Burroughs ruined me. Reality, though, is a more magnificent desolation.
Phobos from the surface of Mars
Tiny, 11km across, and close, about 6000km away, it probably does zip across the sky fairly quickly, but it’s nowhere near as impressive as our moon. That’s an amazing photo.
I wouldn’t want to live there.
I barely want to live here as things are going.
Mars and the Moon sit in the same category of Antarctica for me. It would be cool to visit because it it is still beautiful in a desolate way, and I can see wanting to stay there for some time if you are doing science (or getting paid quite well), but, to quote the bard, not ‘the kind of place to raise your kids’.
(One of my grad school professors wintered over at the South Pole twice. He said by the time he got back to Wellington on his way home, he might as well have been standing in Times Square for the way it hit him, because he was so used to seeing the same people and places for two years.)
If you find a big volcanic lava tube in which to build the space station it might be marginally more spaceous than an Antarctic base, but the travel conditions back and forth on the Earth-Mars route would be very cramped.
Unless you invest a few billons in Aldrin cyclers, essentially space stations moving in ellipses suitable for Earth-Mars journeys and giving relative comfort.
It’s impressive in a different way.
I probably wouldn’t want to live there, but it would be a spectacular visit. I might even be tempted to go on a one-way flight.
I haven’t read Burroughs, but I think I recognize the reference to “hurtling moons”. It was mentioned in a book by Finnish astronomer Esko Valtaoja (a beardy man of PZ’s generation), who grew up reading the Chronicles of Mars in Finnish translation.
I think “hurtling” may be a popular misinterpretation of the short orbital periods. Our Moon has a much longer period, but its apparent movement in the sky is almost entirely based on Earth’s rotation instead, and therefore resembles Sun’s apparent movement.
Mars rotates about as fast as Earth, in 25 hours. Phobos (the bigger one, 20-25 km across and 6,000 km away) makes just over three rounds in that time, so it does indeed seem to make just over two rounds a day, once every 11 hours or so. That’s as close to hurtling as it gets.
Deimos (the smaller one, 10-15 km across and 20,000 km away) has an orbital period slightly longer than the Martian rotation period, and in the same direction. That means it actually takes several days to move around Mars relative to the planet’s surface!
BTW, just recently I began observing the International Space Station, which has a period of only 93 minutes, or 100 minutes if you count the effect of Earth’s rotation. Now that’s a hurtling satellite. It looks kind of mesmerizing with that rapid movement, despite being just a point of light to the naked eye.
Observing satellites as they are still illuminated by the sun as you have entered night is fascinating, but you usually need to memorise the pattern of the stars so a slow-moving satellite stands out. Most objects are not large enough to be especially bright.
The Martian moons are ‘rubble pile’ objects, but if you find a solid object you can hollow out a toroid inside and have a rotating space habitat there. Just get enough roller bearings.
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s book A City On Mars has a lot of ideas.
His purple prose was good, but ‘Doc’ Smith’s was better, and Harry Harrison’s was best.
Great opening hook:
Whenever I have the opportunity to stargaze in an area with dark skies, I always am looking for dots of light moving against the background of stars. I have no idea just which satellite I’m looking at but it doesn’t really matter. I’ve seen the space station many times as well as the shuttle, back in the day. Those were quite identifiable simply because they moved so rapidly. I’m fortunate in that it’s my generation that went from having no man-made objects in space, just like the previous 4-1/2 billion years to having many objects to spot in just 60 years.
I heard tell Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact, it’s cold as hell
And there’s no one there to raise them if you did
I’ve always been a little disappointed with the way orbital velocities are represented in SF movies and TV shows. What would it actually look life if something zipped past at a little over 17,000 mph? There was a little YouTube simulation that showed the ISS going overhead as if it was just a few hundred feet above the ground. IIRC. I also remember a passage from one of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy – Green Mars, I think – in which he described one of the Martian moons speeding past a space elevator faster than you could turn your head to follow it.
As for Musk’s nonsense about living in a shirtsleeve environment in glass domes, he’s going to get a lot of people killed if they take him seriously.
@ ^ seversky : Musk has already gotten a lot of people killed.
Source : https://futurism.com/neoscope/mothers-children-dying-musk-cuts
No doubt more will be dying now and into the future as a result of Musk’s evil racist bigotry.
Phobos or Mars or both?
Not that its actually an option – yet.
One day that may well change and we may indeed terraform Mars over many centuries and millennia as KS Robinson among many others has described and make the surface look very different albiet Phobos will still be zooming across the sky. Perhaps added to by space elevators and more.
I’d love to live in that future, to see old SF dreams and ideas made real. To help make them so. But that’s me.
Tangetially did folks hear that our robot surrogates on Mars – specifically the Perseverance rover – have observed an aurorae in the martian skies too lately?
As noted here :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-05-15/auroras-mars-nasa-perseverance/105295470
@11. michaelbarnes : I’ve heard that sung here too. (5 mins long.)
Thanks Elton John. Thankyou illustrators artists (?) Stephen McNally & Majid Adin for the powerful audio-visual epic here. ^
Just had to cross-post this from the ‘boots’ article for PZ to see after he gets back from his walk:
https://www.earth.com/news/martian-rock-spherules-look-like-a-nest-of-spider-eggs-perseverance-st-pauls-bay/
@14 StevoR
Auroras on Mars don’t look quite like they do on Earth — but they still produce a weird and fascinating light show.
A critical detail about aurorae on Mars is that they are invisible to the human eye. So yes, they don’t look like an aurora on Earth looks. They don’t look like anything at all.
Robots can see it, but only with a long exposure. The same kind of long-exposure astrophotography that shows red and green light from Earth’s atmosphere on a clear evening.
Ahem: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/planets/mars/nasa-observes-first-visible-light-auroras-at-mars/
(Maybe you could tell NASA that it is wrong in what it observed and reported)
@18
Really, John, you’re getting pedantic about this?
NASA is talking about the visible part of the EM spectrum (hence their use of the term “visible-light”, note the hyphen), not a light intensity that is necessarily visible to the human eye.
From the actual article posted by NASA, which you most clearly did not peruse, my emphasis just for you:
To elaborate on #5 lumipuna, Phobos is sufficiently low in its orbit that (by Kepler’s laws) it rises in the west and sets in the east (unlike Deimos).
That’s your fascinating fact for today, you’re welcome.
@ 19 beholder
Morales pedantic! Unheard of.
Silentbob at 21:
Indeed. That’s because it orbits faster than Mars rotates (due to being sufficiently close), while they both go in the same direction. Just like the Earth and ISS.
I can be pedantic, too! From a Burroughs quote at John’s 9:
How long are Martian months, exactly? Not very long, if they’re based on the actual moons of Mars.
According to Wikipedia (“Timekeeping on Mars”), it’s been proposed that the Martian calendar year (of ca. 687 Earth days or 669 local days) could be divided into 12 calendar months, apparently for the sake of having intermediate time units between a day and year. But why have specifically twelve 55-day months, when you could have 55 twelve-day months, or twenty-two 30-day months, or whatever you want?
Now, what if you wanted something based on local astronomy? The phase cycles of the moons (resulting from their position relative to the Sun) won’t do, because the phases rotate about as fast as the moons orbit Mars. The phase cycle is 7.67 h for Phobos and 30.36 h for Deimos. The rise/set cycle of Deimos is longer, 131 h or 5.3 Martian days, but that’s still quite short. Deimos is also rather small and inconspicuous, difficult to observe.
Phobos rises and sets on average 2.22 times during the Martian day, or every 11.12 hours. That means every second rise is about 2.5 hours earlier on consecutive days. The timing rotates backward a full cycle in between 4 and 5 days, and quite precisely two cycles in nine Martian days, which is 20 rises and 29 phase cycles of Phobos. This 9-day Sun/Phobos cycle repeats 74.3 times during the solar year. Could that be a basis for Martian month?