Today we consider Mars, the next planet in our journey through the Solar System. Apart from the Earth, it's the most explored planet in our Solar System. Even now there are rovers crawling the surface, orbiters overhead, and a lander on its way. It's a cold, dry desert, so why does this planet hold such fascination?

<strong><a href="http://media.libsyn.com/media/astronomycast/AstroCast-070903.mp3">Episode 52: Mars (14.7MB)</a></strong><br />&nbsp;<br />

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I wish you had had more time to talk about this one.

I wanted to hear about the 300mph+ storms, and what they would feel like to you with such a low-density atmosphere.

And I really wanted to hear about the Cydonia region.

Not the face, but the "pyramids" and how they could have formed.

I'm such a huge fan of the red planet that my wife's online name is Cydoniagirl.

I even wrote a song for her about it for her birthday 2 years ago.

http://www.evileyemonster.com/jerryf...ydoniagirl.mp3

Great show, as is usual for the best podcast out there . If I may, I'd like to revisit the geology portion of the show.

When looking at a topographical map of Mars, it strikes me as odd that on the otherwise relatively even surface of the planet, the largest volcanoes and biggest canyon in our solar system just happen to be located almost exactly opposite an enormous impact basin (Hellas). Is it not possible that the object that created the Hellas basin was also responsible for the formation of the Tharsis volcanoes and Valles Marineris? Think of shooting a round pellet at an apple. If the pellet is moving slowly enough, it will not go all the way through the apple but will cause the skin to split and some of the insides to be forced out at a point opposite the entry hole. In the case of Valles Marineris, the fact that it is almost arrow straight along its entire length makes me think more of a split or tear than being carved by liquid. If you look at canyons carved by water on Earth, they tend to meander at least a bit, moreso as they get longer.

I've thought about this for a while, and can't really come up with a good reason to discount it as a theory, yet I've never seen it brought up. Is there something I'm missing that would make this an impossible scenario?

Cheers
Markk

Folks, you said:

"There was actually for a while people wondered if this meant that Jupiter would have three, so if you look back at old documents people used to do all sorts of numerology out of this – Venus 0, Earth 1, Mars 2. That's not the case."

What is your source on this? Why I ask is that we discovered the first four Jupiter moons in 1610. The Martian moons were discovered in 1877. We've not discovered. The Galilean moons were the first satellites discovered outside of our own Moon, so I'm thinking that any wondering if Jupiter had three moons would have had to have happened before 1610. If Earth had 1 moon (which we were pretty sure of, I would think), and people assumed Venus had 0, what did Mercury have?

I'm just wondering what your source was here.
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Doc Kinne

Hello,

during the podcast it was claimed that terraforming on Mars wouldn’t make any sense, since the solar wind would blow away any atmosphere build up by human technology. That may be so, but wouldn’t it take quite some time for the solar wind doing so? The “artificial” atmosphere would at least last thousands of years. Enough time at least for the colonization and exploration of Mars in length. Of course this is all quite hypothetical since the technological challenge would be so incredible big.

To add...

Isn't even the natural wind on Mars, even though fast, very weak because of the gravity?

I mean.. a hurricane force wind on Mars may be messy, but could it even blow your lawn-chair over?

Doc Kinne,

I think it must be logical that Mercury would have -1 moon. An anti-moon.

Jokes aside, I want to hear more about Mars too!

I would think it would be less about the gravity and more about the thin atmosphere (1/100th of Earth's) which would make the effects of the fast wind very weak.

nice song

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