After Venus, Mars is the planet that comes closest to the Earth. It is one of the easiest planets to spot in the night sky because of its reddish-orange colour. We often call it the Red Planet. This is a good name because space probes have show that the whole planet is a rusty red colour.

Mars has two tiny moons, called Phobos and Deimos. They are potato-shaped lumps of rock, pitted with craters. Even the biggest, Phobos, is only about 29 kilometres across.

In some ways Mars is similar to the Earth. Its ‘day’ is only a little longer than our own. It has seasons. There are ice caps at its north and south poles. And it has an atmosphere in which clouds form and dust storms rage.

People once thought that conditions on Mars might be suitable for some forms of life, even for intelligent creatures like ourselves. But we now know that the Martian climate is too harsh for any form of life as we know it. For most of the time, temperatures are far lower than they are in Polar Regions on Earth in winter. Also, there is hardly any atmosphere, and it has no oxygen for breathing.