It’s hard enough to get the Mars advocacy community to agree on issues such as sample return missions, but imagine trying to achieve a consensus for a new method of timekeeping and calendar for an entire world! With a day length of 24 hours and 37 minutes, and a year lasting 687 (Earth) days, many solutions for timekeeping have been proposed for Mars but none agreed on. Thomas Gangale and Marilyn Dudley-Rowley look into the issues of Martian Time that will become increasingly important as our exploration of the red planet continues.
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Filed under: Articles on April 4th, 2002 | 25 Comments »
Should aliens ever decide to land on Earth, they’d probably pick Contact to make their first appearance. Held in the Bay Area from March 1st-3rd, the 19th Contact Conference covered an ambitious array of topics including anthropology, astrobiology, planetary science and more, with speakers such as Apollo Astronaut Rusty Schweickart, Frank Drake and Robert Zubrin. Even though no extra-terrestrials were (visibly) in presence, they’d have been more than welcome as long as they could have survived an inevitable barrage of questions from the assembled scientists, authors and artists. New Mars staff writer Joel McKinnon reported from the first day of the conference.
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Filed under: Articles on March 23rd, 2002 | 3 Comments »
Adrian Hon presents an in-depth report on the first Mars Society UK Symposium. With speakers from Dr. Robert Zubrin to Prof. Colin Pillinger, the director of the Beagle 2 Mars lander, the symposium certainly had an interesting range of presentations and was by all accounts a resounding success.
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Filed under: Articles on January 25th, 2002 | 3 Comments »
“After dark tonight, I won’t be able to go outside and see numerous space stations spinning gracefully in the sky to a Straussian soundtrack, nor will I watch Pan Am shuttles and tourist spaceplanes flitting between them. There are no IKEA-outfitted science outposts on the Moon, no orange-spacesuited astronauts slowly walking down ramps into the floodlit depths of excavated lunar craters.”
Let’s face it, 2001 wasn’t all it was shaped up to be, and despite Pathfinder and the Global Surveyor, the public aren’t showing any signs of increased interest in Mars. Stuart Atkinson laments the sorry state of Mars’ portrayal in entertainment media and gives a few ideas about how things could be made better.
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Filed under: Articles on January 8th, 2002 | 16 Comments »
When the first humans land on Mars, what will they see and experience when they look to horizon at sunset? Ryder Miller considers the importance of sunsets to the human condition and how we must rethink our priorities in the exploration of Mars.
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Filed under: Articles on January 4th, 2002 | 4 Comments »
What is the future for manned missions to Mars in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks? Joel McKinnon examines how the Mars advocacy movement must respond to the disaster.
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Filed under: Articles on October 12th, 2001 | 7 Comments »
Exploring Mars will enlighten us not only about the red planet, but also the entire Solar System through its rich complement of meteorites. Stuart Atkinson considers how some of these meteorites may have originated from the most unexpected places of all…
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Filed under: Articles on October 1st, 2001 | 1 Comment »
Joel McKinnon airs his views on the implications on the existence - and non-existence - of Martian life based around presentations at the 2001 Mars Society Conference. As ever, the issue of terraformation is discussed here with the usual suspects involved; Chris McKay, Robert Zubrin and the never-disappointing Kim Stanley Robinson.
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Filed under: Articles on September 27th, 2001 | 5 Comments »
In this Perspective, Stuart Atkinson takes issue with Damien Hirst’s spot painting being the first artwork to land on another planet via the Beagle 2 Mars Lander.
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Filed under: Articles on August 7th, 2001 | 6 Comments »
Written by Richard Poss. Part of the Mars Tales issue.
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Filed under: Articles on August 7th, 2001 | 2 Comments »
