Overview: Canals on Mars
The planet Mars, named after the Roman god of war, has always been the subject of curiosity and speculation. It can be seen without a telescope, and has been known by astronomers since Egyptian times. In the 1600’s, Galileo was the first to see it via telescope.He noticed dark areas on the planet and called them “seas”, similar to the dark areas on the moon which were also called “seas” or mare in Latin. In the late 1800’s, an astronomer named Schiaparelli saw regular straight lines connecting the dark areas that he called canali in Italian. The word was translated as “canal” in English. In addition, the poles seemed to have ice caps that grew in the “winter” and melted in the “summer”. When the day was measured, it was only a few minutes longer than a day on Earth, and the year is almost twice as long.
Space Probes Reveal the Truth about Mars
The famous astronomer Percival Lowell (of Pluto fame) studied Mars with the most powerful telescopes in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He wrote books about water and life on Mars, which influenced science fiction writers like H.G. Wells. (The War of the Worlds was based partly on Lowell’s work.) Early space probes to Mars in the 1960s and 1970s revealed a planet that was anything but welcoming to life. Mars, rather than having lush green valleys and seas, had planet wide dust storms, craters from constant meteor strikes in its southern hemisphere,, a thin atmosphere, and a weak magnetic field. The polar ice caps are made of dry ice, and any liquid water is below the surface, trapped in permafrost. It does not have canals, channels, or seas. Nor does it have indigenous life in any quantity, although every flyby mission and every Mars rover has looked.
Clues to the Distant Past
While Mars is arid now, it may not have been in the past. Some rock formations show erosion that may have been caused by liquid five million years ago, and there may have been rivers billions of years ago. ( It may not have been friendly to life, however, as erosion samples have shown a high mineral, salt, and sulfur content.) With the thin atmosphere and low gravity of Mars, any liquid that remained on the surface would have evaporated. Pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope show a Mars that is colder and dryer than what was first thought.
Samples Drilled During Mars Exploration
The newest Mars rover, Curiosity, landed in 2012. It began drilling samples, in February 2013. The rover was fitted with drills before leaving Earth, and this mission will be the first to do full drilling for samples on Mars. The plans are to test an area of flat rock to see if it ever contained free water, and if anything could have lived there. The rock chosen has many mineral features and deep veins that may have once contained water. Deep samples, rather than the surface rocks that have been tested previously would show if Mars ever had large quantities of water and more atmosphere, even if it was billions of years ago.
The Future of Exploration on Mars
Mars is still a mysterious planet with many surprises, even though it is not exactly what was imagined in science fiction. If the theories hold true, and there were large amounts of water hidden below the surface, perhaps its past was very different. Martian geologic records show clues that can only be uncovered by more study such as the drilling samples.
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