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Rosetta Probe Reveals Martian Cloud Systems
MattSparkes writes "The ESA's Rosetta probe swooped around Mars on Sunday, completing a key manoeuvre in its 10-year mission to land on a distant comet. The 3-tonne probe came within 155 miles of the planet's surface, and took some incredible images that reveal cloud systems on the planet. "At this time of the Martian year, a large fraction of Mars' atmosphere is evaporating from the southern polar cap and will migrate to the northern polar cap during nothern winter. Over most of the Martian disk one can see large cloud systems.""
You unbelievers! See how global warming on earth has now started to affect other planets!
Hmmm, let's see.
Weird Abbreviations Specifically To Emaphasize Technology In Media Environments
About five minutes.
Sorry, I'm a writer. That makes you raw material.
From: Dr. Flaorlesq Vvaerklyn, Managing Scientist-Supervisor (codename: "The Fun Guy")
Re: Status report, Project 8723F-R3381-PTV11-03, Sol-III.
Traal,
It looks like this terraforming project we initiated on Sol-III is finally moving into the stage where it will begin paying off. As you can see from this latest message (attached below), the locals are starting to figure out that their planet is habitible because we gave them a moon of reasonable size. Pretty soon, they'll work out the interplanetary space drive and the cultural embargoes will expire; I give it less than one local year after they get off-world, and they'll be easy pickings for our marketing division. They'll be in hock to us for the rest of all eternity!
I remember how expensive it was to bust up that fifth rocky planet so we could have something to throw at Sol-III, but that nickle & iron core was perfect for the job. It knocked all the light silicates into orbit, and when they coalesced into Sol-III's moon, it was heavy enough to keep the primary's core molten through tidal action, light enough to solidify completely without a liquid core of its own.
True, it's been pretty time-consuming waiting around for semi-intelligent tool users to develop from the primordial life we seeded down there, but as I've said all along, just think how long we'd have had to wait without all of the intelligent designing we've done over the years. It's slower, but still cheaper to grow up our own customers than trying to find naturally occurring ones. You know how incredibly rare habitable planets are in this galaxy. What a dump!
Anyway, it shouldn't be much more than another 600 years, local time, before they get off-world and we can start to really exploit them. The first job will be to get them to do the terraforming of Sol-II. Trust me on this one - they'll work for peanuts.
Cheers,
Lesq
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain