Happy Valentine's Day...From Mars

 

 

[image credit Phil Plait at Slate, here]

 

 

Mr. Plait tells us:

In general, I would've thought valentine-shaped features on other planets would be rare, but that's because I'm a cold-hearted, calculating scientist. Turns out I'd be wrong, as this collage of pictures from the Mars Global Surveyor shows.

These are all either mesas (raised eroded features) or depressions on Mars. My favorite has to be the perfectly-shaped, light-colored tiny heart mesa at the bottom of the crater in picture R09-02121 at the upper right. It's just adorable … even though it's roughly the same size as a football stadium, and the event that formed it was an impact-generated explosion similar to that of a nuclear bomb!

Anyway, for you and yours, enjoy these celestial images and enjoy your Valentine's Day.  Today (and indeed all days) treat the special loved one in your life, well, specially.

 

More Good "Bad Astronomy"...and Ultrarunning

Another gem from Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy, here, in talking about the Mars Curiosity mission:

[don't feel bad, I can't make out the unmagified Earth either]

Plait says, in some memorable prose:

The Universe is terribly vast, hugely distant, cold and indifferent to us.

But remember this: The picture above was taken by a machine made by humans, and it’s sitting on the surface of another world. It took hundreds of people thousands of worker-years to imagine it, lobby for it, create it, loft it, and land it on Mars. You can’t see that in the picture because the camera was turned the other way. But if you can step out of the picture in your mind and simply turn around, you’d see that rover on the Martian dust, a testament to human curiosity, the drive to explore, and the need to leave the nest for parts unknown.

It doesn’t bother me in the least that the Universe doesn’t know or care about me. I know and care about it. And that’s what counts.

That's why we still need a viable space program.  And in a parallel way, the thoughts expressed here kinda touch upon the why of Ultrarunning--the lure of the unknown, the uncovering of the hidden, the feeling that only you and a select few other hardy souls have invested the effort of psyche and body to reach the edge and find out what you are made of.

Somewhere on Mars....

From the incomparable Driftglass, a post about the Mars Rover, which he points out is "Operating 3,000% beyond design specification...And run by the Evil Gummint."

I, for one, am always inspired by our efforts in space and feel it's shortsighted to cut back. 

Back to Driftglass, who feels the same:

Scientists directing NASA’s Mars Opportunity rover gushed with excitement as they announced that the aging robot has discovered a rock with a composition unlike anything previously explored on the Red Planet’s surface – since she landed on the exotic Martian plains 7.5 years ago – and which offers indications that liquid water might have percolated or flowed at this spot billions of years ago.

Barely three weeks ago Opportunity arrived at the rim of the gigantic 14 mile ( 22 km) wide crater named Endeavour after an epic multi-year trek, and for the team its literally been like a 2nd landing on Mars – and the equivalent of the birth of a whole new mission of exploration at an entirely ‘new’ landing site.

This is what Hope actually looks like: a small helpmate to mankind made by our species with love and exquisite precision, slowing ambling across the surface of an ancient world, enduring so far beyond anyone's wildest dreams as to border on miraculous, and sending back dispatches from the Final Frontier in silent streams of 1s and 0s.

Remind me again how tax cuts and Creationism were responsible for landing this tireless emissary of the human race on Mars?

 I continue to think that something from space--an asteroid perhaps, or actual proof of other life--is about the only thing that has any possibility of altering our headlong rush to destroy this planet and ourselves along with it.