We hope you enjoyed this April Fool’s post! It was designed to sound believable, up to the point you got to either the beer or to the news in the Mars Times. (‘Tiu’ is an old english word for ‘Mars’, as in ‘Tuesday’.) But rest assured, nothing in here is true, especially the bit about…
All volcanoes are the same. You start with liquid rock some distance below the surface. It tries to rise because molten rock is less dense than the solid rock that surrounds it. Once it reaches the surface it is called a volcano. There are many variations, of course. The liquid may pour out and form…
The space race had seemed a bit pointless. The first orbiting satellites were mainly there to demonstrate the capability of the carrying rockets – whose real task was to deliver missiles to whoever was deemed to be the enemy. Jodrell Bank became famous not by detecting the first Sputnik – anyone with a radio could…
The Judgement of Jupiter is a story written around 1495 in Germany and published under the pen name of Paulus Niavis. It tells of a case in the court of law of Jupiter. The accusation is parricide (destruction of the environment). The accused is a mine worker; the victim is Mother Earth. Mercury is the…
The exploration of space has been a two-way battle. Not between the Russians and Americans, but between humans and robots. The race to the Moon was a victory for the humans. But it is notable that the humans have been in retreat since. We no longer go beyond low-Earth orbit: we could not go back…
Its career as a planet last for less than half its year. Pluto was discovered late, in 1930, as our final planet, completing the Sun’s brood of nine. (In hindsight it had been seen, but not recognized, as early as 1909.) But it was always an odd one, the runt of the litter, banished to…
The previous post on Venus described a peculiar type of volcanic construct called a corona, unique to Venus. This blog is read by knowledgeable people with a somewhat critical attitude to authority, while at the same time having a strong respect for experts [For UK readers: see footnote], and this statement was immediately questioned. A…
It is hell up there. No man-made object has ever survived the immense heat and pressure for more than a few hours. Each day lasts 117 earth days, but the Sun never appears. The yellow clouds which hide the Sun contain sulfuric acid, but down at the surface the air is not corrosive, just boiling,…
Science should be “sexy”. Once we had decided to write an article on Olympus Mons, we began to consider how to present it in a manner that would appeal to our readers. The regular science article is usually a rather monotonous enumeration of facts, figures and equations and thus heavy to digest for the average…
This far, the expedition had been a highly successful failure. Five weeks into the exploration with three weeks of intense survey had brought a wealth of data, but not what they had come for. Olympus Mons or Nix Olympica, the Olympic Snows as it was formerly known, had stubbornly refused to accede to human wishes.…