Video: Reasons to Settle Mars

Posted on by onespaceman2000

If you are interested in the idea of settling Mars, and the book A City on Mars has not scared you away, then you should plan on tuning into the upcoming 25-part video series by the Mars Society.

In a news release, the Mars Society defines the new series in this way:

Created for a broad public audience, each video offers a clear, accessible look at how Mars exploration drives scientific discovery, technological innovation, economic growth, and long-term planetary resilience.

I recommend you view the series, but also read the book cited above. The authors of that book seem to think we should have a Mars plan that will settle humans in the next few centuries rather than they next few decades. Or maybe we should be settling on a space station or asteroid, as suggested in the book The Giant Leap, though I expect that a society with “Mars” in its name might disagree.

I’m just trying to keep an open mind.

Stay tuned.

Movie: The Astronaut

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: The Wonder Company/Grinder Monkey

The recent film The Astronaut did not stay in theaters very long, but then again very few films do these days. Even so, if you are looking for something inspiring, such as a space adventure that takes us away from Earth, you will be disappointed. This astronaut is from the International Space Station, not Mars, so we do not even make it to the Moon.

If the trailer is not clear enough, here is the main story from Deadline:

When astronaut Sam Walker (Mara) returns from her first space mission, she’s found miraculously alive in a punctured capsule floating deep off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. General William Harris (Fishburne) arranges for her to be placed under intense NASA surveillance in a high security house for rehabilitation and medical testing. However, when disturbing occurrences begin happening around the property, she fears that something extraterrestrial has followed her back to Earth.

Without giving away the whole plot, just think of it as a gruesome ET: The Extraterrestrial. Critics were not impressed, with the Tomatometer showing only 42 percent approval. In general, a rating between 40 and 59 percent is considered mixed or mediocre, with the average film achieving something in the low 70s.

Matt Donato from Collider did not have high praise for writer/director Jess Varley’s first film:

The Astronaut has sky-high ambitions that go up in flames during the home stretch. Everything’s chugging along fine, then the tone implodes, and Varley’s command over scenes disintegrates...I haven’t seen a movie shoot itself in the foot like this in a wee bit, and that’s a shame.

The selection of films of this genre are slim, so you may have a desire to see it anyway. That’s fine, but you have been warned.

Professor Loeb is Not Convinced by NASA Statements About 3I/ATLAS

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): October 2, 2025 image of comet 3I/ATLAS as captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

Harvard Professor Avi Loeb is not satisfied with NASA’s comments this week that the interstellar object streaming through our Solar System is a normal comet.

In his blog, Professor Loeb stated:

NASA’s representatives should have emphasized what we do not understand about 3I/ATLAS rather than insist that it is a familiar comet from a new birth environment…We should not “judge a book by its cover,” because we all know about the Trojan Horse which appeared unthreatening to the guardians of the City of Troy. When monitoring an interstellar visitor, we should not fall prey to traditional thinking but scrutinize new interpretations. The public resonates with science as a learning experience, where the collection of evidence leads the way to new knowledge rather than reinforces variants on past knowledge.

Trojan Horse? That is certainly an alarming way of looking at this foreign object. Professor Loeb is not backing down one bit on his concerns, and refers back to his 12 puzzles, one of them being:

Its nucleus is about a million times more massive than 1I/`Oumuamua, an interstellar object discovered in 2017, and a thousand times more massive than 2I/Borisov, discovered in 2019, while moving faster than both, altogether with a likelihood of less than 0.1 per cent (see here and here). This suggests that it may have targeted the inner solar system rather than being drawn from the reservoir of icy rocks.

Again, using terms like “targeted” is certainly garnering a lot of interest by outside observers.

Maybe this will be settled next month with new images. Or maybe this will be a continuing controversy. Even if it goes nowhere, I think we can expect another book from Professor Loeb.

Pic of the Week: Wolf-Rayet Apep

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Dust spirals surrounding Wolf-Rayet Apep, as captured by the JWST. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Y. Han (Caltech), R. White (Macquarie University), A. Pagan (STScI))

This week’s embryonic image comes from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It shows what NASA calls “four serpentine spirals of dust” around a pair of Wolf-Rayet stars. Such stars are rare, with NASA estimating that only a thousand can be found in our galaxy consisting of hundreds of billions of stars. And binary Wolf-Rayet stars are even rarer.

NASA notes that the JWST, or Webb, provided a much better image of the spiraling dust:

Observations taken prior to Webb only detected one shell, and while the existence of outer shells was hypothesized, searches using ground-based telescopes were unable to uncover any. These shells were emitted over the last 700 years by two aging Wolf-Rayet stars in a system known as Apep, a nod to the Egyptian god of chaos...Webb also confirmed that there are three stars gravitationally bound to one another in this system. The dust ejected by the two Wolf-Rayet stars is “slashed” by a third star, a massive supergiant, which carves holes into each expanding cloud of dust from its wider orbit. (All three stars are shown as a single bright point of light in Webb’s image.)

Video: Cool Worlds Discusses Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS 

Posted on by onespaceman2000

With all the ongoing stories about interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, you may enjoy an earlier video from Cool World Labs titled “Could 3I/ATLAS Be Technological?” Columbia University Associate Professor David Kipping looks at the claims by Harvard Professor Avi Loeb that the comet is not only from another solar system, but it may in fact be a spacecraft.

Professor Kipping focuses his discussion on an earlier paper by Professor Loeb titled Is the Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas Alien Technology? The points discussed in the video are broken down into three categories: (1) trajectory, (2) speed, and (3) excessive size. In each case, he provides plenty of technical points, but the main point seems to be that the evidence is often arbitrary or contradictory. Professor Kipping also notes those occasions where the paper goes “off the rails” to make the idea of a spacecraft possible.

All of these points continue to bounce around as we learn more about the comet, but it is interesting to see the scientific community represented here by Professor Kipping doing a great job of parsing the evidence while keeping all of it professional. He made it clear throughout the video that he has great respect for Professor Loeb’s work over the years, even if this particular theory about a spacecraft does not seem plausible.

Check it out for yourself.