A Couple of Oddities on Mars

Post # 91

      Ever since an astronomer wrongly thought he saw canals on Mars, the Red Planet has mystified everybody.  As late as the early 1970's it was still taught as fact in the schools that Mars had canals, although they were adamant that there was no life on Mars.  Once the pair of Voyagers got there and took a whole bunch of pictures most people knew that the planet was dry and lifeless.  To many others though, and to Hollywood and the world of literature, the damage was done.  In their wee little collective cranium Mars was full of Martians - sometimes scary, and once in a while, mild, friendly, or benevolent.

The War of the Worlds - the 1950's version.  That movie scared the crap out of me when I was a kid.  

The recent remake of War of the Worlds, starring Tom Cruise.  Great special effects, and an overall intense film.  

                                             My Favorite Martian - a 1960's sit com

      Actually the world of Sci-Fi has lost their imagination when it comes to Mars.  While they have gotten great in the rest of the realm of outer space, most filmed or written on Mars is just a rehashing of previous hits.  You have to admit though that due to modern special effects these remakes are pretty cool. 

John Carter on Mars - a modern rendition from the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic from the Barsoom Series

      Maybe the romance with the red planet is due to the fact that it is such a close neighbor that with the naked eye we can see it's color.  On those rare years when its closest approach is even closer, you can almost see its ice caps.  Or maybe it all started many ages past when it was associated with its namesake - the Roman war god. 

      After all those Rovers went there and sent back a multitude of cool pictures people have gotten intersted in Mars again.  At least the realm of Geekdom have anyway.  Some of the pictures were taken on sunny days (with no windstorms/sandstorms) and the sky has an undeniable bluish tint.  Other pictures show the routine dusty haze of iron oxide rich dirt (here on Terra Firma when we hold a handful of dirt or describe dirt we call it earth, and we call things made of dirt "earthen."  We also call the colors of dirt "earthen."  We couldn't say that on Mars.  It just wouldn't be right).  The picture below called by NASA "A Rusty Sunset on Mars" shows that normal earth rich mars rich dust, but the thing that makes this picture so other worldly (besides the fact that it is in fact from another world) is that the sun looks too small. It looks half the size it should be at sunset.  Well, it should look half the size, because it is almost twice as far away from the sun as the Earth is. 

      NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive has a lot of great pictures taken by the Rovers showing an almost New Mexico/Arizona looking landscape.  If you install Google Earth, you also get Google Sky, and Google Mars.  There you can see many strange features if you zoom in.  It is some of those features I will write about tonight.
      First up are a couple of pictures showing that huge crack running across the planet.  If you take notice you will see that this crack goes about a third of the way around the globe.

      Some astronomers think this was caused by an impact from a monster asteroid.  According to their theories, it came in at a very low trajectory, hit the planet and ricocheted back out into space.  It was so big that it could have blown the planet into pieces and created another part to the asteroid belt.
      Many scientists agree that there must have been an atmosphere, and even water on the planet.  When Mars cracked open much of its molten core spilled out.  This caused the core to cool considerably.  Without a huge liquid core Mars lost its magnetosphere.  Without a magnetosphere the solar winds continuously blow Mars' atmosphere out into space.  It gets thinner and thinner, and one day there will be no atmosphere of any kind left on the planet.
      In accordance to the impact theory, an impact like that would have vaporized most of the planet's water, however much it may have had.  With most of the planet being comprised of iron, the rest of the water would have gone into the soil during the formation of iron oxide.  That also tells us that there was at one time a lot of oxygen, but again, during the formation of that much rust,......
      The next series of pictures is adored by conspiracy theorists and other weird people.  Forget the so called "Face of Elvis."  This feature is officially called "The Incan Ruins," because it looks so much like the ruins of some ancient city.  It looks a lot like the foundations of a bunch of squarish buildings all stuck together. 

      To me personally, I think they look more like the foundations of a city like Catal Hoyuk, or Asikli Hoyuk.  The ridges that look like foundations are all stuck together in a big clump.  The official explanation is that they were caused by wind.  Well, I don't know about you, but I've never seen wind create something like square ridges.  Honestly, I have no real answer for what I think caused them.  They are just plain weird.  The imagination side of my brain goes off the deep end, and makes suggestions that are so outlandish, that I would not want to write them down - unless, of course I never wanted to have anyone ever take me seriously again.  All I can say for sure is that they are very cool, and I have no freaking idea what they are, or how they got there. The longer I look at them I expect to see Rod Serling pop out around the corner and start talking about them.

      Mars has a myriad of other features that boggle the mind.  It boasts the tallest mountain so far observed anywhere in the solar system, and it happens to also be a volcano.  There are some features, that at just the right resolution look like forests of some alien kind of tree, but are actually rock and black dirt formations.  There is a series of large boulders, rounded by the continual battering from sandstorms that some people think look like the houses on a place like Tatooine.  The Rovers have witnessed giant rocks that appear to move hundreds of yards, and leave a trail behind them in the dust.  They are not self ambulatory, but rather, they slide across the ground on the nightly frost that forms.
      I'd like to say, it is a cool and mysterious place, you should visit it some time, like Rich Steves would say, but that's not really possible right now.  Besides, our present technology is too primitive to make it possible for a weekend getaway, or even a place to go for a fortnight.  Our ships are just too slow.  They are like oxcarts in comparison to what they would need to be.  So until I am able to develop ring magnet propulsion after the technologies of Tesla, I'll just have to tell you to imagine going there. Either that or we need a Stargate.