Dr Meyer calls Mars’s red colour distinctive- easy to recognise because it’s different from everything else. But did you hear why it’s red in the first place, Sam? NASA explores the unknown in air and space, innovates for the benefit of humanity, and inspires the world through discovery. Today, three NASA spacecraft are circling, or orbiting Mars. The spacecraft are using scientific tools to measure the volcanoes, canyons, craters, temperature and the kinds of minerals on Mars. They also are taking pictures and searching for water. Red's foster home certainly isn't the worst place she could be. It's a beautiful old farmhouse somewhere in the mid-west, there are lots of kids her age, and her foster parents, the ironically named Fosters, are good people. Still, they obviously have their hands full. For Red, it just isn't where she wants to be, and, when you are in a place like that, no matter how ideal the situation, you look for ways out. Some 28 miles (45 kilometers) wide, Jezero Crater sits on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator. Scientists have determined that 3.5 billion years ago the crater had its own river delta and was filled with water.

Pittman Explains How Two Decades in Animation Led to - CBR

NASA scientists believe that life may have once thrived on Mars, as there is ample evidence that the planet used to be much warmer and wetter billions of years ago. Whether there is anything alive today on Mars is an open question.

Mars has an active atmosphere, but the surface of the planet is not active. Its volcanoes are dead. Project engineers and scientists will now put Perseverance through its paces, testing every instrument, subsystem, and subroutine over the next month or two. Only then will they deploy the helicopter to the surface for the flight test phase. If successful, Ingenuity could add an aerial dimension to exploration of the Red Planet in which such helicopters serve as a scouts or make deliveries for future astronauts away from their base. Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA, will send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

Red Planet | Live Science Mars: The Red Planet | Live Science

JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission and the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter technology demonstration for NASA. Finding liquid water could make the Red Planet habitable- good enough to live on. And with billionaire businessmen like Elon Musk planning manned missions to space, who knows how long it could be before we see a human on Mars? In the 19th century, Mars was investigated by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelliand American astronomer Percival Lowell, who believed they saw long canals on the planet's surface indicating civilizations and life. Their claims were dismissed by others in their time and ultimately turned out to be incorrect. Over the subsequent decades, orbiters returned far more detailed data on the planet's atmosphere and surface, and finally dispelled the notion, widely held by scientists since the late 1800s, that Martian canals were built by an alien civilization. They also revealed some truly dramatic features: the small world boasts the largest volcanoes in the solar system, and one of the largest canyons yet discovered—a chasm as long as the continental United States. Dust storms regularly sweep over its plains, and winds whip up localized dust devils. Well, they both want to be left alone! How many books do you anticipate in the "Red's Planet" saga?

Mission Commander Kate Bowman is the pilot and commander of the most important mission of the 21st century: saving the human race. It's 2050, earth is dying, and colonizing Mars is the only alternative to obliteration. Bowman and her crew have made this journey to investigate what went wrong with the malfunctioning Mars Terraforming Project, and to repair it. But what happens when they get there is far more terrifying than anyone could have guessed. The possibility that there were once oceans and rivers on Mars is fairly well established. Observations suggest that there could have been water on the surface as recently as 2 billion years ago.

BBC Learning English - 6 Minute English / Mars: Mysteries of

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. So far, only uncrewed spacecraft have made the trip to the red planet, but that could soon change. 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. Here’s a look at why these journeys are so important—and what humans have learned about Mars through decades of exploration. Why explore Mars Well, that all depends on finding water. Water is life, and as Dr Meyer told BBC World Service’s, The Forum, with water anything is possible. One of the distinctivethings about Mars is that it’s red so you can see it and identify it. It looks red because of rust– iron oxide on the surface, which is red and, interestingly that look can change. And we saw that in 2018 when there was a global dust storm – Mars, instead of looking red looked a little orange, and that changing of colour might have made the civilisations watching Mars maybe uneasy to see something immutablein our night sky changing colours. Whatever the Romans thought, civilisations throughout history have described looking into the night sky and seeing a bright, red light. But where does Mars’ characteristic colour come from? Mars has captivated humans since we first set eyes on it as a star-like object in the night sky. 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. 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. Now, we know there are no artificial constructions on Mars. 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.It's always a balancing game to give the supporting characters enough time to tell their stories without taking away from the central story. If you give them too much time, the audience forgets what the real story is and wants to know more about the secondary characters. But if you do it just right, the characters come to life and the reader thinks you told them much more than you actually did. I don't know which I achieved in Red's Planet, but I'm hoping the latter.