My weekend begins…..a leisurely two days where I do anything NOT related to politics…….

Remember War of the Worlds…….a Martian invasion began when Mars was at its closet point to the Earth…..well guess what?  It is close….again…….

The red planet is coming in for a close-up with our night sky: As Sky & Telescope reports, Mars will be closer to Earth this month than it’s been since the end of 2007, appearing bigger and brighter in the night sky for the middle two weeks of April. It hits its “opposition”—the point at which it’s opposite the sun—on Tuesday, and zooms closest to Earth the following Monday, April 14.

For context, NBC notes that Mars’ elliptical orbit can take it as much as 250 million miles from Earth, while on April 14 that distance gets down to 57 million miles. “These opportunities only come about every two years,” says Sky & Telescope’s senior editor. “Most of the time, Mars is pretty darn far away.” For sky watchers in the southeast, the red planet is the brightest object in the sky this month; it appears as a yellow-orange color.

When Mars comes into range then maybe we can explain this………..

Is there life on Mars—and has it left its lights on? A strange blip of light in a photo snapped April 3 by NASA’s Curiosity rover has excited UFO enthusiasts, the Houston Chronicle reports. While experts suspect a pixel problem, some believe the light shining upward signals Martians. “This could indicate there there is intelligent life below the ground [that] uses light as we do,” writes the editor of UFO Sightings Daily. “This is not a glare from the sun, nor is it an artifact of the photo process.”

The mysterious light, spotted in a photo taken by the rover’s right-hand navigation camera in a new area being studied known as the Kimberley, does not appear in the photo taken by the left-hand camera, suggesting the “light” is actually a speck of lost data, reports NBC News. It notes a photo taken the day before, again by the right navcam, shows a similar light that the left again did not capture. Whatever it is, the buzz about the blip shows that people are examining the rover photos very closely. An imaging expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory shares his theory: A “cosmic ray hit”affected Curiosity.

But wait!  There is an answer to the light mystery……….

NASA has offered a few more explanations for a strange beam of light spotted in a photo from its Curiosity rover—and none of them involve Martians. The bright spot that has excited UFO enthusiasts is probably either “the glint from a rock surface reflecting the sun” or sunlight hitting the camera directly through a vent hole in the camera housing, a NASA imaging scientist tells Space.com. Cosmic rays hitting the camera are also a possibility, he says.

Whatever the cause, this is far from the first time such a light has appeared in images from the Mars rover. “In the thousands of images we’ve received from Curiosity, we see ones with bright spots nearly every week,” the NASA scientist says. The rover has now arrived in an area known as “the Kimberley” where four different types of rock intersect; there, it can study samples for clues to environments that might once have harbored life, the Houston Chronicle reports.

Maybe we can answer one of those big questions of life….Is There Life On Mars?