Month: July 2012

Shortly after midnight on Earth August 6, the Mars Science Laboratory rover named “Curiosity” is scheduled to complete its 8-month journey with an intricately choreographed daytime descent into Gale Crater on Mars.

Raymond Arvidson, James S. McDonnell Distinguished Washington University Professor, and graduate student Abigail Fraeman will be among the 270 or so planetary scientists who have gathered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena CA to hold their collective breath during the complicated landing maneuver and then cooperate in giving Curiosity the best possible scientific start to its two year mission.   Arvidson has participated in every Mars landing since Viking 1 in 1976 except the 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission, and is a “participating scientist” for this mission.

Continue reading Life on Mars? Mars rover Curiosity will be on the lookout

The mastodon, that huge elephant-like creature that symbolizes the Ice Ages for many of us, is once again part of an archeological controversy concerning the origin of native Americans.

Before their extinction about 10,000 years ago, mastodons roamed North America for about 2 million years.  Missouri was no exception.  In fact, when Albert Koch, Ph.D. unearthed a nearly complete skeleton in the 1840’s for display in his St. Louis Museum, he named it “Missourium.”

The site that Koch dug near Kimmswick has yielded many more mastodon skeletons, as well as the bones of other ice-age ‘mega-fauna’ such as giant sloths, giant beavers, and dire wolves.  But the discovery by Russell Graham in 1980 of a carefully crafted stone spear-point touching a mastodon bone caused that site to be preserved as Mastodon State Historic Site.

Continue reading Mastodon State Historic Site is link to prehistory in Missouri