Last Thursday, for reasons which will eventually become clear, I celebrated Bastille Day in the shade of a rather fine if lopsided cedar of lebanon in the gardens of Bowood House. But while most of my thoughts were centred on the eighteenth century, and how we -- and the cedar -- got from there to here, it was a good day to spare a through thoughts for Mars, as well, since it marked the 40th anniversary of the Mariner 4 fly by. We have come a remarkably long way in those four decades -- from a single fly by to a small flotilla of probes in orbit and from a handful of very grainy images of craters and the first local measurement of that damnably thin atmosphere to wonderful global databases full of stunning images and reams of reasonably compelling theorising. Not to mention robot explorers capable of rolling round the surface for years at a time. It's an extraordinary achievement. Here's a nice portfolio of recent imagery provided by Nature by way of celebration. I particularly like the sunset.
In other coincidences of the calendar, it is 30 years since the Apollo/Soyuz flights, over which Jim Oberg passes a somewhat caustic eye at The Space Review. And it is sixty years since the Trinity test, which the excellent Susan Kitchens has been blogging.
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