Category: Mars

Phoenix is still working hard on the surface of Mars, scraping and digging into the frozen regolith, preparing samples for the next TEGA bake. This next sample to be dropped into one of the eight on board ovens will intensify the excitement for the confirmation of water ice (in abundance) on the Martian surface. The Phoenix Mars lander has been working on the Red Planet for 57 Sols (a.k.a. Martian days) since it landed on May 25th, the robot has pretty much operated as planned, exceeding all expectations (to be honest, I was relieved it touched down in one piece, anything else was a bonus!). But today, the lander releases a stunning image from its Surface Stereo Imager that really brings the whole mission into perspective: Martian midnight Sun…
Continue reading “Midnight Sun on Mars by Phoenix”

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is a stunning piece of kit. It is generating a vast quantity of images, all lovingly displayed on the HiRISE and other NASA websites. New views of the Mars landscape appear almost daily, with technical information on the projected scene, a polished display image, raw files and a little bit of text telling us what we are looking at. So far so good. That was until recently… Generally speaking, articles with compelling images do rather well online, plus I’m a big believer in “a picture speaks a thousand words,” so I jumped on the chance of running an article about some mysterious shapes that have recently been seen on the planet. Obviously the writer of the HiRISE image was of the same mind by letting the picture do the talking and… well, forgetting to mention where these mysterious features were located…. a mystery indeed…
Continue reading “And This Mysterious Mound is Where?”

This is just one of those niggles I’ve felt ever since I started working on Mars projects and articles. How can “Mars soil” be an accurate description of the stuff that sits on the surface of Mars? You see it written everywhere, from NASA to New Scientist, writers have referred to Martian regolith as soil. Why is this? Is regolith and soil that much different? Perhaps I was just getting my knickers in a twist for no reason; perhaps they were the same thing after all. So back to basics, I grabbed for my trusty old dusty dictionary and stopped leafing through the pages at “S”… there, soil. Now for “R”… got R but no regolith (wasn’t that a word in 1980?), just regorge (that isn’t pretty). So I get online and do my research 21st Century style: Google.

I found my answer, but it turns out recent data from the Phoenix Mars lander has complicated matters… apparently the writers at NASA and New Scientist were right all along (even though they didn’t realise it)…
Continue reading “Now we can Call Martian Regolith “Soil” Thanks to Phoenix”