Cold Snap Up North
Listen now
Description
NASA’s InSight Mars lander keeps daily records of weather conditions at the Elysium Planitia landing site on the red planet. Last week saw daytime highs from 8 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit; lows fell to -139 degrees. Seasons are twice as long on Mars as on Earth because the Martian year is 687 days; almost double an Earth year. Mars doesn’t have months like we have months though. Our concept is based on a lunar orbit. Mars’ moons orbit much faster – Phobos every 8 hours, Deimos every 30 hours; so well over 2,000 orbits per 30 day ‘month’ for Phobos and over 500 orbits per ‘month’ for Deimos. InSight landed Nov. 2018 on a two-year mission to better understand the interior of Mars using both surface and drilling geophysical sensors. Turning to night sky highlights this week: Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn have the morning sky at 6:00 a.m.; Venus has the evening at 6:00 p.m. We’re gaining 2.5 minutes of sunlight per day through March.
More Episodes
Published 02/29/20
Stardust discovered in a meteorite that landed in Australia more than 50 years ago is up to three billion years older than our solar system. These remnants are left over from ancient stars that populated this region of the galaxy prior to the birth of our sun, some 4.5 billion years ago. These...
Published 02/22/20
Today is Galileo’s 456th birth anniversary. His iconoclastic reputation overshadows his basic raison d’etre at the time – to make a buck. He was a struggling teacher who worked in the ‘gig economy’ of Renaissance Italy. Galileo wasn’t born to a high place in society; he wasn’t a politician, his...
Published 02/15/20