Today’s comic seems a bit out of place in the scheme of things when looking at Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. Mostly because Part 2 was unplanned and reactionary to the recent AGU press conference, and originally the lonely martian was going to usher in today’s strip. I was also in a weird [...]
View Part 1 Here Yesterday at a press conference at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting, members of the SAM* team reported on their initial findings. This is the moment we had all been waiting for. The verdict? The instruments work, and the dirt on Mars is very similar to other dirt on Mars. Good night, [...]
I’m not usually one to gloat, but I told you so. Last week’s big announcement that the Mars Curiosity Rover had found something incredible on Mars was a big misunderstanding. Turns out that when NASA said they had made an “earth-shattering” discovery—”one for the history books”—they were talking about the whole Curiosity mission. Which sounds [...]
I’m already way late on the martian blueberry game when I decided to sit down and draw this continuation of the Martian Chronicles*, which references last month’s unceremonious upstaging of the Curiosity rover by its older brother (8 1/2 years now!) Opportunity. The short story, years ago, when Opportunity first landed, it found the ground [...]
Photographs of the surface of Mars are beginning to trickle in from the newly deployed Curiosity rover—as well as photos of its descent. Judging by the most recent, first color photograph, it looks like the protective lens caps are still on, so don’t mind the fuzziness. Lens caps or not, Curiosity won’t be seeing any [...]
Congratulations to the MSL team and NASA JPL for the most flawless execution of an utterly insane plan. Our species has landed a goddamn truck on the surface of another world using a parachute and a flying crane. There are no words. The excitement in the control room as each stage went off was contagious, [...]
The Martians are back! If you recall, their first appearance was in a flash-forward comic—a fever dream of what manned explorations of Mars could become. So today there are more of them, but their grasp of English is a bit flawed (Or is it, held-up-mirror-to-popular-culture?). I know there are many questions, plot holes, inconsistencies, and [...]
In late November 2011, NASA’s Curiosity rover was loaded into an Atlas V rocket and sent on its merry way to Mars—an eight- month journey through space. Armed to the teeth with an impressive array of scientific equipment, Curiosity will carry out a very specific mission: examine the Martian surface for signs of life. This [...]