Boy It's Cold

Here is a news item from Space.com (a very good space and astronomy news site):

---- Mars Warmer than Northeast Cities

PHILADELPHIA - We're supposed to run out of degrees here tonight, with a forecast low of 0 Fahrenheit. It's annoyingly frigid as some of the coldest air in decades settles over the northeastern United States. Highs in the low 20s today. It's worse of course in Boston, where today's high was about 7.

At least it's not as bad as Mars, right?

Despite the red planet's reputation for being cold -- it's half again as far from the Sun as we are and has much less atmosphere to hold heat in -- NASA's Spirit rover is enjoying comfortable afternoon temperatures right now compared to parts of the Northeast.

Wednesday in the early afternoon at the Gusev crater it was plus 12 degrees Fahrenheit (-11 Celsius), according to the rover's infrared instrument.

At 1 p.m. Wednesday in Syracuse, N.Y. it was -4 Fahrenheit. In Mt. Washington, N.H. it was -36.

Even a Canadian would not enjoy a night outside on Mars, though. After sundown the temperature plummeted to about -130 Fahrenheit (-90 Celsius) last night, said Michael Smith of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

"For the Northeast, that record will be a little harder to break," said Keith Eggleston, senior climatologist at Cornell University's Northeast Regional Climate Center. ----

(And yet, I notice, there are still people not wearing hats or gloves. It's amazing.)

Manned Mars Mission FAQ

Looks like I've adopted the Bush Mars Plan as my "news story" to inform my inconstant readers about. Whether or not this is actually going to happen, it's a story that has grabbed me (as has the Rover story).

Here is a nice if somehow brief FAQ from Space.com about Dubya's proposal, placed in a context. It's perhaps a little too uncritical of the Dubya plan, but it is also based on his one speech and wisely doesn't speculate unduly about the somewhat more detailed info that may be in the FY2005 budget sent to Congress in February.

Either way, I think this gives readers some useful info about the plan and about the myriad questions and debates going both among the general public and within the space science community.

http://www.space.com/news/bush_plan_faq_040115.html