At 10:45 19-03-01 -0500, Dan L. wrote:
>Just saw "Mission to Mars." As a treatment of science fiction in a movie, it
>isn't bad. The human drama is the thing. It seemed to be "Apollo 13" with a
>massive chunk of "2001: A Space Odyssey" at he end. There's also a dash of
>"Robinson Crusoe on Mars." There was a long slow start (a la "The Big
>Chill") to get us to care about the characters, but they pretty much stay
>cardboard characterizations.
Here's a review I wrote when it first came out:
<http://Zealot.com/reviews/archives/missionmars.php3>.
>The "Martians" are as physically impossible as most aliens. When humans
>develop enormous braincases we had better develop good strong necks or
>cantilevers or something (helium lift pockets maybe). Even under lighter
>Martian gravity there are some designs that just don't make biological sense.
But big-headed, small-bodied aliens are a _TRADITION_! It implies that
their brains have developed much more than ours, so they don't need muscles
and their bodies have atrophied.
>I know someone on the list will have looked at this. The Martian atmosphere
>is amazingly thin right? Thinner than the air at the summit of Everest isn't
>it? Thinner than the air that airliners fly through? So getting a
>rip-roaring dust storm going requires the air to move pretty fast or the
>particles of dust to be pretty fine (maybe both). A feather moves easily on
>earth, but a feather being acted upon by near-vacuum will stay wherever
>gravity puts it. So what would a Martian dust storm feel like? Weak gravity
>holding very small particles, but very thin air stirring them. Would a
>Martian wind be anything like a strong wind on earth?
It's enough to move sand dunes. Low density but high velocity. See
<http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010226.html>.
>Can you really terraform Mars? With the Martian gravity so weak, wouldn't
>any atmosphere we "make" just boil off into space? Isn't that why Mars has
>so little atmosphere now? Only heavy carbon dioxide lingered in the weak
>gravity. I'd think we'd need to use a lot of greenhouses, or smash it
>together with Venus to begin to get something like an Earth gravity.
>Otherwise, it'd be like bailing a leaky boat.
One recent suggestion is that the lack of a global magnetic field on Mars
allows the solar wind to hit Mars' upper atmosphere with full force,
breaking apart molecules and accelerating the atoms to escape velocity.
>There is a scene in Mission to Mars where the greenhouse is billowing in the
>breeze. They walk around inside with a breathable air pressure. If there
>was really a Martian air pressure outside, the greenhouse would be more like
>a rigid balloon. It wouldn't billow. But maybe it isn't a flaw. Maybe it
>wasn't billowing, but was a flapping-windmill-energy-gathering thingy. One
>advantage to not giving the audience a good look, we can't catch a flaw.
"The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind
The answer is blowing in the wind . . . "
-- Ronn! :)
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-- Ronn Blankenship
Instructor of Astronomy/Planetary Science
University of Montevallo
Montevallo, AL
Standard Disclaimer: Unless specifically stated
otherwise, any opinions stated herein are the personal
opinions of the author and do not represent the
official position of the University of Montevallo.
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