![]() The United Arab Emirates and China might join that club if their recently launched Hope and Tianwen-1 missions reach the red planet safely in February 2021.Įarly highlights of Mars missions include NASA's Mariner 4 spacecraft, which swung by Mars in July 1965 and captured the first close-up images of this foreign world. With eight successful landings, the United States is the only country that has operated a craft on the planet’s surface. So far, four space agencies-NASA, Russia’s Roscosmos, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)-have put spacecraft in Martian orbit. The thin Martian atmosphere makes descent tricky, and more than 60 percent of landing attempts have failed. Later, probes pulled into orbit around Mars more recently, landers and rovers have touched down on the surface.īut sending a spacecraft to Mars is hard, and landing on the planet is even harder. Early missions were flybys, with spacecraft furiously snapping photos as they zoomed past. Since the 1960s, humans have sent dozens of spacecraft to study Mars. And, the more we learn about Mars, the better equipped we’ll be to try to make a living there, someday in the future. It also lets us look for biosignatures, signs that might reveal whether life was abundant in the planet’s past-and if it still exists on Mars today. The question now is, what happened? Where did those liquids go, and what happened to the Martian atmosphere?Įxploring Mars helps scientists learn about momentous shifts in climate that can fundamentally alter planets. Somewhere during Martian evolution, the planet went through a dramatic transformation, and a world that was once rather Earthlike became the dusty, dry husk we see today. It was also likely wrapped in a thick atmosphere capable of maintaining liquid water at Martian temperatures and pressures. Elsewhere, rainstorms soaked the landscape, lakes pooled, and rivers gushed, carving troughs into the terrain. Those observations suggest that the planet may have once had a vast ocean covering its northern hemisphere. Today, when scientists scrutinize the Martian surface, they see features that are unquestionably the work of ancient, flowing liquids: branching streams, river valleys, basins, and deltas. Learn how the red planet formed from gas and dust and what its polar ice caps mean for life as we know it. Although water does exist on Mars, it’s locked into the planet’s icy polar caps and buried, perhaps in abundance, beneath the Martian surface.įrom its blood-like hue to its potential to sustain life, Mars has intrigued humankind for thousands of years. Methane gas also periodically appears in the atmosphere of this desiccated world, and the soil contains compounds that would be toxic to life as we know it. Unfortunately, the planet is now wrapped in a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and cannot support earthly life-forms. That’s why one year on Mars lasts for 687 Earth days, while a day on Mars is just 40 minutes longer than on Earth.ĭespite its smaller size, the planet’s land area is also roughly equivalent to the surface area of Earth’s continents-meaning that, at least in theory, Mars has the same amount of habitable real estate. ![]() It takes longer than Earth to complete a full orbit around the sun-but it rotates around its axis at roughly the same speed. It is just a smidge more than half of Earth’s size, with gravity only 38 percent that of Earth’s. Mars is the fourth rock from the sun, just after Earth. Over the last century, everything we’ve learned about Mars suggests that the planet was once quite capable of hosting ecosystems-and that it might still be an incubator for microbial life today. Here’s a look at why these journeys are so important-and what humans have learned about Mars through decades of exploration. NASA is hoping to land the first humans on Mars by the 2030s-and several new missions are launching before then to push exploration forward. So far, only uncrewed spacecraft have made the trip to the red planet, but that could soon change. Since the 1960s, humans have set out to discover what Mars can teach us about how planets grow and evolve, and whether it has ever hosted alien life. But we’ve also learned that, until 3.5 billion years ago, the dry, toxic planet we see today might have once been as habitable as Earth. Now, we know there are no artificial constructions on Mars. Then, in the late 1800s, telescopes first revealed a surface full of intriguing features-patterns and landforms that scientists at first wrongly ascribed to a bustling Martian civilization. Early on, its reddish hue set the planet apart from its shimmering siblings, each compelling in its own way, but none other tracing a ruddy arc through Earth’s heavens. Mars has captivated humans since we first set eyes on it as a star-like object in the night sky.
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