Category: Red Planet Pen

Welcome to The Red Planet Pen. This is a collection of articles written by Nicole on a variety of topics of interest to educators and students.

SLC4 The Comeback Kid (Issue #35)

Guest blog by Dale Hammond This following describes how a California launch facility and a pair of accidents there spoke less about failure and more about the resilience and perseverance of human efforts in orbital space and beyond. Accidental failure occurred not once but twice in the same place within a span of just eight

Read More
It’s Never too Late to Fulfill Your Childhood Dreams (Issue #34)

Guest Blog by Bob Bruner Bob Bruner is an amateur scientist that has attended all the Case for Mars conferences given by the Mars Underground in the 1980’s and 1990’s and joined the Mars Society at its founding.  This story is a case of an amateur scientist actually having an impact on NASA decisions for its next big mission

Read More
What Does The Mars Society Do? (Issue #33)

By: Nicole Willett The latest episode of Neil DeGrasse-Tyson’s Star Talk, featuring, Bill Nye, President of The Planetary Society, Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator, and Astrophysicist, Dr. Michael Shara, was chock full of great information and insight.  While watching, my heart ached for our civilization to understand the importance of a manned mission to Mars.  Charles

Read More
The Curious Case for Methane on Mars, methane and active organics discovered on Mars (Issue #32)

  By:  Nicole Willett On December 16, 2014 at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco, a panel of scientists working on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity Rover data announced what we have all been waiting decades to hear.  John Grotzinger stated unequivocally, “…there is methane occasionally present in the atmosphere of Mars

Read More
3-D Printing on Mars (Issue #30)

3-D Printing on Mars 3-D Printing, what is it and what is all of the hubbub? A very simple analogy of 3-D printing would be if you imagine a regular printer, printing ink onto paper and going back and forth layering the ink on the paper thousands of times until you build up a three

Read More