M2K4 Roaming the Red Planet -Why Mars/ Exploring Mars
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Exploring Mars
The Quest for Water
Mission to Mars
The fantastic perception of Mars started to become more realistic when the
first robotic spacecraft began traveling there in the mid-1960s -- not that
Mars was always cooperative. The first spacecraft to fly past Mars, a Soviet
mission launched in 1962, did so silently, having lost contact with Earth before
reaching Mars. Mariner 3, the United States' first Mars mission, was unable
to unfold its solar panels and never reached Mars.
The first successful flyby of Mars came in 1965, when Mariner 4 came within
6,118 miles of Mars and returned 21 close-up photos. Thereafter, spacecraft
returned images of a desolated, frigid world, pocked with giant impact craters
similar to those on the Earth's moon. However, all was to change as the robotic
exploration of the 1970s again revealed a Mars with new possibilities…
and not quite so foreboding.
Getting to Mars has never been easy. The first attempt to land on Mars, by the Soviets in 1971, suffered a braking-rocket failure and crashed, returning no data. A companion mission landed successfully and returned barely 20 seconds of video before failing. The United States successfully placed a satellite in martian orbit in 1971 (Mariner 9, the first spacecraft from Earth to orbit another planet), then landed two Viking spacecraft in 1976.
Explorations suggest that Mars resembles two different worlds that have been glued together: From latitudes around the equator to the south, ancient highlands riddled with channels attest to the flow of water. The northern third of the planet is sunken with a much smoother surface -- perhaps the floor of an ancient sea or the product of innumerable lava flows or vast deposition of dust-bowl sediments. Thanks to recent discoveries from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey spacecraft, scientists now believe a giant ice sheet may lie under the smooth northern plains.
By searching at human scales for clear evidence of the history of water on
Mars, Spirit and Opportunity will open an exciting new chapter in our exploration
of another world, and begin (again) the quest for understanding whether Mars
could ever have harbored life.