A Book Crystallized In The Ocean

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Rachel C Lewis | @wnq-quoteoftheday | @wordsnquotes-online

Mars is the third solar body inhabited by humans. (cir. 2029)

Ten interesting facts about Mars

The ancient Sumerians believed that Mars was Nergal, the god of war and plague. During Sumerian times, Nergal was a minor deity of little significance, but, during later times, his main cult center was the city of Nineveh. In Mesopotamian texts, Mars is referred to as the “star of judgement of the fate of the dead”. The existence of Mars as a wandering object in the night sky was recorded by the ancient Egyptian astronomers and, by 1534 BCE, they were familiar with the retrograde motion of the planet. By the period of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the Babylonian astronomers were making regular records of the positions of the planets and systematic observations of their behavior. For Mars, they knew that the planet made 37 synodic periods, or 42 circuits of the zodiac, every 79 years. They invented arithmetic methods for making minor corrections to the predicted positions of the planets.

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System after Mercury.

The bright rust color Mars is known for is due to iron-rich minerals in its regolith — the loose dust and rock covering its surface. The soil of Earth is a kind of regolith, albeit one loaded with organic content. According to NASA, the iron minerals oxidize, or rust, causing the soil to look red.

The rotational period and seasonal cycles of Mars are likewise similar to those of Earth, as is the tilt that produces the seasons. Mars is the site of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano and second-highest known mountain in the Solar System, and of Valles Marineris, one of the largest canyons in the Solar System.

Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, which are small and irregularly shaped. These may be captured asteroids, similar to 5261 Eureka, a Mars trojan.

There are ongoing investigations assessing the past habitability potential of Mars, as well as the possibility of extant life. Future astrobiology missions are planned, including the Mars 2020 and ExoMars rovers. Liquid water cannot exist on the surface of Mars due to low atmospheric pressure, which is less than 1% of the Earth’s, except at the lowest elevations for short periods. The two polar ice caps appear to be made largely of water. The volume of water ice in the south polar ice cap, if melted, would be sufficient to cover the entire planetary surface to a depth of 11 meters (36 ft). In November 2016, NASA reported finding a large amount of underground ice in the Utopia Planitia region of Mars. The volume of water detected has been estimated to be equivalent to the volume of water in Lake Superior.

Mars can easily be seen from Earth with the naked eye, as can its reddish coloring. Its apparent magnitude reaches −2.91, which is surpassed only by Jupiter, Venus, the Moon, and the Sun. Optical ground-based telescopes are typically limited to resolving features about 300 kilometers (190 mi) across when Earth and Mars are closest because of Earth’s atmosphere.

Like Earth, Mars has differentiated into a dense metallic core overlaid by less dense materials. Current models of its interior imply a core with a radius of about 1,794 ± 65 kilometers (1,115 ± 40 mi), consisting primarily of iron and nickel with about 16–17% sulfur. This iron(II) sulfide core is thought to be twice as rich in lighter elements as Earth’s. The core is surrounded by a silicate mantle that formed many of the tectonic and volcanic features on the planet, but it appears to be dormant. Besides silicon and oxygen, the most abundant elements in the Martian crust are iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, and potassium. The average thickness of the planet’s crust is about 50 km (31 mi), with a maximum thickness of 125 km (78 mi). Earth’s crust averages 40 km (25 mi).

Mars lost its magnetosphere 4 billion years ago, possibly because of numerous asteroid strikes, so the solar wind interacts directly with the Martian ionosphere, lowering the atmospheric density by stripping away atoms from the outer layer. Both Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Expresshave detected ionised atmospheric particles trailing off into space behind Mars, and this atmospheric loss is being studied by the MAVEN orbiter. Compared to Earth, the atmosphere of Mars is quite rarefied.

Mars’s average distance from the Sun is roughly 230 million kilometres (143,000,000 mi), and its orbital period is 687 (Earth) days. The solar day (or sol) on Mars is only slightly longer than an Earth day: 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds. A Martian year is equal to 1.8809 Earth years, or 1 year, 320 days, and 18.2 hours

Mars is scarred by a number of impact craters: a total of 43,000 craters with a diameter of 5 km (3.1 mi) or greater have been found. The largest confirmed of these is the Hellas impact basin, a light albedo feature clearly visible from Earth. Due to the smaller mass of Mars, the probability of an object colliding with the planet is about half that of Earth. Mars is located closer to the asteroid belt, so it has an increased chance of being struck by materials from that source. Mars is more likely to be struck by short-period comets, i.e., those that lie within the orbit of Jupiter. In spite of this, there are far fewer craters on Mars compared with the Moon, because the atmosphere of Mars provides protection against small meteors and surface modifying processes have erased some craters.

Martian craters can have a morphology that suggests the ground became wet after the meteor impacted.

Source 1

Source 2

images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona , ESA, Tunç Tezel

astronomy facts

a brief departure from the typical posts here…

while i try not to include my personal work in subtilitas, readers may have noticed content has been a little sparse here lately, largely due to a few large projects wrapping up. one of which is a book i’ve been involved with through the cactus store, which was just released this week.

xerophile is a compendium of desert plant and habitat photography three years in the making. a selection of over five hundred photographs of arguably the rarest and most bizarre plants on earth, photographed in their remote natural habitats over the past 80 years by a global cadre of obsessed cactus aficionados made up of both the amateur and the professional—from phd. botanist to banker, art teacher to cancer researcher. aside from the field photography, we’ve also included several interviews with the explorer’s themselves, who’s stories only add to the mystique of their images. 

posts should begin to be more regular next week. thanks as always for reading.

The future is kelp

The push for renewable energy in the U.S. often focuses on well-established sources of electricity: solar, wind and hydropower. Off the coast of California, a team of researchers is working on what they hope will become an energy source of the future — macroalgae, otherwise known as kelp.

The Pacific Coast is known for its vast kelp forests. It’s one of the fastest-growing plants on Earth, and farming it requires no fertilizer, fresh water, pesticides, or arable land. “It can grow 2 to 3 feet per day,” says Diane Kim, one of the scientists running the kelp research project at the University of Southern California.

Kelp is transformed into biofuel by a process called thermochemical liquefaction. The kelp is dried out, and the salt is washed away. Then it’s turned into bio-oil through a high-temperature, high-pressure conversion process.

Some small companies are growing kelp as a substitute for kale in the U.S., but that’s exactly the problem – very, very few are doing it. Thus, the infrastructure and investment isn’t in place to make other products from kelp, like biofuel.

Scientists Hope To Farm The Biofuel Of The Future In The Pacific Ocean

Photos: Courtesy of David Ginsburg/Wrigley Institute, Monika Evstatieva/NPR (2) and Anjuli Sastry/NPR

Matilda's got all the shades to grey to throw at you

apparently e.l. james called former child star mara wilson (matilda) a “sad fuck” for critiquing the 50shades books a while ago and now there’s a feud. i love it.

He came from a distant star. So far that when he passed by Vega--some 300,000 years ago--Vega wasn't even there yet.

MEET OUMUAMUA, THE FIRST INTERSTELLAR ASTEROID 

The whole story is fascinating but these bits caught our attention:

Pronounced “Oh-moo-ah-moo-ah,” it means “a messenger from afar arriving first.”

Observations of the wildly-varying light from ‘Oumuamua showed scientists it wasn’t spherical, but probably had a cigar shape measuring 800 meters by 80 meters by 80 meters—that’s something almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty, but half a mile long. It’s red, and likely made from metal and carbon-rich matter like some comets.

There are many unknown things in our galaxy, and some of them are zooming at us at incredible speeds.

I plucked the stars for my girlfriend tonight

Galactic Rose [1589x1178] - For more images of the cosmos Click Here

I believe

The X-Files Season 11 - 90s print ads inspired

pls credit if you repost.

The total solar eclipse which crossed from Alaska to Texas spurred many to make the trip West in 1878. Dr. Henry Draper, a medical doctor and former chair of physiology at New York University, assembled a group who watched the eclipse from the railroad outpost of Rawlins, Wyoming Territory and made some observations.

I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.

Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (via mrs-princeton-dicaprio)

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