King Harv steps on Mars.

King Harv’s offers “coffee from absolutely everywhere,” including one surprising venue.

There are many things mankind is not meant to know about. One of these is the fact that Mars has been settled since 2002, specifically for the purposes of coffee cultivation. King Harv’s Imperial Coffees Mars to be precise.

It started long, long ago. I am the son of King Harv, well known coffee tycoon and millionaire philanthropist. I was just a recent Chemistry graduate and Software engineer who had been tinkering for years on the topic of space travel. Specifically with the use of the metal wires steaming out of the Army’s Hellfire missiles being used not for destruction, but as a dynamic bridge to the planets. Now each missile has a wire capacity of about 2.5 miles. The closest Mars would appear would be 34.8 million miles. Hence with only 13.92 million Hellfire missiles, with the wires spliced together, they could make it to Mars. Now, removing the explosive shaped charge of each missile, and extending the wire length accordingly, I figured we could get by with only 9 million Hellfire’s. The next step was where to acquire or manufacture them. Or something similar to them.

This turned out to be much easier than expected. By substituting strong fishing line for the wires, and utilizing solar wind for additional acceleration, we were able to construct a single shot fire and forget missile for under $87.00. (We utilized used fishing line). The budget did not allow for any testing, but we were confident. We just aimed that sucker at Mars one night and “boom”, you could see the giant spool of line flying out faster than you can eat a bag of habanero Doritos. Yeah, that fast. So anyway, it turned out we “forgot” that little bit about celestial mechanics and planetary movement, so we were bound to miss mars by a by millions of miles… had we not fortunately got tagged by one of them there pieces of space junk from the top secret Mercury Blue missions of the 1960s. Anyway, it hit us just right and targeted our little rocket straight to Mars, where it landed with a dignified womf and implanted its space anchor. And the American flag.

So there we were, with a strong fishing line connecting Mars to Earth, and just King Harv’s Imperial Coffees knowing about it. (it was a transparent fishing line.) Well, our plan was for us to get some decent Harbor Freight line grippers and foot by foot pull up the used Russian submarine we had purchased and converted to a space habitat. Seemed like a straight forward idea at first, but you always know something’ll come up, and it did. Our Russian friends were all for us using their old submarine, and at a killer price, but at the last minute demanded a “nuclear royalty” due to us using one of their famously reliable nuclear power plants in the sub/ ship. Now by this time I was about broke, but realized that Russians like a few things in the world besides Rubles and Vodka. A dang good cup of coffee. So we settled on giving them a perpetual 5% of our Martian coffee harvest. Fair enough. It is the red planet after all.

RTWT

HT: Sarah Hoyt (and William Jacobson) via Karen L. Myers.

You and I may not live long enough to go there, but at least we get to look at it! Go Full Screen.

HT: Vanderleun.

Mars Rover and scoop marks

NPR:

Scientists working on NASA’s six-wheeled rover on Mars have a problem. But it’s a good problem.

They have some exciting new results from one of the rover’s instruments. On the one hand, they’d like to tell everybody what they found, but on the other, they have to wait because they want to make sure their results are not just some fluke or error in their instrument.

It’s a bind scientists frequently find themselves in, because by their nature, scientists like to share their results. At the same time, they’re cautious because no one likes to make a big announcement and then have to say “never mind.”

The exciting results are coming from an instrument in the rover called SAM. “We’re getting data from SAM as we sit here and speak, and the data looks really interesting,” John Grotzinger, the principal investigator for the rover mission, says during my visit last week to his office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. That’s where data from SAM first arrive on Earth. “The science team is busily chewing away on it as it comes down,” says Grotzinger.

SAM is a kind of miniature chemistry lab. Put a sample of Martian soil or rock or even air inside SAM, and it will tell you what the sample is made of.

Grotzinger says they recently put a soil sample in SAM, and the analysis shows something earthshaking. “This data is gonna be one for the history books. It’s looking really good,” he says.

I’m betting on microbial life.

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Yahoo quotes a News Agency report of the additional locating by the Mars rover of “a small, bright object.”

NASA officials say the Curiosity rover has made its first scoop of the surface of planet Mars and has detected a bright object on the ground.

Officials said in a news release Monday that they suspect the object might be a part of the six-wheeled rover, but they won’t sample or scoop anymore until they figure out what it is.

The Curiosity has already beamed back pictures of bedrock that suggest a fast-moving stream once flowed on the planet.

The rover landed Aug. 5 and is on a two-year, $2.5 billion mission to study whether microbial life could have existed on Mars in the past.

Cigar band dropped by Captain John Carter, C.S.A.

Hat tip to Sarah Jenislawski.

Hat tip to BuzzFeed.

Avalanches on Mars’ North Polar Scarps

The Boston Globe has 35 landscape images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE) on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Meteorite of Martian origin thought to include a fossilized bacteria colony

NASA scientists are gradually becoming convinced that Mars at least used to harbor life.

The Telegraph:

A research team at Johnson Space Centre in Houston has been re-examining a meteorite that hit Antarctica 13,000 years ago, and found the most compelling evidence yet that the planet once harboured bacterial life.

The team says that microscopic crystals found in the rock are almost certainly fossilised bacteria that have many characteristics in common with bacteria found on Earth.

“The evidence supporting the possibility of past life on Mars has been slowly building up during the past decade,” said David McKay, Nasa chief scientist for exploration and astrobiology.

Impact Crater Wall

Details as small as one meter are visible in some of the 95 pages of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photos just released.

Via John Murrell.