Updike has an essay in the new issue, all about the history of people studying Mars, from its mythology to its elliptical orbit and topography. Written in Updike's typically florid style, the essay talks about the pull Mars has exerted on the imaginations of humans, from the ancient Babylonians up to the present.

There are some pretty cool revelations, like this one:

One of the keenest eyed cartographers of the planet was Giovanni Schiaparelli, who employed the Italian word canali for perceived linear connections between presumed bodies of water. The word could have been translated as "channels," but "canals" caught the imagination of the public and in particular that of Percival Lowell, a rich Boston Brahmin who in 1893 took up the cause of the canals as artifacts of a Martian civilization. As an astronomer, Lowell was an amateur and an enthusiast but not a crank. He built his own observatory on a mesa near Flagstaff, Arizona, more than 7,000 feet high and, in his own words, "far from the smoke of men"; his drawings of Mars were regarded as superior to Schiaparelli's even by astronomers hostile to the Bostonian's theories. Lowell proposed that Mars was a dying planet whose highly intelligent inhabitants were combating the increasing desiccation of their globe with a system of irrigation canals that distributed and conserved the dwindling water stored in the polar caps.

Did you know that Carl Sagan believed "polar bear-sized creatures" could be roaming the Martian surface, as late as 1965?

Updike also takes in science fiction, from H.G. Wells to Edgar Rice Burroughs, with obvious relish, especially when he talks about virile humans mating with Martian maidens. He concludes by saying Mars isn't really as dead as we thought in the 1970s, now that we've seen how geographically active and varied it really is.

The accompanying illustrations, as you'd expect from NG, are compelling and fresh — there's a Mars gallery, but also a really nice interactive Mars timeline dating back to the Soviet Union's failed 1960 Mars probes, Marsnik and Marsnik 2. (I didn't know about these.) [National Geographic]

Apparently the pattern created by these "steps" corresponds to a known pattern in the tilt of Mars' rotational axis. So these perfectly-spaced ridges were created during periodic changes in the planet's tilt.

Martian Rock with Ten Beats to the Bar [via NASA]

Photo via NASA and AP.

The textures above are colorized images taken by the MRO. According to National Geographic:

From top to bottom: Sand dunes show streaks of dust and carbon dioxide frost being blown by the wind. In Russell Crater mysterious gullies scar the face of a brown dune. It's unclear how they form, but sublimation—the instant transformation of carbon dioxide frost into gas when surface temperatures rise—could play a role. "We don't have anything on Earth that compares to this process," says NASA's Candice Hansen-Koharcheck. Across the tops of other dunes, dark tracks, looking like clumps of hair, appear where dust devils have scoured away beige sediments. And at the south pole, pits that grow wider each year pockmark a sheet of dry ice. Thermal evidence suggests a layer of water ice may lie below the slab.

This crater is less than 1 million years old, and gives scientists a look under the covers of the Martian landscape. Like the images above, this one has been given a false coloration to help researchers distinguish dust from rock. Here, the rock is bluer than the dust.

This image, of Victoria crater, is very close to the actual color of Mars. You can still see the swirling texture of the wind-carved rocks.

Visions of Mars [via National Geographic] Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

Winds blowing into and out of the 7-km deep crater create "Rossby waves," which in turn affect other weather systems. According to PhysOrg:

These waves reroute the high altitude winds on Mars and force the weather system towards the south pole. In the western hemisphere of Mars, this creates a strong low-pressure system near the south pole, and a high-pressure system in the eastern hemisphere, again near the south pole.

The temperatures in these two systems are different. The low-pressure system is the right temperature to cause carbon dioxide snow, which turns into ground frost. In the high-pressure system there's no snow. So you get ground frost without a snow covering. That means the ice cap is actually half frost, and half carbon dioxide snowy frost. The areas covered in snow don't melt off in summer because they reflect the sunlight. But frost grains can't reflect sunlight as well, and their shape actually exposes them to more sunlight. Which means they're easily melted in summer.

So that irregular polar cap you're seeing is the result of two winter different weather fronts coming together — one full of snow, the other causing frost. And in summer, only one side melts away — the non-snowy side. Which means there's always good carbon dioxide skiing on the western side of the Martian south pole, even in summer. Composite image via ESA/ Image Courtesy of F. Altieri (IFSI-INAF) and the OMEGA team.

Mars Polar Cap Mystery Solved [via PhysOrg]

According to the European Space Agency:

[This is] an image taken by the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express of Echus Chasma, one of the largest water source regions on the Red Planet. Echus Chasma, which resembles Arizona's Grand Canyon, is an approximately 62.1 miles (100 km) long and 6.2 miles (10 km) wide. The data was acquired on 25 September 2005. A 4000-meter-high cliff marks the edge of the source area of Kasei Valles in its western part. Gigantic water falls may have once plunged over these cliffs on to the valley floor. The original shoreline is still partially visible. The remarkably smooth valley floor was later flooded by basaltic lava.

Photos via AP.

Echus Chasma Images from Mars Express [via People's Daily Online]

Here's project manager Steve Cook gesturing at a video screen while talking about the Ares V moon rocket. NASA wants to beef up the size and power of the moonshot to enable it to carry more weight up to the lunar surface. Images by AP/NASA and AP/Jay Reeves.

This represents a huge breakthrough for the mission, which had until now been unable to find much solid evidence that frozen water existed beneath the Martian pole. A release from NASA quoted lead researcher Peter Smith, who said:

It must be ice. These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that.

Early yesterday, Phoenix was digging in a trench unrelated to the icy one, and found a very hard surface that scientists might be an entire layer of ice beneath the planet's surface. This bodes well for future missions to Mars that contain humans. If the ice can be converted into something drinkable, it could become a supply of much-needed water for thirsty colonists.

Exploring the Arctic Plane of Mars [via NASA]

Space.com reports on the ongoing water search:

[TEGA team leader William] Boynton says the team wasn't surprised that they found no indication of water ice because the sample sat out in the Martian sun for several days while it was stuck at the entrance to one of TEGA's ovens, which heat up the soil so that the instrument's mass spectrometer can analyze the composition of the vapors the soil gives off.

In the next few days, scientists will further heat the sample up, to a maximum of 1,800 F (1,000 C), to vaporize out minerals that might have chemically-bound water, carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide.

"We expect there's a high probability that we would find minerals with chemically-bound water, which would release their water at higher temperatures," Boynton said. Signs of water in the minerals would indicate that rocks on the surface once interacted with liquid water.

And here's what's going on with that mystery white substance:

Mission scientists are still debating whether this bright, white material is exposed subsurface water ice or salt minerals. "It could be ice; it could be salt. We have to sample it to be able to tell," said Phoenix robotic arm team leader and mission digging czar Peter Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis.

A small chunk of the material was knocked loose by the robotic arm scoop as it performed one of its backhoe-like maneuvers in the trench. Scientists will be monitoring this chunk and expect to see it change if it actually is ice.

"If it really is ice, we expect it to sublimate, or go into the vapor phase," Arvidson said.

Here's hoping it's the top of a secret underground laboratory put there by an alien race to study humanity from a distance.

Robot Finds Mars Dry So Far [via Space.com]

The Planetary Society is heading up the effort, but they need your help: they've got a stack of high-res images of the likely crash area that require a human pair of eyeballs to examine. Find the polar lander and you'll go down as the first explorer in history to discover a shipwreck on Mars.

[Check out images of the other successful landers (Viking I and II, Mars Pathfinder, Spirit, and Opportunity) here]

Source: The Planetary Society

As Phil "Bad Astronomer" Plait put it, the parachuting shot is "the first action shot" of a man-made machine landing on the surface of another planet. Very cool. This one's not bad either:

(click here for the full size shot from HiRISE)

The HiRISE camera has clearly been earning its money up there in Martian orbit, and has long since jumped ahead of the-great-and-powerful Google, whose Google Mars rainbow-colored elevation map of the Red Planet is a distant second to these awesome shots. I think the two should join forces for what could be a truly kick-ass mashup, with HiRISE imaging points of awesomeness like Olympus Mons, Vallis Marineris and the Viking I lander site, and GMars crunching the data and letting us users zoom in and do custom flybys.

Source: HiRISE via Bad Astronomy and The Planetary Society