Spyro The Dragon! - PS1 (1998) ↳ Game Pause Menu.
“Everything, even something as mundane as getting out of the car can be fun if you find a right game.” - James Veitch
Phobos, Mars’ moon, from the surface of the Mars. Credit: NASA / JPL / MSSS / Justin Cowart [840x1050]
“Finally, there are the wavelength limits as well. Stars emits a wide variety of light, from the ultraviolet through the optical and into the infrared. It’s no coincidence that this is what Hubble was designed for: to look for light that’s of the same variety and wavelengths that we know stars emit.
But this, too, is fundamentally limiting. You see, as light travels through the Universe, the fabric of space itself is expanding. This causes the light, even if it’s emitted with intrinsically short wavelengths, to have its wavelength stretched by the expansion of space. By the time it arrives at our eyes, it’s redshifted by a particular factor that’s determined by the expansion rate of the Universe and the object’s distance from us.
Hubble’s wavelength range sets a fundamental limit to how far back we can see: to when the Universe is around 400 million years old, but no earlier.”
The Hubble Space Telescope, currently entering its 30th year of service, has literally revolutionized our view of the Universe. It’s shown us our faintest and most distant stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters of all. But as far back as it’s taken us, and as spectacular as what it’s revealed, there is much, much more Universe out there, and Hubble is at its limit.
Here’s how far we’ve come, with a look to how much farther we could yet go. It’s up to us to build the tools to take us there.
A telephoto view of the Orion nebula and surrounding region over a Saskatchewan tree [OC]
Like a paintbrush caressing the rings of Saturn, wee moon Daphnis has just enough gravity to make a ripple. (at NASA’s Cassini Mission to Saturn)
Martian volcano Olympus Mons is more than twice as high as Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, the tallest mountain on Earth from top to bottom.
Compared to the Grand Canyon on Earth, Valles Marineris on Mars is nearly five times deeper, about four times longer, and 20 times wider.
The red planet doesn’t have plate tectonics, which is what causes most quakes on Earth. But rising plumes of magma could trigger Mars quakes, as could meteorite impacts and the contraction of the world due to cooling. InSight will listen for them with its seismometer.
Martian oceans also had tsunamis like those on Earth. The tallest may have reached as high as 400 feet, just slightly shorter than the London Eye.
Like Earth, Mars has ice caps at its poles. The northern cap is up to 2 miles deep, is a mix of water and carbon dioxide, and covers an area slightly larger than Texas.
The average surface temperature on Mars is -81˚F, 138 degrees chillier than on Earth. But on a mid-summer day at the red planet’s equator, temperatures can peak at a balmy 95˚F.
Billions of years ago, Mars had oceans and flowing water. But adding them up would give you just 1.5% of all water on Earth today.
Mars has almost as much surface as Earth has land — but that doesn’t account for the 71% of Earth that’s covered in water.
The Martian atmosphere is 61 times thinner than Earth’s, and it consists almost entirely of carbon dioxide, which makes up just 0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere.
On Earth, sunsets are a brilliant mix of reds, pinks, oranges, yellows, and other colors. But on Mars they’re blue. Because air is dozens of times less dense on the surface of Mars than it is on our planet, white sunlight refracts less — leading to fewer colors (primarily blues).
Missions to Mars have become much rarer — after 23 launches in the 1960s and 1970s, we’ve launched just 10 in the new millennium (so far).
Getting to Mars is hard: About a third of the missions launched have failed.