I am leaving town to visit relatives and to see Tom Paley in concert, so The Celestial Monochord will be quiet for several days. But I thought I’d show you this image from the European Space Agency, showing water ice in the floor of a crater on Mars. It’s very cool and the press release about it is worth reading.
But part of what interests me is that I know of the image from only two sources: a friend who emailed it to me to ask "Is this real?" and from the latest issue (October) of Sky and Telescope. If the picture got wider press in the United States, I completely missed it. It’s water. On Mars. Do I have a conspiratorial disposition, or would this have been utterly unavoidable in the United States if it had been taken by NASA, which has made so much fuss lately about its own search for water on Mars?
I’m not trying to dissapoint you, but from where i sit, that looks like mercury, the chemical, not the planet, anyway, yeh, it looks like mercury