Copy
A DOCUMENTARY FOR OUR NEWEST SPACE AGE
View this email in your browser
Madame Mars is a transmedia production designed to prepare all of us for our futures in space, whether orbiting Earth, returning to the moon, or colonizing Mars – and worlds beyond.
JANUARY 2016
DONATE TO MADAME MARS!

Your tax-deductible gift to will enable completion of the Madame Mars documentary and will support production of online educational materials - all to help inspire and motivate girls and women in their quests to become the next generation of female space pioneers.
 
HAPPY NEW YEAR (ON EARTH)!
HAPPY SUMMER SOLSTICE (ON MARS)!
Martian clocks and calendars may seem complicated to Earthlings. 

Because the Martian year is nearly twice that of Earth - 668 sols (Martian days) or 684 Earth days - a Martian new year does not occur each January 1 on Earth. The most recent new year on Mars began June 20, 2015, and the next will be May 5, 2017. It is entirely appropriate, however, to wish you a happy Martian summer solstice, which occurred January 3. 

Earth calendars use months to organize each year into 12 units - historically based on lunar cycles - but the Martian moons offer no simple analog solution. Multiple Martian calendars have been proposed, but none has been universally adopted.

Fortunately, there's an app to help you keep track - the Martian Calendar (see screenshot, left) displays current date for both planets, along with your device's local time. You can select between three different Martian calendars.

Sols (days) on Mars are easily divided into the time it takes for the planet to make one full rotation: each sol is about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth. 
 
For time-keeping on Mars, you can download the Mars24 sunclock (see screenshot, right), a cross-platform application showing the current sun and nightsides of Mars, along with a numerical readout of the time. Additional features are a plot showing the relative orbital positions of Mars and Earth and a diagram tracing the path of the Sun during the day.

NO MATTER WHAT CALENDAR YOU'RE USING, MARK YOUR EARTH CALENDAR for the next Mars opposition* on May 22, when Mars will be making a close approach to Earth (46.8 million miles).

Mars and Earth come closest to each other every 26 months, although the opposition distance varies from 35 million to 63 million miles, due to the elliptical orbit of Mars. 

*Mars and the sun are on opposite sides of the Earth
ANALOG MARS: MARS WITHOUT BOUNDARIES (CREW 158) COMPLETES DECEMBER MISSION AT MARS DESERT RESEARCH STATION
A member of Crew 158 rests on the "Martian" surface -  structures of the Mars Desert Research Station can be seen in the distance (photo credit: Mars Society)

From November 28 to December 13, six members of the Mars Without Borders Crew 158 experienced an "analog Mars" experience at the Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert. Led by Dr. Susan Jewell, the team not only conducted science and medical experiments as if they were actually living on Mars, but they also recorded exclusive footage of their activities for use in the Madame Mars project - video to come!
WOMAN OF MARS
Mabel Loomis Todd
(Nov. 10, 1856 - Oct. 10, 1932)
 




By William Sheehan
Astronomy Historian and
Author, The Planet Mars





 
Poor Mabel Todd!

She is often cast as a villain, for despite serving in the highly creditable role of posthumous editor of the poems and letters of Emily Dickinson, she tends to be remembered today, if at all, for her torrid affair with Emily's brother Austin. Both were married to others at the time and the liaison is said to have disrupted Emily’s creative work. 

But Mabel does not deserve to be remembered as a mere footnote to the Emily legend. She was highly accomplished in her own terms; frank and adventurous - even fearless - in her explorations of the intimate side of relationships (which included a refreshing, for the time, enjoyment of her sexuality). 
 
What most do not know is that Mabel had a serious relationship with the planet Mars as well.

In 1907 she accompanied her husband, astronomer David Peck Todd, and assistant astronomer Earl C. Slipher, on the “Lowell expedition to the Andes," whose purpose was to photograph Mars and, for the first time, to record images of its “canals” (the results were inconclusive). Mabel actively participated in the observations, kept a detailed journal and published two articles, "Our Ruddy Neighbor Planet" in The Independent (vol. 64, no. 3097) and "Photographing the 'Canals' on Mars" in The Nation (vol. 85, no. 2203).

In addition, her drawings of Mars were used to illustrate her husband's article, "Professor Todd's Own Story of the Mars Expedition" in The Cosmopolitan Magazine (vol. 44, no. 4, 1908):
 
It was “extraordinary,” writes K. Maria D. Lane in her book Geographies of Mars, for a woman’s sketch to be “creditably published in a leading magazine” as “scientific evidence of an astronomical finding.”

David Peck Todd (right) and radio/tv pioneer C. Francis Jenkins pose with the machine Jenkins invented for Todd's use in an attempt to record signals from Mars (photo credit: The Art Part)
 
Soon after the expedition, David became increasingly obsessed with Mars, making feverish efforts to contact the Martians until he was institutionalized in 1922. Mabel spent her final years accomplishing the thing for which she will always be remembered: salvaging Emily Dickinson’s poems from oblivion. 

David and Mabel have achieved immortality together in the heavens. They are honored with sequentially numbered her-and-his asteroids: 510 Mabella and 511 Davida.
 
William Sheehan has written and collaborated on numerous books about our universe, including Galactic Encounters, The Transits of Venus, Epic Moon, Worlds in the Sky and Planets and Perception. He is currently revising and updating his comprehensive 1996 volume, The Planet Mars, and tells Madame Mars he intends "to showcase more female astronomers/wives than in the earlier edition."
NEWS FROM FRIENDS OF MADAME MARS
From the Flagstaff Arts Council:
KEVIN SCHINDLER is among the 2016 Viola Awards nominees for his Arizona Sun column The View From Mars Hill. Winners will be announced March 5.
From Explore Mars:
The annual H2M (Humans to Mars) summit will be held May 17 to 19 at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The early registrations savings period has been extended through January 16.
From the Mars Society:
The Mars Society invites presentations for its annual convention, September 22 through 25 at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Send 300-word abstract by June 30 to abstracts@marssociety.org.
From Spaceflight Now:
Offshore barge landing targeted after next Falcon 9 launch
Re-usable rockets make space travel more affordable and humans to Mars more do-able! SpaceX plans to launch another rocket Sunday, January 17, from Vandenberg Airforce Base, and will attempt another landing - this time on a floating barge in the Pacific Ocean. You should be able to see live webcast here.
ARE YOU MAKING NEWS ABOUT MARS, SPACE EXPLORATION OR STEM EDUCATION? SEND US YOUR NEWS SO WE CAN INCLUDE IT IN FUTURE ISSUES OF THIS NEWSLETTER!
MEANWHILE, ON MARS
Polar Portrait
The European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter has been photographing the red planet for more than a dozen years.

An image captured last Feb. 25 and recently released shows a wide view of the southern polar region with the distinctive white ice cap, surrounded by the red "highlands" of the southern hemisphere, numerous impact craters, and in the upper left, a portion of the enormous Hellas basin.

The spacecraft normally orbits at 300 km. (186 mi.), but for this view was repositioned to 9900 km. (6151 mi.) above Mars, where it performed a "broom-sweep" pan across the surface, enabling the cameras to photograph the planet from one side to the other.
DAVID BOWIE
(JANUARY 8, 1947 - JANUARY 10, 2016)
as Ziggy Stardust

NASA SCIENTIST SAYS BOWIE WAS RIGHT ABOUT SPIDERS ON MARS
 
The name David Bowie once used for his Ziggy Stardust band turns out to be the name for seasonal geological formations on Mars, according to planetary scientist Candice Hansen Koharcheck, who works with the camera team for NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
 
And here they are, as photographed by the spacecraft's HiRISE camera:
 

"Spiders on Mars" (photo credit: NASA)
Stay connected to Madame Mars:
  • send us your news for inclusion in future newsletters
  • send us feedback on this issue or suggest an article you'd like to see in the next one - maybe you'd like to write it (?)
  • forward this newsletter to your friends and invite them to subscribe
  • like us on Facebook and invite your FB friends to do the same
  • follow us on Twitter, favor and retweet at will!
READ OUR ARCHIVED NEWSLETTERS:

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
OCTOBER 2015
SEPTEMBER 2015

Earlier editions:

October 10, 2014 (400kb)
November 4, 2014 (425kb)
November 25, 2014 (580kb)
December 18, 2014 (843kb)
Copyright © 2016 Madame Mars Project/Documentary Film Institute, All rights reserved.


Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list

Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp
VISIT OUR WEB SITE OR FIND US ON