Learn about the history of Martian exploration

The dream of going to Mars have been drempt for centuries or even milleniums ago when the earliest human beings marveled at the stars in the sky late at nights. However it wasn't until recent years when human beings have explored the unknown planet through satelites and machinery.

For more than a century we have been enthralled with the idea that it harbors life. In our collective consciousness Mars is not simply a planet, an astronomical curiosity, but a mustery and a beacons, a place as myth laden as Olympus of Valhalla or Shangri-La. We feel this way today, largely because of a turn-of-the-century aristocrat named Percival Lowell, a man smitten with a passion for astronomy and gripped by an interplanetary sense of drama.

As a child Lowell had been facinated with astronomy. In fact, he liked to tell people that his earliest memory was of Donati's comet, which, with its greast scimitar tail, was one of the great celestial light shows of the nineteenth century, streaking across the night sky for the better parrt of four months in 1858. This fascination ultimately inspired Lowell to tap his personal fortune in 1893 and build his ery own obsercatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. After years as a traveler, diplomat, and sucessful author, this observatory became his way of resolving an ongoing debate among scientist about the possibility of life on Mars. Lowell recruited some of the top talents in the field, bought a plot of land on a mesa seven thousand feet high, and rushed an eighteen-inch refractor telescope and state-of-the-art observatoty in construction. The facility had to be ready by 1894, in time to catch sight of Mars at its closet approach to the Earth, when it is only 35 million miles away.

For years Lowell used this facility to discover many facts about Mars. He theorized many of his theories such as the intelligence of Martian alien. He also wrote many books such as Mars to spread the idea of his findings. Some questioned his findings. Others however widly fantasized about such questions. The king of these fantasies was a man named Edgar Rice Burroughs.

During the 1960's many ideas were scattered among the people about Mars. People just had ideas of what it was about through books such as Mars from Lowell, or fantasy books such as that from Edgar Rice Burroughs. HOwever it wasn't ntil 1965 when truth began to reveal itself. In 1965 U.S probe called Mariner 4 raced within 6,118 miles of the planet, providing the first good view Earthlings had even had of the planet. It beamed back 22 images that revealed no sign of vegetations or rivers, and no canals. The impression the images have was that the main difference between the moon and Mars was that Mars was red.

Mariner 6 and 7 soon followed and confirmed all of these findings. It crushed the hopes of the scientist who hoped to find simple traces of life. All the evidence indicated that the planet was ice cold and hadn't changed since the beginning of time. Then came Mariner 9. Mariner 9 reached Mars on November 13, 1971, the planet was engulfed in a furous gloval dust storm that rendered the surface invisible. Winds were clocked at over 300 miles an hour, and there wasnt much the Mariner teams could do but wait by their monitors at the JPL as the probe beamed back images after image of an erased world.

About the same time Mariner went up, the U.S.S.R had launched two probes, Mars 2 and 3. They were programmed to land on the planet. When the robots arrived their trajectory didnt't allow them to check Earth for further instructions. They dutifuly plummeted through the windstorm and disappeared. Mars 3 actually managed to each the surface, making it the first Earthly object to land on Mars, however it was engulfed by the desert storm after beaming back 20 seconds of information.

Slowly the storm relented, and as it did four strange protuberances began to appear through the whirling haze, the tops, it turn out, of tremendous volcanoes made up of colossal mounds of lava. The summit of the largest mountain, Olympus Mons, rose fifteen miles into the sky - three times higher than Mt. Everest - and its base was as wide as Montana. Southeat near the Martian equator scientists also found a gargantuan canyon that cut a jaggest gash in the planet 25 hundred miles long and in place places 5 miles deep. Scientist dubbed the scar the Valles Marineris for the probe that discovered it.

However it saved it best secrets for last. As the dust settled, Mariner revealed hundreds of miles of channels and grooves east and north of the Valles Marineris that looked like they had been formed by running water. Some were shaped like dried riverbeds on Earth with treelike branches, but many seemed to have sprung out of nowhere, their channels equally wide from beginning to the end. Both types stunned scientists. Features like these made no sense on a world as dry and cold as Mars where running water would be impossible. People began to wonder how they got there.

An answer came from an old geologiest named Harlen Bretz. He was determined to find out how the landscape had been so scarreed, and after year of study, conluded that theirteen thousand years earlier, during the last ice age, a lake had formed along the Montana-Idaho border begind a glacial dam, and one day the dam burnst, Three thousand square miles of water, three hundred feet high, suddenly exploded across the Idaho panhandle and through Washington Sate into the Pacific leaving the raggest landscape behind it.

He won acceptance for his theories and shortly thereafter planetary scientist began to compare photos taken of the scablands by a sophisticated earth orbiting satellite called Landsat with Mariner's images of the enormous Martian channels. They looked so similar that some scientist began to suggested that leviathan floods had also formed the strange features on Mars. No one could say what had initiated the Martian deluges in the first place, but based on the evidence, some theorized they were created when meteors plumeted into the planet or volcanoes suddenly erupted, tranformeding the Martian permafrost into surging oceans of water and mud. Gouged channels have been explained by catastrophic flood. However the more ancient Earthlike riverbeds that Mariner's cameras had found still remained as a mystery. These most scientists now believe could only have been formed by running water that existed when the planet was warmer. But if it were the cse that Mars once had rivers of water, couldn't life hadve also established a toehold there as it had on Earth? The Viking missions were deployed to find out.

Viking 1 and 2 were highly sophisticated probes designed as a kind of space age, cybernetic tag team. Both would circle the planet then jettison landers, which would decend to Mars to perform a number of tests including the most anticipated of all, make contact.

The landing site for the landers were decided just before the landing. Both landed sucessfully on their landing sites. The landers discovered that the atmosphere was 95% carbon dioxide .1% was oxygen. A human would die 30 seconds if he was exposed to the atmosphere. Plus even in the hottest summers, the temperature barely thralled up to -24 degrees Fahrenheit.

After analyzing and reanalyzing the soil, the Viking biology team could only report that the results simply didn't permit any final concluision about the presence of life on Mars. Despite our advanced technology and all of the intricate cybernetics, Mars had once again confounded its terrestial inquisitors. The twin Viking probes had covered 35 million miles, sought their answers, and where the mysteries of life were concerned, had only come ip with more questions. Since then no other landers have returned to Mars press the point, and the question remains unsolved.