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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
That last panel is truefacts, folks. I took some artistic license, but otherwise it’s 100% true. As if astronauts on the ISS didn’t have enough problems with microgravity induced maladies such as headaches, bone density loss, muscle atrophy, and even blindness, they can’t even enjoy food thanks to stuffy heads. Their solution? A tactic near and [...]
Not breaking news by any means, but fascinating nonetheless. A while back I told you about some of the interesting properties of moon dust, one of which was the peculiar smell of it. Every now and then an article about outer space itself having a smell will appear, and in every one it has been [...]
Since the 1960′s, humankind has been scraping at the heavens to learn more about where we sit in the Universe. In all of human history, there have only been twelve people to ever set foot on another world. With the death of Neil Armstrong this past Saturday, that number has been reduced to eight living [...]