Word: planetful
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...impose comic order onto moral chaos. But it has been adapted here with undue reverence. The movie cuts from World War II, where Pilgrim is a P.O.W. during the fire-bombing of Dresden, through his model suburbanite's life in Ilium, N.Y., to an improbable future on the planet of Tralfamadore, where he is doomed to pass eternity with a molestable movie star named Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine). In its elaborate structure and editing, its leaping bounds between fact and fancy, the film is like a version of Last Year in Marienbad revised for showing on Sesame Street...
...answer may lie in a theory suggested by Astronomer Bradford A. Smith of New Mexico State University and others long before Mariner 9 took off. Smith says that water may be stored as ice in the planet's northern polar cap under a thin layer of frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice. That hidden water, he says, may be released periodically into the Martian atmosphere, producing regional rains and perhaps floods to erode the arid Martian surface. Bemused scientists at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab are now calling Smith's rains Martian "monsoons...
Gyroscope. The possibility of monsoons is not as farfetched as it seems. Mars has an eccentric orbit that causes large variations in the planet's distance from the sun. The Martian north pole is currently tilted toward the sun only when the planet is also at its greatest distance, or aphelion, from the sun. In contrast, the southern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun at the planet's closest approach, or perihelion. As a result, the southern polar cap gets warm enough to evaporate almost completely each summer, releasing most of its dry ice into the atmosphere...
...slowly wobbles as it travels around the sun. Though this motion, or precession, is barely perceptible, the Martian axis leans in the opposite direction every 25,000 years, or halfway through a complete precessional cycle. When that happens, the northern polar area is angled toward the sun at the planet's closest approach, while the southern polar area, tilted away, freezes and traps the moisture. What interests Smith, however, is the orientation of the poles in between those extremes. Then, both polar regions receive equal heating from the sun. The warmer outer portions of the caps release most...
...glacier-like quantities of frozen water have accumulated in either polar cap, says Smith, enough water might be released to keep the monsoons going for centuries, and possibly millenniums, until the slow precession of the planet's axis causes one pole to begin cooling enough to draw water back out of the atmosphere and into the Martian deep freeze for another 25,000 years. Even if the monsoon theory is correct, however, many centuries will pass before visitors to Mars will have to shoot Martian rapids or brave unearthly downpours. Mars has just passed the point in its precession...