Showing all posts tagged: Mars
Sending people to Mars will be challenging, for all the wrong reasons
25 February 2025
Maciej Cegłowski’s in depth (deep dive) articles on an array of topics are always worthy reading, even if I’m not always able to consume his pieces in one go. In his latest long form column, he takes on the prospect of sending an Apollo-like flight to Mars, complete with a human crew on board. But going to Mars is not even remotely like a jaunt to the Moon:
A trip to Mars will be commital in a way that has no precedent in human space flight. The moon landings were designed so that any moment the crew could hit the red button and return expeditiously to Earth; engineers spent the brief windows of time when an abort was infeasible chain smoking and chewing on their slide rules.
But within a few days of launch, a Mars-bound crew will have committed to spending years in space with no hope of resupply or rescue. If something goes wrong, the only alternative to completing the mission will be to divert into a long, looping orbit that gets the spacecraft home about two years after departure.
Sending people to Mars is not beyond the realm of possibility, but it will be difficult, incredibly difficult.
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Unfortunately, colonising Mars is not a great idea
23 September 2024
There’s the challenge. There’s the adventure, the pioneering spirit, of setting off to another planet. Not everything is, or should be, easy. But are those really the right reasons for wishing to establish a human colony on the fourth rock from the Sun, Mars?
Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.
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Video of a solar eclipse on Mars, Phobos occults the Sun
30 August 2022
Footage of a solar eclipse on Mars, filmed by NASA roving probe Curiosity. Eclipses on Mars are a little different to those we are treated to on Earth though, with the speed of the red planet’s “moontatoes” making the phenomenon more of a blink and you’ll miss it occasion.
Mars’ moons Phobos (“fear” in Ancient Greek) and Deimos (“dread”) circle Mars every 7.65 and 30.35 hours respectively, a relative blink compared to the 27-day orbit of Earth’s moon. They’re also a lot smaller than the Moon, and considerably more lumpy – little moontatoes, rather than the nice round disk we see shining so argently in our night sky.
It makes me think. If Pluto doesn’t make the grade as a “proper” planet, why should the so-called satellites of Mars be regarded as moons? Surely “captured objects” would be a more apt classification.
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astronomy, Mars, science, video
Not every moon is a moon, most are captured objects
9 January 2014
Here’s a 2010 photo, taken by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express probe, of Phobos, one of two… moons orbiting Mars. But that’s not a moon. And nor is Deimos, Mars’ second so-called moon. In reality they’re merely random rocks captured by the Red Planet at some point in the past.
Take a look at Earth’s moon. The Moon. It’s elegant, sizeable, and spherical. The same cannot be said of the rocks orbiting Mars, a couple of unfortunate asteroids that once strayed a tad too close to the fourth planet. Most of the outer planets of the solar system have moons similar in stature to Earth’s satellite, but they also host a bunch of minuscule, oddly shaped rocks, called moons simply because they orbit the planet in question.
It makes me think it is time to consider what really constitutes a moon. If Pluto can no longer be regarded as a planet, why then must every last rock that has been pulled into orbit by a planet, be called a moon? Surely such bodies should adhere — like planets, real planets — to some sort of criteria before being called a moon.
Being pretty much spherical, and of a certain size and mass, could form basic benchmarks, and anything under a certain size should be referred to as a captured object rather than a moon. Sorry Mars, but both your orbiting companions, Phobos and Deimos, are captured objects, not moons.
Originally published on Thursday 9 January 2014.
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astronomy, legacy, Mars, science