Main research

The main research document that was used by myself was NASA's main website, as it had up to date news on the progression of the MAVEN mission and her sister missions, along with the information about the missions, it is a fantastic resource of photographs and diagrams of the missions progress, simulations on the missions orbit track and just spectacular images of space and mars.

there was an interesting article in the november issue of new scientist that spoke about catastophic events in space and our universe, talking about how allot of things are just part of cycles but as they are on such a large scale they look so violent, but they are just appart of the life and death of plannets and stars, it rang quite true to the tangent that i had decided to explore of the MAVEN missions results and findings being less than favourable for us as a planet.

i researched into the claims behing the end of the Mayan calender which happens on the 21st of spetember, mainly looking at how it has been recived by us as a society, which to be fair has been met with sceptical veiws and more humour than anything else, people are so sure of the falcity of this doomsday claim i have found an abundance of adertisements using it as a basis for said campaigns, things such as the lynx final edition , if adertisement companies felt tht it would heavily offend people it would of never been touched as a topic

on the flipside to that aswell i watched a few episodes and read a few reveiws about a show on national geographic entitled "doomsday preppers" in which people where genuinely preparing for all manner of doomsday to occur in their lifetimes, things such as nuculear attacks, weather disasters to things as farfetched as the rapture and a zombie apocalypse, it shows the cautious side of the human condition that allows some form of fear to take a hold of us and to calm that we do everything we could to preevent it

i looked into some social events that have happend recently to show how maybe the masses may react to unfavourable news that may be given by governemt parties or even reasons why information is withheld, things as simple as ignorance being bliss. the events i speak of however are not pleasent, i looked into things such as mass genocides in africa that happen quite regularly to things such as the riots in britian last year, i wanted to explore the darker side to the human condition things we do when we think we wont get caught or when mass panic insues such as maybe a broken cease fire  or senseless violence and police brutality

i felt at this point maybe i was going off topic a little too much and decided to read over my rambelings and research and take forward what was applicable to the essay.

i am as always concious that the essay could become a collage of quotes, which is something i am uncomfortable with, i like the vast majority of my essays to be my own words and am not a big fan of "beefing" up an essay with long winded quotattions, when used to explain a point or back up an opinion that is fine, but i think i will have to maybe set a limit of words or quotations i am willing to use.

i also decided very early on the website Wikipedia will not take any part in anything to do with my essay, wiki is open to interpretation and can carry fals information.

Approach to research before beginning essay

Once the subject of my essay was chosen i decided the best way for me to go about setting out a structure, was to completely waffle for about 400 words to see what kind of ideas pilled out from my head and what tangents i could explore within then that would make some sense.

i decided to use for my essay the MAVEN mission to mars which will launch early 2013

from my rambelings i managed to find a tangent that really stood out to me and allowed me to speculate on things not just related to MAVEN or video games, i decided to use the mars mission in a looser way than i would of usualy considered. instead of basing my essay solely around this scientific endavour, i used it as a basis for speculation into what would happen if the findings that it retrived were unfavourable for our planet and how we as people may react and government reaction.

i have now bullet pointed topics i wish to discuss in the essay