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Mars Daily
Mars missions, rover discoveries, planetary science, exploration technology, and the people, agencies, and companies shaping humanity's next destination.
Mars Daily
A meteorite that fell near the Australian town of Murchison in 1969 turned out to contain silicon carbide grains roughly 7 billion years old, meaning fragments inside that rock formed around dying stars more than 2 billion years before the Sun ignited
Silicon carbide grains inside the Murchison meteorite, which fell on a Victorian dairy town in 1969, have been dated to roughly 7 billion years old — condensed around stars that died more than 2 billion years before the Sun ignited.
How did a hilltop sanctuary in southeastern Anatolia, built with 5-metre limestone pillars around 9600 BCE, predate Stonehenge by roughly 6,000 years without metal tools, pottery, or the wheel?
Olympus Mons on Mars rises about 22 kilometres above the surrounding plains but stretches roughly 600 kilometres wide, so a climber standing on its slope would see only a gentle rise in every direction and never realise they were on the tallest volcano in the solar system
In 1846, French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier predicted the position of an unseen eighth planet from irregularities in Uranus's orbit, and when he wrote to the Berlin Observatory, they found Neptune within a single degree of his coordinates on the very first night they looked
How does a coastal tree that grows with its roots in salt water store three to five times more carbon per hectare than the tropical rainforest inland from it?
A Martian day lasts 24 hours and 39 minutes, so close to Earth's that rover teams at JPL initially tried to live on Mars time, sliding 40 minutes later each day until crews were showing up to work in the middle of the Los Angeles night
Why does a concrete recipe used in Roman harbour walls two millennia ago grow stronger in seawater, while modern reinforced concrete built to the same purpose crumbles inside 50 years?
Why does draining a waterlogged carbon store that covers just 3 percent of land surface release more CO2 each year than the entire global aviation industry?
In January 1953, Maurice Wilkins showed James Watson the DNA image produced by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling without Franklin’s knowledge, weeks before three Nature papers changed biology
Bristlecone pines growing on the White Mountains of eastern California include individuals that germinated more than 4,800 years ago, meaning trees standing on that ridge today were already centuries old when workers at Giza set the first casing stones of the Great Pyramid
In 1962, one missing overbar in an Atlas guidance equation helped send Mariner 1 off course, forcing range safety to destroy NASA’s $18.5 million Venus mission less than five minutes after launch
