Mars. Mars means: Mars was the Roman god of war and agriculture.
It may not seem like these two things go together, but they do. Mars protected those who fought for their communities, and stayed home to raise crops for food. In Greek, Mars was known as Ares. How much would you weigh on Mars? If you weighed 70 pounds (32 kg) on the Earth, you would weigh about 27 pounds (12 kg) on Mars. The Planet Mars excites scientists because its mild temperament is more like the Earth's than any of the other planets. You may sometimes hear Mars referred to as the "Red Planet. " Exploration At first, the only way modern explorers could study Mars was with satellites that would fly close to the surface of Mars and take pictures as it did so. As scientific technology became more advanced, scientists were able to put spacecraft into orbit around the Red Planet.
Mysteriously dark Mars regions are made of glass - space - 15 April 2012. THEY look dark, but mysterious expanses on Mars are mainly made of glass forged in past volcanoes.
The dark regions make up more than 10 million square kilometres of the Martian northern lowlands, but their composition wasn’t clear. Past spectral measurements indicated that they are unlike dark regions found elsewhere on the Red Planet, which consist mainly of basalt. Briony Horgan and Jim Bell of Arizona State University in Tempe analysed near-infrared spectra of the regions, gathered by the Mars Express orbiter. They found absorption bands characteristic of the iron in volcanic glass, a shiny substance similar to obsidian that forms when magma cools too fast for its minerals to crystallise (Geology, DOI: 10.1130/G32755.1).
The glass likely takes the form of sand-sized grains, as it does in glass-rich fields in Iceland. On Earth, such rinds coat volcanic glass weathered by water. Mars' History Is A Fluid Situation. Is This Proof of Life on Mars? Want to stay on top of all the space news?
Follow @universetoday on Twitter View of Mars from Viking 2 lander, September 1976. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) The Curiosity rover is currently on its way to Mars, scheduled to make a dramatic landing within Gale Crater in mid-August and begin its hunt for the geologic signatures of a watery, life-friendly past. Solid evidence that large volumes of water existed on Mars at some point would be a major step forward in the search for life on the Red Planet. But… has it already been found? Researchers from universities in Los Angeles, California, Tempe, Arizona and Siena, Italy have published a paper in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences (IJASS) citing the results of their work with data obtained by NASA’s Viking mission. Ice Sculptures Fill The Deepest Parts of Mars.
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Follow @universetoday on Twitter Curious "lava lamp" landforms in Mars' Hellas Basin may have been created by ice. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona One of the “weirdest and least understood” areas of Mars, the enormous Hellas Impact Basin contains strange flowing landforms that bespeak of some specialized and large-scale geologic process having taken place. The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recently captured the image above, showing what’s being called “lava lamp terrain” — stretched and contorted surface that looks like overworked modeling clay or pulled taffy… or, with a bit of imagination, the melted, mesmerizing contents of a party light from another era.
At 1,400 miles (2,300 km) across, Mars’ Hellas Basin is one of the largest impact craters in the entire Solar System. Although the texture at first appears as if it could be volcanic in origin, it’s thought that flowing water or ice may actually be the source. Did Ancient Mars Have a Runaway Greenhouse? Cosmic impacts that once bombed Mars might have sent temperatures skyrocketing upward on the Red Planet in ancient times, enough to set warming of the surface on a runaway course, researchers say.
According to scientists, these findings could potentially help explain how this cold, dry world might have once sustained liquid water, conditions potentially friendly for life. The largest craters still visible on Mars were created about 3.7 billion to 4.1 billion years ago. For instance, the Argyre basin is thought to be 3.8 billion to 3.9 billion years old, a crater about 710 miles (1,140 kilometers) wide potentially generated by a comet or asteroid 60 to 120 miles (100 to 200 kilometers) in diameter.
The origin of these immense craters roughly coincides with when many branching Martian river valley networks apparently formed. Mars. Animation of Mars' rotation from the vantage of an observer who moves south, then north, to hover over both poles, showing the planet's major topographic features.
Mars is currently host to five functioning spacecraft: three in orbit – the Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – and two on the surface – Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity and the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity. Defunct spacecraft on the surface include MER-A Spirit and several other inert landers and rovers such as the Phoenix lander, which completed its mission in 2008. Observations by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed possible flowing water during the warmest months on Mars.[25] In 2013, NASA's Curiosity rover discovered that Mars' soil contains between 1.5% and 3% water by mass (about two pints of water per cubic foot or 33 liters per cubic meter, albeit attached to other compounds and thus not freely accessible).[26] Physical characteristics.