There are two schools of thought in the world on extra-terrestrial life coming from people who think seriously of such things. One is that the universe is teeming with life, yes… teeming. A good majority of folks these days think the universe is lousy with life forms. The second theory is that here on Earth life is a rare and possibly singular event. Either of these conclusions are quite a leap of faith for lack not only of evidence, but for opportunities to even discover any of the evidence needed to support either assertion. You see, the universe is spread out in a big way. It takes light from Earth a bit over 4 years to reach the nearest star to our sun Alpha Centauri, meaning that any astronomers at Centauri who might be peering out in our general direction see us as we were 4 years ago. So if it takes light that long to get to our nearest neighbor, you can imagine how long it would take our fastest, newest spacecraft to reach there. Using technologies not even mature enough to consider actually using, it still could take us 40+ years just to reach that nearest star… and that’s probably a liberal estimate.

So apart from someone developing a hyper-warp drive which can surpass the speed of light (which they tell me is not only impossible but pose an awful lot of other difficult circumstances) or someone at SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) picks up a faint and 25 year old signal coming from Vega (see the film Contact for reference), it would seem for the time being we are stuck having to search our own neighborhood.

About 30 years ago the outlook for life in our own solar system seemed bleak. The moon was as desolate as one could imagine and Mars when spied by Mariner 4 for the first time, up-close (see above), shocked and disappointed many with a surface that seemed more akin to our moon than with Earth. Gone were all the dreams of Martians directing canals to their great cities or even the hope of a Mars rat scurrying across the red dunes. In addition to this, the assumption was that the rest of the Solar System was hopelessly cold and unworthy of hosting even the smallest of microbes. The gas giants were surface-less hostile environs, most bodies lacked breathable air of any kind and Venus was so hot it would immediately fry anything hoping to eek out a living on its surface. Finally, after the Viking landers determined Mars to be lifeless in the 70’s (in what many now call a flawed experiment) most gave up hope and began seeing the Solar System as nothing more than a place filled with mostly cold lonely destinations offering mankind little more than an ultimate challenge of survival away from home. That was until Voyager sped by Jupiter and its moons a few years later and a small world most have never even heard of, named Europa, held out a glimmer of hope to those in the know.

After returning the first images of Europa’s surface riddled with ridges, cracks and what looked like considerable geological activity (see above wallpaper, actually taken by the Galileo not Voyager) many began to speculate these features must be the result of a vast underground ocean which causes stress on the outer “shell” and causes it to crack. This theory was propped up further when Galileo arrived at Jupiter in the 90’s. Much better resolution images revealed much greater detail including what appeared to be “icebergs” in a large region that from a distance appeared to look like shattered glass. You could easily see where one “berg” broke off from another and floated a distance away by some means (see below). This makes many as sure of the underground ocean on Europa as you can get without actually drilling down through the icy crust and plunking down into the wet core.

So if we have a moon made largely of water ice, who is being internally heated by tidal forces coming from Jupiter, we can almost assume that much of this body would be melted ice as you move down from the rock-hard frozen surface toward the warm center… and… one can assume that somewhere in between hot in the middle and cold on the surface, there may be a large zone of warm waters as cool and warm as that found on any Hawaiian beach. Meanwhile here on Earth, we have found that life survives nearly any hostile environment from 200 degree heat vents of acid water on the ocean floor to microbes found frozen in Antarctica. The theory goes, if life survives in hell on Earth why not a comparable heaven on Europa?

I recently posted the existence of this blog to another forum of serious researchers at www.unmannedspaceflight.com and since have had a few terse comments posted here (which I have now edited as of July 2007). My intention in posting there was to have these people take a look and see if maybe I was getting anything wrong or taking too broad a liberty with extending some images to fill the proportions of a wallpaper image. What I have had instead is a few people angry with me that I didn’t credit certian people enough for some of the fine work they have done. The one example that I would really agree with was the Venus Projection image i colorized. Don P. Mitchell really did some extraordinary work on re-translating the old Venera data into those images used and I removed his credit from the color version which was water-marked. I left it in the original B&W image on the post, and linked to him in the text… but the wallpaper was void of any credit back to him and I have repaired that.

Some other comments have been made about other usage and I guess I am feeling like it starts to get silly. The flash thing at the top picks from about 30 random images and apparently one of them was an image that someone had worked on. Now, I can remember staring at these places when I was in Junior High School and the image I used up top was nearly identical to this image I have been told was produced by a freelancer more recently. You see, NASA image are famously copyright free as the missions are paid through government funds… or taxes. So the trick here is to know when it is NASA free and not NASA free. When I made many of these wallpaper images I was not sharing them on a blog and didn’t know I would one day. So I wasn’t taking notation on where I found the original and I wasn’t looking to see if anyone was claiming credit.

So, if you are one of these people whose materials I may have unintetionally lifted… please keep in mind this is non-profit, I do this in the interest of public interest of space exploration and that I admire the work you do very much. Just drop me a line and I will brand most anything with your credit and update the files. As a matter of fact, many of these freelancers maintain their own websites containing awesome galleries of images rarely seen by mainstream media so I am thinking adding some of these sites to a nice links page could be a great resource as well. One great example I recently found is this one for Mars Rover images: MER Imagery run by James Canvin.

From now on I will try to take note of where I am getting these things and run a credit and provide a link. The more the merrier.

In 1977 George Lucas released Star Wars and in it was featured the now infamous Death Star space station which was justly destroyed in the films final scene. That same year Voyager 1 was launched from Earth on its way to the outer solar system. On its way through the Saturnian system it relayed back images of a moon that bore a striking resemblance to Lucas’s own vision of the Death Star.

The only feature that really makes the resemblance complete is the presence of the Herschel crater which, like the Death Star, occupies almost 1/3 the moon’s own diameter. The central peak, which often occurs on larger sized impacts, also makes for a good stand in for the giant laser turret that destroys planets. With results of the Voyager mission streaming in a few years after the film became a smash hit and just a few months after the release of “Empire Strikes Back” one has to wonder if anyone at mission control uttered the words, “That’s no moon”.

However, while the circular feature on the Death Star destroys other worlds, Mimas’s giant circular feature nearly destroyed its own self. The crater is so large in comparison to the size of the moon itself it is believed that it was quite close to shattering the small moon into many bits which maybe could have resulted in even more rings for Saturn. As it is there are fractures on the opposite side of the moon which some suggest may be stress lines from that same impact and show evidence that the moon did start to become unhinged. Proportional to the size of the body itself, this is the largest crater in the Solar System with only Mars’s moon Phobos coming close with its Stickney crater.

During the cold-war between America and the Soviets the real race was to the moon, but once that race was won a lesser race began to see who would master Mars exploration. After an unbelievably long series of failed Soviet missions to Mars — America managed to take the lead position in Mars exploration as well, with the Mariner and Viking missions. So the Soviets turned their eyes to our other neighbor, Venus, which seemed to garner very little attention from America apart from a few flyby missions. The Russians had Venus all to themselves and really didn’t have to be too concerned with anyone beating them to the punch.

So during the early 70’s the Soviets managed to be quite successful with multiple Venera missions to Venus which included various flybys, orbiters, radar mapping of the surface and even multiple landings on the surface. Some of the missions had failed, but most completed their missions and we have the above color images to prove it. Recently though, I stumbled across these projections of the above images which I have never seen before.

Someone who knows about such things, Don P. Mitchell (see more on his blog mentallandscape.com) had returned to the original data sent to us by the Venera spacecraft from over 30 years ago and with new computing techniques, managed to reveal to us Venus anew. Instead of just looking at some stones and tiny hints at what a Venusian sky might look like, these projections show what it might actually look like walking on the surface of Venus. The main part of the image above is a composite from spherical projections, which are seen at the top-right, remapped to perspective projections. The way the projection works is the closer you get to the very center of the image, the less accurate the representation may be. However, there is evidence in the data to assume most of what you see here even at the very center where the data was at most thin, is still fairly accurate.

Unfortunately the new projection images were only in black and white and i really missed what seemed to be really fascinating color from the original Venera images… so I tried to colorize it to match the originals.

This interpretation is artistic and not based upon any data other than looking at the original images and trying to assume some of those colors back into Don’s black and white image.