APSI in media

This is a collection of selected articles where APSI’s experts have been in the public eye. The list is by no means exhaustive—for a comprehensive list, go through the APSI activities list. For your convenience, all titles and texts below have been translated into English.


Kaleva: “The Per­se­ve­ran­ce rover has a six and a half meter head start – planetologist Petri Kostama from Oulu was fascinated with the sounds of wind on the surface of Mars” (March 27th 2021, Pekka Rahko)

  • Petri Kostama was interviewed about doing Mars research and the planet in general.
  • Kostama hopes that Perseverance will find rock faces [i.e., vertical walls] with varying layered deposits. ‘That could help us get a grip on the different time periods of the red planet, and the wetter and hotter history of Mars’, he reflects. Kostama followed the Perseverance landing closely in real time on the internet live stream. He was impressed by the sounds recorded by the probe. ‘It was marvellous to hear the wind on the surface of Mars!’ “

Sina Technology: Chang’e 5 Moon sample return mission countdown (November 17th, 2020)

  • Article detailing the Chinese lunar research program and the upcoming Chang’e 5 sample return mission. They used APSI infographics to illustrate the historical lunar landing locations.
  • Automatic translation: “[Chang’e 5] is to be launched at the end of 2020. The landing area is near the Rümke Mountains, a new location completely different from the previous Apollo and Luna missions. The plan is to bring back 1 to 2 kg of lunar samples. The moon sampling returns to a new era! This return dream will be realized by Chang’e-5 for the first time, and it is worthy of the attention and expectation of all our children of China!
  • Sina corp. has the most visited news site in mainland China with tens of millions of hits each day. This was probably the most extensive media visibility in APSI history.

Äänekosken kaupunkisanomat: “The stargazer” (August 29th, 2019, Riina Nygren)

  • An personal article about Teemu Öhman in his home town newspaper.
  • “Space. It is hard to comprehend, even for a professional. And that is what intrigues Teemu about it. ‘It is just so extremely cool. With a small telescope you get to see photons that are millions of years old. The same lights that hit your retina started their journey when humans were still on the savannahs of Africa plucking fleas from each other’s fur.’

Kaleva: “Waves of water on the ancient Mars” (Heidi Aisala-Aalto, May 6th, 2018)

  • Soile Kukkonen was interviewed about impact craters, giant canyons and large volcanoes on Mars.
  • ” ‘In order to understand the history of Mars, we need to know what happened there, and especially where and when.’ – – – ‘Previously people thought that small impact craters were not suitable for figuring out geologic time. In my work I showed that they are as useful for research as the big ones.’

The Brown Daily Herald: Brown researchers write analyses of multi-ring lunar basin(Elena Renken, Nov. 8th, 2016; WBM)

  • Teemu Öhman was interviewed about the recent studies of Orientale basin.
  • Studies use gravity field data from GRAIL mission to describe, model subsurface structure of Orientale basin.” – – – ” ‘Previously researchers only had photographs and topographical data available to them’, said Teemu Öhman, earth and planetary scientist at the Arctic Planetary Science Institute. ‘Compared to earlier theories, these new analyses are much more believable’, he added.

Suomen Kuvalehti: “A hole the size of an asteroid: Even the basics are off in the know-how of general journalists when it comes to topics in science” (Pasi Kivioja, Oct. 7th, 2016; WBM)

  • Excerpts from a new book on weird science journalism experiences by several authors, including Jarmo Korteniemi.
  • Jarmo Korteniemi is a journalist specializing in astronomy. He asks in a recent book what it would feel like if you read the newspaper sports section and read about ‘the world cup of bicycle cycling’, or ‘how Ronaldo beat the chess match with a hook shot at the end’? I guess that a journalist writing such crap would find his talents being needed elsewhere in the organization, away from the writing desk. According to Korteniemi, articles about space are full of such mistakes. Even the basics are often off. Reporters come up with neologisms whose meanings are a total mystery. They write about ‘space satellites’, while they never mention ‘atmosphere planes’. And what in the world is a ‘telescope spy glass’?” – – – “The know-how of general reporters has indeed a hole the size of an asteroid. It should be pathed.

Lakeuden Aviisi: “The largest crater lake in Europe – Lappajärvi is a centre for geoturism” (Jokiaho T., Sep. 4th, 2016)

  • Teemu Öhman was interviewed about Lappajärvi impact structure and the planetary image archive transferred to Lappajärvi. Illustrations by Jarmo Korteniemi.
  • ” ‘If the Lappajärvi impact would happen today, its consequences would reach the entire country in an instant. In mere fifteen minutes after the impact, a hurricane force pressure wave blowing at 51 meters per second would rip away all the roofs in Helsinki, and blow down a third of all trees there.’

Yle Pohjanmaa: “The meteorite came from the same direction” – Nasa’s rare planetary images end up at the shores of a crater lake (Antti Kettumäki, June 14th, 2016; WBM)

  • Marko Aittola was interviewed about the former NASA planetary image archive, which was transferred to the shores of the Lappajärvi impact structure.
  • “‘This is a self-evident confluence, since the materials are similar on Earth and the planets. Planetary craters were studied in Oulu [where the images used to reside], and now we are at the shores of a crater lake.’ Marko Aittola, a spcialist from the Arctic Planetary Science Institute, continues: ‘It’s a clear connection’

Iltalehti: “Research showed that the two Suvasvesi craters in Kuopio were formed in two separate impacts. Even nuclear bombs would have played second fiddle” (Jenna Heino, May 5th, 2016; WBM)

  • Teemu Öhman was interviewed about the age determination of the Suvasvesi ”false” doublet craters.
  • 750 million years ago there was not yet any life on dry land. Nobody knows what the landforms were like then. What we do know is that it was a big explosion. ‘The asteroids that formed the [two] craters were big boulders, a few hundred meters across [each]. It would have been a hefty kaboom. Nobody would have enjoyed being in Kuopio at the time. The airborne pressure wave and the seismic wave in the ground would have reached the city and wreaked havoc.’ Öhman paints a picture: ‘Even a big nuclear bomb would have nothing on these impact explosions.’ “

Tekniikka & Talous: “Rocks of the sky” (Teemu Subin, 16.4.2014; WBM)

  • Jarmo Korteniemi was interviewed about the reality of mining asteroids.
  • ‘These visions are all about gold rush enthusiasm, even though all we have is remote images and a few radar measurements. As of now, no probe has ever even turned a rock over on an asteroid, let alone split it in two and checked out what is actually inside. Or drilled into the bedrock under the dust for that matter’, says Korteniemi. He is a specialst on Mars and the Moon. He emphasizes that even though these two celestial bodies are the best understood, after Earth of course, it is still unknown what mineral deposits might lay below their surfaces.

Abbreviations:

WBM = Wayback machine, Internet archive