Without the sun as a guide, screwing up your inner clock is not hard to do—and it can have drastic consequences. Torturers seeking to “break” their captives often begin by using sensory deprivation to remove all sense of the passage of time. As such, astronauts are put on a tight schedule, to keep their circadian [...]
While the Mars-500 living unit looked like your grandmother’s basement (ugh, the wood panels!) it was actually a pretty robust simulation. By design, the capsule was set up to simulate all the aspects of the actual mission, which included having landing module and an indoor mockup of the Martian surface—complete with dirt and rocks. Not [...]
The downside of not being able to draw a comic every day is that any series more than 3 or 4 comics feels like it really drags on, and that the time between them is a gaping abyss. I don’t remember feeling this with Super Woo, and that even had Nadir comics in between each [...]
For anybody just jumping in, over the next few comics I’ll be covering aspects of the landmark Mars-500 experiment, which put six guys (Alexey Sitev, Sukhrob Kamolov, Alexander Smoleevskij, Romain Charles, Diego Urbina, and Yue Wang) from a variety of backgrounds—including cosmonauts, engineers, and doctors—in a mockup of an Earth-to-Mars spacecraft for 520 days. The [...]
This isn’t the first comic about a Mars-based reality TV premise. Nor is the concept so strange to me anymore. But the difference between MArs-500 and its predecessor is that the former was a real experiment—a series of experiments, in fact. The production crews are probably going through the footage as we speak. While only [...]
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, [...]
Two years ago today I sat down and drew a comic strip about NASA’s arsenic life press conference in December of 2010. I had decided before then that drawing comics about science was the way for me to cure the artistic malaise that was gripping me at the time, and the epic un-nnouncement was the perfect moment. It [...]
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 [...]