Volcanoes on the ‘Home World of Women’

Woman got the worse deal when author John Gray wrote a book titled ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.’  The point he was clearly making was about the communication issues between the sexes, but men definitely got the better deal in home worlds.  For one, Mars is kind of cold, has polar ice caps, is covered in rust and dust, has been pretty dead inside for millions of years, and is bombarded with radiation from the Sun (you can draw your own parallels to men yourself).  But Venus, with its 400 degree Celsius temperature, sulphuric acid rain, incredibly...

Mars keeps on Surprising: It has Glaciers!

As the inevitable launch of humans to Mars slowly approaches over the coming decades, we are using our best technology to study our neighbour in detail.  With multiple orbiting satellites and ground surveyors, we are slowly learning more about the geology, climate, environment, and history of Mars.  It feels as if every new discovery is a surprise, and we never expected Mars to be such a dynamic and complex world.  With science and technology improving every year, humanity is focussing efforts on the red planet.  The latest incredible discovery comes from radar data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The...

Biggest Asteroid Impact Crater Ever Discovered in Australia

We have found evidence of ancient impacts all across the Earth, from the famous Chixulub crater in Mexico to the Sudbury Basin a little bit closer to my home.  From Space the remains look nothing like craters, millions of years of sediment and growth hide the massive regions from obvious detection, but signs remain of these massive events, even after millions of years.  This week, what is possibly the largest impact crater basin ever discovered has been found in central Australia.  And it is thought to originate from the breakup of a massive 400 Km asteroid into two pieces that...