The new Mars rover was named Curiosity because it hopes to answer one of the greatest questions of modern man: Are we really Martians?
A few billion years ago, Mars may have been a planet covered with oceans. We’re not sure what happened (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show), but we do know that the liquid has mostly burned away. Curiosity will probe the soil that they left behind in order to look for tiny fossils.
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Asteroid impacts are rare, but they can cause incredible harm (look what one did to the dinosaurs!). In 1908, one of them flattened 800 square miles in the Russian countryside. What would have happened if it had hit a major Western city instead?
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We’ve heard of Icelandic volcanoes affecting planes and even meteors hitting people, but this is the first time we’ve herd of a meteor shower grounding planes, but that’s what happened right here in the US: Authorities grounded firefighting aircraft that were battling an out-of-control wildfire in Colorado Springs.
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That asteroid that hit the earth 13,000 years ago was a killer, all right–it triggered an ice age that wiped out most of the large animals on Earth. Melted glass buried deep within the Earth at sites around the world confirms the theory that a comet or meteor was responsible.
In the June 12th edition of the Los Angeles Times, Thomas H. Maugh II writes: "The Younger Dryas event began about 12,900 years ago and lasted about 1,300 years.
"The period is named after the alpine-tundra wildflower, Dryas octopetala, which spread southward during the period. Average temperatures during the period dropped by as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit in Europe, perhaps a little less in North America.
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