In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli turned his telescope to Mars and saw signs of a potentially lush world. He would publish his observations of what he believed to be “seas” and “continents” on the Martian surface. He also described channels (later found to be an ...read more
Humans have been captivated by Mars almost as long as we’ve been watching the night sky. The ancient Greeks and Romans watched nightly as a reddish dot moved among the stars, growing dimmer and brighter in a two-year cycle. Each named it for the god of war; the Roman version, ...read more
As the second-closest planet to Earth (after Venus), Mars is the subject of endless fascination to us humans. This has only increased in recent decades, as spacecraft observations have revealed how similar the red planet is to our own in many ways—including its clouds, winds, ...read more
The car-sized rover Curiosity arrived on Mars on August 6, 2012, after an eight-month journey from Cape Canaveral. Since landing in the Red Planet’s Gale Crater, a vast depression the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, the rover has spent its days capturing images, ...read more
The Curiosity rover, which has been exploring Mars since late August, has gathered strong evidence that water once flowed on the Red Planet’s surface, NASA scientists announced last week. Just weeks into its two-year mission, the robotic explorer beamed back images of two rocky ...read more
1. Giovanni Schiaparelli sees “channels” on the surface of Mars in 1877, and speculation runs rampant that intelligent beings created them. What a difference a word makes. When Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli peered through his telescope in 1877 to view the surface of ...read more
The unmanned spacecraft Mariner 4 passes over Mars at an altitude of 6,000 feet and sends back to Earth the first close-up images of the red planet. Launched in November 1964, Mariner 4 carried a television camera and six other science instruments to study Mars and interplanetary ...read more
After traveling 120 million miles in seven months, NASA’s Mars Pathfinder becomes the first U.S. spacecraft to land on Mars in more than two decades. In an ingenious, cost-saving landing procedure, Pathfinder used parachutes to slow its approach to the Martian surface and then ...read more
Three and a half billion years ago, right when life was first forming on Earth, was Mars home to a vast ocean swimming with alien fish? This scenario may have been possible, according to scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder. In a report published in the journal ...read more
