First off, an amusing piece from a reputable source of cutting edge science news – ESPN. It’s an article about the Caltech men’s basketball team, which is a far cry from the Kansases and Texases of the world where academics are an afterthought at best. Then again, those teams actually win.

In other news, some pretty interesting findings from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) mission the other day. MRO is best known for the incredible HiRISE camera, capable of spotting objects the size of a dinner plate on Mars (not that I’m suggesting dinner parties are occurring…). But MRO is stocked with other incredible instruments which produce equally valuable, if less flashy, scientific results.

Speaking of flashy results, an excuse to show one of HiRISE’s many stunning images. This one shows some sand dunes breaking out of the winter’s frost.

One of these additional instruments is SHARAD, the Mars Shallow Subsurface Radar. Hmm, that snappy will acronym is a bit of a stretch…

Anyway, by using radar, SHARAD is able to “see” a few hundred meters below the surface, interpreting dielectric constant numbers to formulate a model of what mixture of rock and ice lies beneath. Recently, SHARAD team members have made two important discoveries. First, the northern plains of Mars are layered with ice and soil, a pattern caused by period changes in the planet’s orbit. When Mars tilts strongly in its orbit (has a high precession), much of the ice in the north melts. When the precession decreases, the sunlight hitting the pole is less direct, and the ice spreads quickly. Thus, layers of soil and ice form, telling us more about Mars’ past climate and the relationship between solar input and water phases on Mars.

More interesting to me, however, is the somewhat associated finding that Mars’ interior is likely colder than once thought. The SHARAD team makes a somewhat oblique argument for this by noting the persistence of solid ice relatively far down, but it nonetheless deserves mention. Much of the continued optimism in the case for current life on Mars has relied on a warm subsurface. Although the surface is freezing, the argument goes, heat from the planet’s interior could provide warmer conditions below the surface. This may still be the true, but the case was dealt a blow with these latest findings.

Expounding on these results (which certainly need more investigation/clarification), it seems that the search for life on Mars might have tilted more in the direction of the pursuit of past life rather than the hunt for extant life forms. The search is likely becoming more akin to paleontology than to microbiology.

A good summary of both of these findings can be found here. Enjoy!