Martian Life Science Time Machine

This project was a set of HyperCard stacks on CD-ROM published in 1991 by the Comm Tech Lab at Michigan State University.

Some screen shots of the segment showing how the distances between Earth and Mars vary are displayed below. At the bottom of the page is a conversion of the activity to Director, which enables display on the Web. The Director version is a work in progress.

Notable:

• drag sliders to set year and month - Earth & Mars move, distance readout updates, and Mars image size updates as sliders adjusted
• show screens with planets far apart and relatively close together; note difference of Mars image sizes, implications concerning which Martian features are visible at different times
• because the orbit of Mars has a fairly high eccentricity (it is more elliptical than the relatively circular orbit of Earth), the Earth-to-Mars distance at opposition (closest approach) varies substantially