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Posts Tagged “

mission to mars

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tv this week

TV This Week: Chief Tyrol Invades Smallville

It's your last chance to get to know Kyle XY this week, and your second-to-last chance to discover Jericho before it goes away, maybe forever. Those both happen to be shows that I really disliked when they started, and they've both grown on me a lot. Meanwhile, Smallville features Chief Tyrol in full crazoid mode, and Lost has a script co-written by Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man). Click through for clips and full listings. More »

Feature

9:00 AM on Mon Mar 17 2008
By Charlie Jane Anders
2,089 views, 14 comments

Latest by CSX321: @Charlie Jane Anders: And The Universe, Modern Marvels, Cities of the Underworld, Futureweapons, and Legion of Superheroes are SF? more »

chart

Bad Movie Physics: A Report Card

Space epics almost always play fast and loose with science, treating the laws of physics like suggestions. Sound in space, unprotected bodies splatting in vacuum, and alien planets that all look just like Calabasas. But some movies dismember Newton and Einstein with way more gusto than others. We rated 18 movies based on how many laws of physics they mangled, and here's our report card. More »

10:00 AM on Fri Mar 14 2008
By Charlie Jane Anders
141,496 views, 135 comments

mars movies

What Killed The Mars Movie Fad?

People have been making movies about Mars for decades, but the real boom in semi-realistic Mars movies started about a decade ago — and ended pretty soon afterward. A spate of movies about Mars, some of which aimed to show the first human exploration of the planet, started around 1999 and stopped in 2002... just before NASA started launching a ton of Mars probes and President Bush talked about sending humans to Mars. What killed the Mars movie? More »

4:30 PM on Tue Mar 11 2008
By Charlie Jane Anders
4,810 views, 44 comments

Latest by Bob_of_Mars: @goldfarb: They're going to make it live action. So it actually Does matter who plays her. IIRC they are trying not to make it PG, but I don't remember where I heard that. Anyways, hopefully they get more »

mission to mars

Looking for Life on Mars with the Next Generation Rover

Definitely one of the coolest symposia at AAAS was the one this afternoon devoted to the Martian rovers — past, present, and future. On the panel were NASA's Richard Cook, who helped design Spirit and Opportunity as well as the next Martian rover; Steven Squyres, a Cornell geologist who has been working with Spirit and Opportunity to get as many geological samples as he can while the rovers survive; and Andrew Knoll, a Harvard planetologist who has studied the evidence for Martian water extensively (including whether it could support life as we know it). I've got highlights from the panel below, plus a giant gallery of pictures of a life-sized model of the new rover, the Mars Science Lab Rover (MSL), which will be blasting off late next year and landing on the red planet in 2010. More »

5:45 PM on Fri Feb 15 2008
By Annalee Newitz
1,426 views, 9 comments

Latest by Pouncer: Spirit and Opportunity are complete and total champions. The actual duration of their activity on Mars, compared to the planned mission timeline, is proof of that. And applying lessons learned to a next-generation rover? This is going to be so more »

mars

Building An Ice Castle On Mars

Martian architecture will have to be different from any existing styles on Earth, say 53 percent of respondents in this poll at NewMars. But weirdly, 15 percent believe that we'll build in "a mixture of Greek and Roman style" on Mars. And another 9 percent each believe we'll build in an "Egyptian" or "Celtic" style. WTF? Luckily, some people have come up with slightly more realistic designs for Mars habitats. Here's a gallery of possible (and one or two discredited) Mars building designs.

12:00 PM on Mon Dec 3 2007
By charliejane
110 views, Comment

space age

Space Is More Fun Without Space Travel

The end of the Space Age was the best thing that ever happened to science fiction, claims author Gerard J. DeGroot:
When the space age ended, the alien age began. In the early 1990s, the Disney Corporation decided to close down its Mission to Mars ride, itself a direct descendant of the Rocket to the Moon attraction Werner von Braun had helped to design. In its place came Alien Encounter, in which an extraterrestrial stows away on a spaceship. This made things easier for Disney, as one executive admitted: "One way for an attraction to remain timeless is for it to be based in fantasy, rather than reality."
More »

3:44 PM on Thu Oct 4 2007
By charliejane
68 views, Comment