Star date: 05:15:99
The planet Mars has long fascinated the human race. First, telescopic observations, and later findings from the Viking spacecraft of the 1970's and Pathfinder brought the red planet into everyone's living rooms.
Today, Mars' Global Surveyor is orbiting the red planet, sending new findings to Earth, increasing our understanding of this mysterious planet. Mars Global Surveyor is in good health and all the science instruments are turned on. Earlier, the hinge which operates the spacecraft's main antenna stopped moving. The flight team has conducted all planned troubleshooting tests to analyze this antenna hinge. These tests have shown that there appears to be an obstruction that prevents the hinge from operating through its complete range of motion. Flight controllers say they can conduct normal mapping operations through February 2000 when the Mars-to-Earth geometry will again prevent the antenna, with its limited range of motion, from pointing continuously at Earth.
Mars Global Surveyor has discovered surprising evidence of past movement of the Martian crust, further evidence that ancient Mars was a more dynamic, Earth-like planet than it is today.
Scientists using the spacecraft's magnetometer have discovered banded patterns of magnetic fields on the Martian surface. The adjacent magnetic bands point in opposite directions, giving these invisible stripes a striking similarity to patterns seen in the crust of Earth's sea floors.
On the Earth, the sea floor spreads apart slowly at mid-oceanic ridges as new crust flows up from Earth's hot interior. Meanwhile, the direction of Earth's magnetic field reverses occasionally, resulting in alternating stripes in the new crust that carry a fossil record of the past hundreds of million years of Earth's magnetic history, a finding that validated the once-controversial theory of plate tectonics. Alternate explanations for the banded structure may involve the fracturing and breakup of an ancient, uniformly magnetized crust due to volcanic activity or tectonic stresses from the rise and fall of neighboring terrain.
The map also reveals that the smoother northern regions are largely free of magnetism, indicating the northern crust formed after the magnetic field of Mars died. The map also identifies an area in the southern highlands as the oldest surviving unmodified crust on Mars. This area on Mars is where the magnetic stripes are most prominent. The bands are oriented approximately east-to-west and are about 160 kilometers (100 miles) wide and 965 kilometers (600 miles) long, although the longest band stretches more than 1,930 kilometers (1,200 miles).
Look for Mars this week as a bright red light in the sky, magnitude -1.3. It will be found nearly exactly southeast at 8 pm, 25 degrees above the horizon. It will be just 3 1/2 degrees from one of the brightest stars in the sky, Spica.
Clear skies, and good viewing.
"Understanding is joyous" - Carl Sagan
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