Mars Exploration Images
“The Red Planet”
After the successful landing of Perseverance on Mars, I am extremely optimistic that one day we might be experiencing this…
Shuttle throttles.. vibrations make us shake away all earthly feelings as we mentally embark on our new destiny… Mars!
Every morning I wake up to beautiful images of Mars which Perseverance is sending us and I get mind blown with it. Not that I have started loving earth any less, I am hopeful that we genius minds can find a way to call Mars our home someday!
Exploration of Mars started more than 50 years ago and with all the below images that scientists were able to gather, do we have got enough evidence to prove that Life on Mars is possible?
Marine 4–1965
After an eight-month voyage to Mars, Mariner 4 becomes the first spacecraft to take close-up photographs of another planet. The image shows lunar-type impact craters, which resembles more like a Moon than the Earth. It also meant that the surface was ancient and billions of years old.
Mariner 9— 19671
The biggest known volcano in the solar system is Olympus Mons on Mars, discovered by Mariner 9 in 1971. This was an indication that it’s a planet that has many stories to tell us.
Viking — 1976
Even if Mars was born dry, seeing this image scientists say that liquid water must have flown across the surface. Evidence that life would have existed on Mars even if it means microbial life.
From this picture, we could find extensive oxidation (rusting) of iron on the rocks’ surfaces and this explains why Mars is red in the color. Iron oxidation is possible only with water.
Pathfinder — 1997
Pathfinder was the first of a series of missions to Mars that included rovers, and was the first successful lander. Pathfinder photographs provide geological support for the important role that liquid water has played on Mars. Persistence flow of water for a long duration giving us hope that there was life.
Mars Exploration Rover — 2004
NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission was a robotic space mission involving two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity exploring the planet Mars. The main task for both rovers was to explore the areas around their landing sites for evidence in rocks and soils about whether those areas ever had environments that were watery and possibly suitable for sustaining life.
Opportunity discovered that the area’s light-colored rocks have wavy layers that cut across each other in sets, a feature geologist call cross-bedding.
Mineral in Mars ‘Berries’ Adds to Water Story. After landing in a small crater, Opportunity found many tiny sphere-shaped nodules, dubbed “blueberries,” that were rich in hematite and were probably formed by water below the surface. So the rocks found by Opportunity result from repeated deposition by wind and water. Scientists studying the chemistry of the rocks in Eagle Crater also found evidence that this water was highly acidic.
Mars sunsets would appear bluish to human observers watching from the red planet. Fine dust makes the blue near the Sun’s part of the sky much more prominent, while normal daylight makes the Red Planet’s familiar rusty dust color more prominent. Unlike Earth, the atmosphere of Mars is dominated by micron-size dust aerosols, and the sky during sunset takes on a bluish glow.
Curiosity 2012
Curiosity is a car-sized Mars rover designed to explore the Gale crater on Mars. These two views, acquired specifically to measure the amount of dust inside Gale Crater, show that dust has increased over three days from a major Martian dust storm.
Two landmark discoveries reveal organic carbon on the red planet, shaping the future hunt for life on Mars. It was the first to drill into a rock and detect Carbon, Nitrogen, Sulfur, among other life-forming minerals.
Earth and Mars are a bit like mirror worlds. Mars is the Red Planet. Earth is the pale blue dot. Mars is a frigid desert. Earth is full of water and life. But there’s another curious difference. The sky on Mars is red, while its sunsets are blue. Humanity launched in total 54 missions to Mars and only 26 were successful. With all this comes the million-dollar question — “Was or Is there Life on Mars?”
The answer is we are still looking for strong evidence to prove life on Mars. If Perseverance’s exploration yields signs of life, that would obviously be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. But what, exactly, would life itself would look like? Are we hoping to see Intelligent life or little green men in flying saucers or microbial or sophisticated humans? So many questions and very few clues.
I will let NASA do the job while I go to bed dreaming of seeing earth….moon…sun…mars all lined like a beautiful picture — A view that we can’t comprehend. The feeling that begs the question …“Wow, where are we?”
Images Credit NASA
