Mars Has a National Anthem ?

Chrispy has been doing a lot of old newspaper researching. I have found a lot of things that are amazing, but this one pretty much takes the cake.

It does not appear to be a ruse, or if it is, many authorities looked at it with some curiosity. One seems to have been Arthur Conan Doyle, by then a convinced and credulous believer of all things psychic.

The "Mrs. James" seeems to be the key in this, and Mrs. Robinson was none too happy about the whole situation, as will be seen below. If there was sexual component to all this Martian moaning, the news was not forthcoming.

A little more digging, and the conclusion of this was pretty quick.

"Mars Remains Silent, After Radio Message. Dr. Mansfield Robinson of London Insists He Knows People Up There Who Want to Talk to Him.

"LONDON--Small ears and long antennae in England strained in vain Wednesday to catch a return message from the big eared folk of Mars, to whom a wireless message was dispatched early Wednesday morning.

"Dr. Mansfield Robinson, author of the message, who professes acquaintance with the Martians through telepathic means, clings stoutly to his faith in the possibility of interplanetary conversations. He admits that no response was received, but insists that his friends up yonder are anxious to exchange good wishes with him. ..."

"In the meantime Mrs. Robinson, wife of the doctor, remained an exasperated woman, shooing away reporters. ... She declared boldly that the experiment was nonsensical."

Source: Albuquerque Journal
Oct. 25 & 31, 1928

(http://weeklywire.com/ww/11-02-98/alibi_skeleton.html)

Martian Weirdness!

In several days, Chrispy will be discussing Lovecraft and Percival Lowell on the HPLblog. Lowell (and others) tried to understand the illusions and oddities they saw through their state-of-the-art telescopes and technology, but they often got it wrong. - You play the game, you pay the dues. - Now, a century or more later, is NASA fumbling or figuring it out?
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"Don't be fooled – it's just an optical illusion", NASA scientists say!

The Martian "trees" in this image are dark basaltic sand pushed to the surface of sand dunes by sun-heated solid carbon dioxide ice (or dry ice).

Sand dunes form a nearly complete ring around Mars' north pole and are covered by a thin layer of reddish Martian 'dust' and patches of dry ice.

In the Martian spring, the sun warms the ice, causing it to sublimate (a kind of evaporation) directly into vapor. "What we think is happening is that the dark sand is sliding down the bright frosted portion of the dune," Hansen told SPACE.com.

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Chrispy is waiting to hear what Richard C. Hoagland has to say about this one! :)

At the Mountains of Mars: Icy Madness?

^Antarctica^
^Mars^

A century after Lovecraft's dalliance at Upton's telescope and meeting Percival Loweel, another Brown University professor makes news.

Using radar from an orbiting spacecraft to penetrate the hidden recesses of Mars, planetary prospectors have uncovered vast reserves of water-ice buried beneath rocky debris. The ice resides in hilly sections of the Red Planet’s southern and northern mid-latitudes and amounts to the largest reservoir of frozen water outside of Mars’ polar regions. The ice could be equal to as much as 10 percent of the volume of frozen water in the planet’s polar ice caps.

Jack Holt of the University of Texas in Austin ... & Jim Head of Brown University in Providence, R.I., describe the radar evidence for the buried ice deposits in the Nov. 21 Science and in an upcoming Geophysical Research Letters.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/38784/title/Water-ice_deposits_found_beneath_Martian_hills

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Evidence is building that microbial life forms NOT on the surface of a planet (or moon) but a few miles beneath the surface where temperatures are above 250 F and the pressure makes steam remain a liquid. Iron, sulfur, and organic molecules, make the primordial soup and from thence the microorganisms percolate to the surface. Once at the surface, such as Old Faithful in Yellowstone, or a deep sea vent, they leak out, engage the new environment as exophiles, and begin combining into complex bacteria, yeasts, molds, and so forth until more and more complex life forms.

We have examples of the same funtions of life - eyes, teeth, all the way to large scale organisms- being created on Earth multiple places and multiple epochs. If it happened here, over and over, each time a meteor wiped out life, it is happening on other worlds, other solar systems, and in other galazies and times. The laws of chemistry and physics seem to be consistent throughout our 13+ billion years and everywhere we look.

Lovecraft & Mars: Mars Had Water !

Lovecraft was keenly interested in astronomy and Mars. He frequently wrote of Mars inhis columns in the local newspaper and met Percival Lowell who believed that mars had water. Lovecraft did not.

Now, it seems that 100 years later, we have evidence that there was an ocean on Mars! If so, the eldritch gods walked upon the surface, and perhaps 2 billion yeras ago Cthulhu had a brother under the Martian Ocean !!




MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. - NASA astrobiologists at the University of California, Berkeley have discovered evidence supporting the presence of large oceans of liquid water on early Mars.
One of the most obvious surface features on Mars is a large plain surrounding the north pole that resembles a sediment-filled ocean basin with shoreline-like features.

The scientists' research is scheduled to be published in the June 14 issue of Nature magazine.

"This work strongly supports the idea that there were large standing bodies of water on the Martian surface," said Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., which co-funded the study. "Interpreting this topography as an ancient northern ocean could have a great impact on current and future Mars exploration," he added.

Scientists calculate that on Mars, an initial shift of 50 degrees from today's pole would be sufficient to disrupt the shoreline.

If a flood of water had filled an ocean at the northern pole on Mars about 3 billion years ago, its mass might have been enough to shift the pole 50 degrees to the south. Once the water disappeared, the pole could have shifted back.