A day on Mars is about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth, so astronomers have a word for that unit of time. They call it a sol, from the Latin word for sun. NASA scientists refer to and the day before the current sol as yestersol. They tried...
carrot-cruncher n.— «Carrot-munchers 1; global confectionery giant 0. For millions of people around the world, Sunday’s climbdown by the makers of Mars Bars was a particularly sweet success. I use the term “carrot-munchers” affectionately, being...
million-mile screwdriver n.— «“Sometimes fixing it is hard at this distance,” said Cox, who is now deputy team leader for the Mars Exploration Rovers. “You find a way to work around it,” what she calls the “million-mile screwdriver.”» —“Goodbye...
taffy-pull terrain n.— «This Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) image shows an example of the extremely odd, seemingly scrambled layered rocks exposed by erosion near the deepest part of the deepest basin on Mars, Hellas. This...
pluton n.— «If the ideas are approved at the general meeting of the IAU in Prague next week, schoolchildren will, in future, have to learn that the solar system has 12 planets: eight classical ones that dominate the system—Mercury, Venus, Earth...
Goldilocks effect attrib.— «Comparative geology between Earth, Venus and Mars. And, hopefully, possibly answering questions where climate and geology are interrelated, like the “goldilocks effect” where Venus is too hot, Mars is too cold, and the...