Surfing the Galaxy---Mars

An article published in The AlterNETive Searcher Issue #7


This article is copyright Hermograph Press 1999 and may not be reproduced in any media without the express written permission of the publisher. A single hard copy printing of this article is allowed per personal use.

As I stood upon the bluff before my cottage on that clear cold night in the early part of March, 1886, the noble Hudson flowing like the grey and silent spectre of a dead river below me, I felt again the strange, compelling influence of the mighty god of war, my beloved Mars…with arms outstretched toward the red eye of the great star I stood praying for a return of that strange power which twice had drawn me through the immensity of space, praying as I had prayed on a thousand nights before during the long ten years that I had waited and hoped. – John Carter in “The Gods of Mars” (Edgar Rice Burroughs)

Seems a lot of people have been infected by the ancient God of War recently. And the planet of John Carter’s desire now rides brightly through these spring skies. Mars reaches what astronomers call “opposition,” directly opposite the sun in our skies so that it rises when the sun sets and is up all night. It shines about as bright as the brightest star Sirius, now lowering in the southwestern sky. But unlike Sirius, a brilliant sparkling blue-white star, Mars glows with a distinctive orange-red color. Opposition is also the time in which Mars is as close to us as it can get and thus is not only at its brightest but also its largest diameter as seen in a telescope.

To locate Mars in the sky you can use the Abrams Planetarium Sky Calendars. $9 a year by mail but you can read the text parts online at www.pa.msu.edu/abrams/SkyWatchersDiary/Diary.html. An easy way to locate the planet is to look for the bright red “star” when the moon is closest to it. Upcoming dates when this happens are Thursday April 29th (evening) and Friday April 30th (morning), Tuesday and Wednesday evenings May 25-26, and Tuesday June 22nd. Two Mars’ west (right) is a bright white star Spica, towards which Mars approaches to within two degrees (4 moon diameters) by mid-June.

Mars is also the focus of an armada of scientific robots. While the Pathfinder probe www.lpl.arizona.edu/imp/index.html may be silent, the Mars Global Surveyor is on the job. Launched in 1996, reaching Mars in 1997, this NASA probe used aerobraking—brushing up against the Martian atmosphere to slow it down and make its orbit circular. The primary purpose of the probe is mapping the Red Planet. It will then become a communications satellite for all other upcoming Mars probes. Find out more about it at the websites mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgsu/, www.jpl.nasa.gov and photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov.

One nice result was the debunking of the so-called “Face of Mars.” A popular site among UFO- logists and other pseudo-scientists, the “Face of Mars” was revealed to be what planetary scientists said it was all along, a craggy, isolated plateau.

Coming up are Mars Climate Explorer and Mars Polar Lander. The former will arrive in or after September 1999, the latter at the dawn of the next millenium. The Climate Explorer’s main goal is to mimic the Global Survey but search Mars for water. The Polar Lander will be set down near the Martian South Pole. It is equipped with microphones to listen for Martians winds as well as do other experiments.

A nice general Mars site is “The Red Planet” at cass.jsc.nasa.gov . Included here are slide sets of images.

A favorite for young students are liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/kids/academy/weight.htm, where you can find your weight on Mars and elsewhere, and www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/weight/index.html where you can calculate your age. (For those who can’t weight, er, wait, a Mars year is about 1.88 Earth years so divide your age here by 1.88. Your weight on Mars is about 0.38 that of Earth. Go ahead and do the calculations…you’ll feel much younger and lighter for the effort!).

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