In honor of next week’s Great Opposition, Phil at The Speculist will be focusing on Mars all week. To this end, he is inviting submissions on topics relating to Mars exploration:
Here’s what we we’re looking for:
- Links to interesting Mars-related websites, news stories, products, pictures.
- One-liner tips about how to make the best of Red Planet Madness, etc.
- Write a mini-essay (50 words or less) on Mars, space, rockets, that kind of thing.
- Any and everything else you’d like to do. Surprise me!
Send your submissions to me before noon, Mountain time on Tuesday.
Hop to it!
I didn’t see you mention it, so here’s a bit about the latest TES results.
http://www.wallofsleep.com/pM/comments.php?id=105_0_1_0_C
Also, do you ping Weblogs when you post? I never see the flag to tell me when you’ve posted…
TES: I haven’t commented on it mostly because I have been too busy this week with work and with posts inspired by last week’s Conference. I have been reading about it, and the results seem to be something of a tempest in a teapot — the readings have not shown the minerals (carbonates, I believe) one would expect to find if large amounts of water had spent a long period of time ponded on the surface, which appears to undermine the theories involving a warm, wet ancient Mars. But, there is photographic and MOLA data showing evidence of ponding in certain craters and of course the “bathtub rings” around Vastitas Borealis (and yes, I know that those too are controversial as evidence of ancient seas). The evidence of hematite deposits in Meridiani (from TES?), another mineral associated with bodies of water, was strong enough to motivate sending one of the MERs there.
I’m not a planetary geologist or geochemist, so I can only repeat what I have read of the matter, which includes a lot of dissent and de-hyping of the news. It’s interesting evidence, but it is only one bit of evidence, and doesn’t appear to me to have conclusively disproved the warm-wet-Mars theories to the scientific community’s satisfaction.
I don’t ping when I post, but I could if you would like. Same with trackback — I think I get the general concept, but I can’t find any explanations of how it works that make sense to me.
You’re right, of course. A meaningful survey will have to be taken on the ground, in depth, instead of in dribs and drabs.
As for pinging; I usually read the sites that are flagged, so the pings are nice.
Trackbacks are a nice way for someone to let you know they’ve written something based on something you’ve written on their site. They’re rather like a comment, except posted on someone else’s site. I use them when available…but I suspect they’re better in theory than in practice. With MT you can include trackbacks in comments, which is cool. I forget the plug-in though…
Found it:
http://kalsey.com/2003/02/simplecomments/