Labyrinth of Night Read Online Free PDF

radio-telescope dish; the headline of a supermarket tabloid, Weekly World News: ‘THE FACE ON MARS—A NEW SHOCKER!’ )
    SCROLL The Independent Mars Investigation Team made their findings public during the 1980s, only to be met by skepticism, and even hostility, from the majority of the space science community. Although the question of whether extraterrestrial intelligences existed was being debated and explored, most SETI research concentrated on detecting radio signals from distant stars, such as Project META in Harvard, Massachusetts (see Chapter Fifteen). The idea that evidence of E. T.s existed within our own Solar System was considered ludicrous by most experts. To its dismay, the group saw media exposure of the Face relegated largely to sensational tabloid headlines, lumped in with Bigfoot sightings and reports that Elvis Presley had returned in a UFO. PRESS ENTER, PLEASE.
    (Film clip of a CIS Proton rocket lifting off from a pad; animation of unmanned Russian and American probes coasting into orbit around Mars; footage of the first-generation Mars ship of first American-Russian manned expedition being assembled in l ow orbit above Earth near Freedom Station; footage of the landers being released from the H. G. Wells above Mars; film clips of Arsia Station in the Tharsis region being assembled. )
    SCROLL While advocates of the Face theory pushed for a return to Mars to investigate the mystery in Cydonia, renewed Mars exploration was eventually begun in the last years of the 20th century by the United States and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Unmanned probes, including NASA’s Sample Return Mission, led to the International Mars Project which landed man on the red planet on August 12, 2020 (see Chapter Two). Arsia Station, the first permanently manned base, was established by the first expedition just south of the equator, approximately 4,700 miles from Cydonia. But the reasons for the first missions had more to do with international politics than scientific inquiry, and the Cydonia enigma remained a low-priority assignment. Even with men on Mars, it was another eight years before the controversy was finally laid to rest by the first human visit to Cydonia. PRESS ENTER, PLEASE…

1. The Shinseiki
    O NE AND A HALF AU’s from the Sun, Mars glides through space, a rust-colored desert world caught between the placid blue-green beauty of Earth and the immense, multicolored maelstrom of Jupiter. On Earth, it’s early summer in the northern hemisphere, but for Mars summer has ended in the northern latitudes; frozen carbon-dioxide and water have caused the small white icecap at the planet’s north pole to expand again while, south of the equator, it is high spring and the ice pack at the south pole has all but vanished.
    As the sun rises over the central meridian, water vapor causes thin, filmy clouds to spawn in the vast canyons of the Valles Marineris, which are quickly evaporated by the new day. For a brief time the winds rise, kicking red sands into the sparse atmosphere before they reluctantly retire again, if only for a while. Mars is a slumbering world, gradually stirring from its rest; as autumn settles on the northern hemisphere and the days get colder, there will be fewer naps for the red planet. Soon the sandstorms will begin and vast curtains of scarlet, wind-borne sand will cloak much of the world, shrouding even the high caldera of Olympus Mons, the great shield volcano north-east at the Valles Marineris.
    The Martian day lasts slightly longer than Earth’s: twenty-four hours, thirty-nine minutes and thirty-five seconds. This is one of the few real similarities between the two worlds. Its atmosphere is composed principally of carbon-dioxide and has a density of seven millibars in the Amazonis Planitia, as compared to Earth’s atmospheric density of one thousand millibars at sea level. Mars has no ‘sea level’; its seas and oceans evaporated millions of years ago, and the lack of atmospheric