 |
| Mars | |
| Planet or moon information | |
|---|---|
| Diameter |
3,396.2 ± 0.1 km |
| Orbital period |
686.9600 days |
| Distance |
35 million miles[1] |
| Revolves around |
Sun |
| Alien relevance |
May have supported life |
Mars is a planet in the SoL solar system which is the nearest planet to Earth. Mars plays a role in alien research because it is rumored that there may or has been Alien life of some kind on the planet. As since evidence of icy water has been found on the planet. In popular culture, Little green men were once said to have lived on Mars.
Bacteria was found on a Martian meteorite in Atarctica, but the evidence is still being argued with by scientists, as the meteorite could have been contaminated. Also, a Martian being was photographed by the Spirit rover in November 2007, but the photo is still in controversy because it could easily be some kind of rock.
What some scientists believe to be "Martian bacteria".
In 2008 the NASA Phoeneix program confirmed there is water on Mars, leading to strong possibilities that life has exsisted in the planet's past. If the supposed being photographed in 11/07 happened to be amphibious, there is even a possibility that not only life, but intelligent life is present there (speculation).
Position on Mars
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While the 1960s were defined within NASA primarily by the efforts to land humans on the Moon, all during that period the agency was also supporting a robust effort to prepare for a mission to Mars. Its core goal: To search for signatures of life beyond Earth.
That effort required substantial research into and inevitable debate about the nature of the “life” that the Viking landers would be looking for. What’s more, those in the biological fields became properly concerned about what microbial life the Viking landers might bring to Mars from Earth, and projecting further on extraterrestrial life that might some day be returned to our planet.
So while hunting for present or past life on Mars was a very popular idea, it opened a Pandora’s box of extremely difficult questions about the still-mysterious nature and origins of life. Nonetheless, the possibility of actually finding extraterrestrial life reached a fever pitch of excitement during the Viking landing in 1976. Many predicted that life would be found on Mars – including Carl Sagan, who looked forward to encountering, via Viking, visible, perhaps floating creatures.
But those predictions gave way to first images of a bleak and barren martian landscape, and then to negative but also confusing scientific conclusions about whether signs of life, or even of organic compounds, had been detected.
The experience was sufficiently sobering that the study of Mars took an abrupt backseat, and it would be decades before interest recovered. And while orbiters, landers, and rovers returned to Mars in the 1990s and 2000s, it wasn’t until the 2012 landing of Curiosity that another astrobiology (though not life detection) mission began.[2]
ReferencesEdit
ResourcesEdit
- Water
- Seeker.com, How Mars Went From Warm and Wet to Cold and Dry, by NANCY ATKINSON, 03/31/2017
- Science, Mars’ atmospheric history derived from upper-atmosphere measurements of 38Ar/36Ar by B. M. Jakosky1,*, M. Slipski1, M. Benna2, P. Mahaffy2, M. Elrod2, R. Yelle3, S. Stone3, N. Alsaeed1,4; 31 March 2017
- Seeker.com, Martian Meteorites Could Reveal That the Red Planet Was Wetter Than We Thought, by BY ELIZABETH HOWELL 06 March 2017
- Origins hypotheses
- BPA, It Seems that Mars has Not Always Been our Planetary Neighbor, by Joelle Renstrom, December 18, 2017
- Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 468, The cool and distant formation of Mars, by R.Brasser, 15 June 2017
- Research Suggests Mars Formed in the Asteroid Belt, by Ryan Whitwam, May 16, 2017
- Mars May Have Been Born in the Asteroid Belt, by Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor | May 15, 2017
- Blog, Mysterious Mars Lecture - Dr Tom Van Flandern, Sunday, February 27, 2011
