MarsDial in action

[mmcirvin]

Here's (more or less) what I wanted to see, on the Planetary Society's kids page: Bill Nye's MarsDial in action, with some of the pictures in color. (One caveat: I don't know what filters were actually used to take these pictures; sometimes JPL uses a near-infrared filter in place of the visible red one.)

Anyway, this thing has mirrors on it that reflect the sort of tan-beige sky color (they are at about 3 o'clock and 9 o'clock on the circular rim), and bright primary-colored swatches painted on the four corners. Unfortunately the pictures are a little dark, but messing around with the color balance of these pictures in the photo editor of your choice makes it pretty clear that you can't make the sky blue without screwing up all the other colors to a ridiculous extent. (Clarification: The really crucial thing is that the rings in the center are painted a neutral gray color, and they're less red than the mirror images of the sky are. You can pretty easily make the sky images blue by messing with channel curves in an image editor, but then the gray rings get even bluer than that. I am, therefore, pretty confident that the sky on Mars has a tan cast relative to the total incoming light that is illuminating the target.)

Unless, of course, the conspiracy has already gotten to these pictures and messed with them, or secretly swapped the MarsDial with a mis-painted version to fool everybody. For all you know, I'm part of the plot.

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[sunburn.livejournal.com]

On that same page, you can read all about the "Red Rover" project (Lego sponsored) which isn't quite live, or working, or something, but basically they've developed a nifty lego rover which can be controlled via a PC client (not Mac, sorry) through the internet. The Planetary Society has arranged (funded? dunno) for a number of places, mainly universities, science centers, natural history musea &c. to host rovers placed in different simulated Martian locations. The client is noisy and kiosk-y, but has some great setting-controls right in its crowded interface, and allows easy screengrabs, and possibly some chat.

I happen to have some access to one of the sites, people who know me know which, and for a reasonably exorbitant fee I can introduce living organisms, possibly including Ethiopian Naked Mole Rats, into the Mars landscape. Naked Mole Rats on Earth are clearly Martian in origin, because they live in dehydrated, heavily-compacted soil with very little oxygen, they're eusocial mammals which is something you never see on Earth, and if they can chew through concrete (it takes time, but they can do it) they can easily chew through spacecraft hulls and such. How it is that burrowing creatures manage an superior space defense (http://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/~dgore/marsscorecard.html), I do not know, but that's why we explore, enit?