence of a subglacial lake of liquid water on Mars.
august: The market value of Apple surpasses one trillion dollars. The US reimposes sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme (having announced its intention to withdraw from the deal in May) while maintaining support to Saudi Arabia in its retaliatory attack on the Yemen.
september: The National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro is engulfed in flames. The Supreme Court of India decriminalises homosexuality. Following a contentious hearing, a controversial justice is appointed to the US Supreme Court, altering its composition.
october: A dissident journalist is kidnapped, murdered and spirited away in pieces at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Canada legalises cannabis possession and use nation-wide. Trump deploys soldiers to the Mexican border to fend off an approaching caravan of asylum-seekers. While visiting his native China, the chief of INTERPOL goes missing and presumed assassinated. The US signals its intent to leave the International Postal Union and shutters its diplomatic outreach offices for Palestine.
november: Democrats take control of the US House of Representative with Republicans retaining control of the Senate. The InSight probe lands on Mars, beginning a mission to pierce the surface of the Red Planet. We had to bid farewell to SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg and social justice warrior Harry Leslie Smith. US ex-president George Herbert Walker Bush passed away, rejoining Barbara Bush, his life partner of seventy-three years, who died in April.
december: The shambles of Brexit and the investigation into the Trump campaign and administration to Russia are ongoing. US forces withdraw from Syria with plans to also do so for Afghanistan and the country’s defence secretary resigns in protest. We had to bid farewell to actor and director Penny Marshall. The US government enters another partial shutdown over Border Wall funding.
Tuesday 25 December 2018
the beagle has landed
Mars, being a world populated exclusively so far as we know by robots, was visited on Christmas Day (sol five hundred ninety-nine) by the lander unit of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express to conduct an exobiology survey of the Red Planet by digging below the frozen surface, an ambitious feat not attempted again until now with the InSight mission’s dousing for water.
The Beagle 2, named after the HMS Beagle that famously transported Charles Darwin to the Galรกpagos archipelago, informing his thoughts on natural selection, had an impressive array of instruments but failed to establish contact with the orbiter or mission control after deploying. In February of 2004, the search mission was called off and the rover declared lost and it was not until another ordinance survey of the planet in 2015 that it was spotted in the spot where it ought to have touched-down. The solar panels failed to fully open, eventually starving the machine of power and also prevented the communication antennae from raising. Because the experiments were to begin upon landing under chemical battery reserves, it’s possible that the Beagle searched its immediate surroundings for some weeks before expiring—which perhaps another passing rover could confirm in the future and maybe reboot the original mission.
Thursday 29 November 2018
6x6
snow globes: a new holiday tradition to us—sending Street View Christmas cards
ammartaggio: a for the nonce Italian Word of the Day in tribute to the InSight touchdown
appellation d’origine contrรดlรฉe: a detail world atlas to explore gustatory landscapes in detail—via Pasa Bon!
condominium: a library straddling the US-Canadian border has become a venue for emotional family reunions for those (we all are) affected by the Trump administration’s immigration policies—via Super Punch
orden mexicana del รกguila azteca: the Mexican government presents Trump’s son-in-law with its highest honour reserved for foreign dignitaries
jantar mantar: an incredible eighteenth century Indian astronomical observatory whose architecture previsions Brutalism
catagories: ๐จ๐ฆ, ๐ฒ๐ฝ, ๐ข, ๐ญ, food and drink, holidays and observances, Mars
Tuesday 23 October 2018
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.
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.
Monday 22 October 2018
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.
catagories: ๐, ๐ญ, libraries and museums, Mars
Monday 30 July 2018
sandbox
catagories: ๐ญ, architecture, Mars
Wednesday 25 July 2018
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.
Friday 2 February 2018
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.
Thursday 22 June 2017
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.
Sunday 27 November 2016
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
catagories: ๐จ๐ณ, ๐️, ๐ฌ, ๐ญ, environment, food and drink, holidays and observances, Mars
Thursday 11 August 2016
yestersol, solmorrow
Tuesday 1 March 2016
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.
Friday 8 January 2016
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.
catagories: ๐ญ, architecture, Mars
Wednesday 17 December 2014
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.
Wednesday 8 August 2012
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.
catagories: ๐, ๐ญ, language, Mars, philosophy
Friday 19 November 2010
flying dutchman or space ghost coast-to-coast
catagories: ๐, ๐ก, ๐ญ, Mars, transportation