Tag: Mars

My Favorite Fact About Mars

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 3 Comments

Hello, friends!  Right now, I’m going through some big changes in my life, which leaves me very little time for writing.  And yet, because I am the person I am, I must write something!  So during this time, I’ve been writing these quick and easy posts sharing my #1 favorite facts about each planet of the Solar System.  Today, it’s time for my #1 favorite fact about Mars.

This one’s tough.  Mars is the most thoroughly explored planet in the Solar System (besides Earth, of course), which means there are tons of Mars facts to choose from.  And brand new Mars facts keep coming in all the time, thanks to the fleet of robotic spacecraft that have been continuously exploring the Red Planet for decades now.  But if I must pick just one Mars fact to share today, it would be this: Mars’s beautiful orangey-red color is only skin deep.

A little over a decade ago, the Curiosity Rover did something that had never been done before.  It drilled a tiny hole into the surface of Mars.  This hole was only two inches deep, but that was enough.  Just beneath Mars’s very red surface, the rock changed to a dull grey color.

You’ve probably heard that Mars’s red color is associated with iron oxide (a.k.a., rust).  So it may be that the grey stuff is some other iron-rich mineral, something that didn’t get oxidized (rusted) like the stuff on top of it.  Since drilling that first tiny hole, Curiosity has drilled over forty similar holes in different locations on Mars.  Sometimes, Curiosity finds grey rock, sometimes not.  That probably just means the red top layer is thin in some places and thicker in others.

What does all this tell us about the history of Mars or the modern geology of Mars?  I’m not sure.  But I do think this is a super fun fact to share at parties: beneath a relatively thin layer of red, Mars—the famously red planet—is mostly grey.

Thanks for reading, friends!  Next time I’ll be sharing my #1 favorite fact about Jupiter, which also involves the color red.

Does Science Make the World Less Magical?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 5 Comments

Hello, friends!

For some reason, whenever I show up at parties, I end up having conversations with people about space.  I swear it’s not always my fault.  I am not always the first person to mention space; however, if anyone does happen to mention space in my presence, my brain contains a wealth of random space trivia, and I am all too eager to share that wealth with others.

A few years back, I was at a dinner party where somebody said something about Mars.  I think this was shortly after the Opportunity rover died, so Mars had been in the news.  Anyway, I love Mars.  I love talking about Mars.  Mars has the largest volcano in the entire Solar System, and also the deepest canyon, and sometimes the dust storms get so bad they conceal the entire planet’s surface from our view.

I could talk about Mars all night if you let me.  Unfortunately, there was one woman at that dinner party who would not let me.  All my Mars facts, all my space facts, all my science facts… she didn’t want to hear any of it.  As she explained herself, she loved to look up at the stars.  She loved to see the stars and wonder about them.  She loved wondering so much that she was afraid all my facts and information about space might spoil her experience of wonderment.

As the evening progressed, I learned that this wasn’t just about space facts.  She also enjoyed wondering how mountains could form, how birds could fly, how a tiny seed could grow into a massive redwood tree.  She loved wondering about these sorts of questions, but she adamantly refused to learn the answers.  It’s not that she was anti-science.  She agreed that science is necessary and valuable.  It’s just that science also made her sad because (in her view) it spoiled all the magic and mystery of the world around us.

I was, and still am, utterly baffled by this point of view.  It sounds like a celebration of ignorance to me.  I mean, I do understand the joy of wonder.  I wouldn’t want to lose the experience of wonderment either.  But science does not diminish wonder.  It enhances it.

Consider looking up at the night sky, noticing one slightly orange, non-twinkling point of light, and saying: “Gee, I wonder what that is.”  Now consider looking up at that same orangey point of light and thinking: “That’s Mars.  That’s a whole other world.  In some ways, it’s eerily similar to our world, and in other ways it’s wildly and terrifyingly different.  Long ago, that world was covered in water, and maybe also life.  Then something went wrong.  The whole planet dried up, and all that life (assuming it was ever there in the first place) most surely died out.  I wonder what happened.  I wonder if we’ll find fossils.  I wonder if we could ever turn Mars into a living planet again.”

Who’s having the greater experience of wonder?  Rather than spoil any magic or mystery, science has given me far bigger and far more interesting questions to wonder about.  Science has enriched my life, and if you are the kind of person who enjoys (who genuinely enjoys) the experience of wonder, I promise you that learning even a little about science will enrich your life, too.

The art used in today’s post is my own original work.  If you like my art, please consider visiting the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble.  Shopping on RedBubble is a great way to support artists (like me) so that we can keep doing what we do.  Thank you!