The scientific interest in life on Mars began in 1877 when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed a network of criss-crossing single and double lines on the surface of Mars. His findings were widly hailed at the time as evidence of intelligent life on Mars. Percival Lowell, an Amecican with an interest in astronomy was excited by these findings and built himself an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. One of his most popular theories was that the giant grooves were canals that brought water from the poles to irrigate the equatoral regions, where an ancient civilization lived.
The belief that if Mars was not inhabited, then it at least could be habitable, was popular until the second half of the twentieth century. Several experiments were conducted to see if life could be sustained on Mars. A laboratory was filled with what they thought to the correct atmosphere of Mars - nitrogen, with a pressure of 85 millibars - and gave it the right temperature. Somethings actually servived in these 'Mars Jars'. Plants like cacti did not do well, but more simple organisms did better - some microbes actually grew if a little water was present.
But any hope that simple life might exsist on Mars was dashed when probes in the mid-1960s sent back pictures of a barren and apparently lifeless ball of rock - a frozen hell.
The Mars Missions
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It was the Russians who sent the first probe to Mars, Mars I was lanched on November 1st 1962. All contact was lost with the probe on 21st March 1963 before it could send back any information. It is believed to have reached within 195,000 kilometers of the planet. It's fate is one that has mysteriously befallen many Mars missions. Like NASA's first attempt to send a probe to Mars. Mariner 3 was lanched on November 5th 1964. It went out of control very early in the mission, it's protective fiberglass shield failing to eject on leaving Earths atmosphere and making the probe too heavy to stay on course. And of course, most recently, a mix up between metric units and English units of mesurement caused the Mars orbiter to fly too close to the atmosphere and burn up.
It was the Americans who won the Mars race, on 28 November 1964, Mariner 4 was launched. It sent back 21 photographs and vital new information, getting to within 10,000 kilometres of Mars. The murky images picked up the planet's densely cratered and lifeless surface. They were man's first glimpse of Mars at close range - a glimpse that shattered many myths.
Just two days after Mariner 4's launch, the Russian Zond 2 attempted to reverse the disastrous fate of Mars 1 - and failed. In the late spring of 1965 all contact with it was lost.
On 24 February and 27 March 1969, NASA launched Mariners 6 and 7. Mariner 6 got to within 3,390 km of Mars and took 76 pictures. Mariner 7 travelled to 3,500 km and sent back 126 pictures.
These early missions were a disapointment. Those that weren't lost to technical disasters sent back pictures of a very dull landscape. A dead planet. There was no vegetation - the dark patches thought to be patches of vegetation were nothing more than dark rocks with the topsoil blown off. There were no canals. Mars was heavily cratered and apparently very old.
Mariner 4, the first successful probe to send back information about Mars, revealed that the Martian atmosphere was not nitrogen, as some had thought, but largely carbon dioxide. Liquid water could not exist on Mars, since the surface pressure was much lower than previously thought - lower than 10 millibars, not around 85. It was an inhospitable nightmare world - drab and lifeless. Peoples hopes and expectaions were shattered.
As a NASA spokesman said:
We've got superb pictures. They'rebetter than we could have ever hoped a few years ago - but what do they show us? A dull landscape as dead as a dodo. There's nothing much left to find.
The next decade would prove this view of Mars as wrong as Lowell's had been.
Mariner 9
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For some time, nobody knew that the pictures taken by those early missions had completely missed any of the varied geological features to be found on Mars.
In May 1971, America and Russia sent a total of 5 probes to Mars within a 22 day period.
Mariner 8, (American) was to map the Martian topographical features, scanning 70% of the planet's surface from a highly inclined orbit. The sun would be very low on the horizon, throwing long shadows. Mariner 9, on the other hand, would position itself for a high sun angle to take pictures of albedo features in the equatoral regions.
Mariner 8 was launched on May 8th 1971. Shortly after take-off, due to a guidance system malfunction, the second stage of the Atlas-Centaur rocket carrying the probe separated from the primary, but failed to ignite. This probe plunged into the Atlantic Ocean.
It was left to Mariner 9 to complete the mission. It's programming was adapted to include aspects of Mariner 8's mission.
Mariner 9 took off 22 days after the demise of Mariner 8. It wasn't alone..
Just two days after the loss of Mariner 8 a Soviet Mars orbiter had been
launched. Like its American counterpart, due to a stupid mistake with the computer systems, it failed to leave Earth's orbit. But two more Soviet craft, Mars 2 and Mars 3 successfully left Earths orbit. Each of these probes had an orbiter with a detachable lander.
Out of the five, only three made it out of Earth's orbit. But as these three probes approached Mars, a huge global dust storm erupted. In Noachis, in the south of Mars, an enormous cloud of yellow dust suddenly appeared. It was soon followed by an explosion of reddish dust clouds. After brewing in Noachis, the storm broke loose and raged forth to the northeast, growing as it raced across the surface of the planet near the equator. With 500-mile-an-hour winds, it tore at the surface, lifting dust clouds like a wall reaching up to the heavens more than 13 miles into the thin Martian air.
There was no immediate concern in the JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) control room about the dust storm as it appeared in the images from the Mariner 9 camerars that flashed on the screens on September 22 1971. There was still six and a half weeks before Mariner 9 would reach it's destination, plenty of time for the dust storms to dissapate. Dust storms had been observed on Mars before trough telescopes. They always occured near perihelion, the closest point in Mars' orbit to the Sun, when solar heating would reach its maximum. The storms would rage for a few weeks over parts of the planet and then die out. This was expected climatic behavior on Mars, such events were predictable and planned for in the Mariner 9 mission. However, it soon became aevident to the controllers at JPL that this dust storm was becoming much larger and more violent than any obseved before. The storm's violence and massive growth was stupefying. It doubled and redoubled in size, sreading north and south. Within days it had encircled the planet and before the astonished eyes of the controllers at JPL, it invaded deeply into the polar regions to completely cover the planet, its violence unabated.
Out of the three probes traveling to Mars, on November the 10th, Mariner 9 was the first to arive to be within 800,00 kilometres of Mars. The dust storm was still raging six weeks on and people at JPL were getting worried. From pole to pole the planet was covered in rolling red dust clouds. Every one agreed the dust storm must end soon, within a few days. Weather analysis from Earth told them that storm systems draw their energy from differences in pressure, temperature and moisture between various areas of a planet's surface. If a storm covers the whole planets surface, the differences are all being mixed away. The storm must end when its enery source is cut off. But seemed Mars wasn't aware of this theory and the dust storm continued to rage. Red clouds were thrown up into the Martian ionosphere at the very edge of space, 45 miles up. The Martian atmosphere had become one vast roiling mass, expending the energy of thousands of earthly hurricaines at once, the energy of millions of hydrogen bombs a second.
Mariner 9 had kept moving and had been taking an ocasional picture of the surface on and on for weeks streaching into months. Finally, in an effort to conseve the precious maneuvering gas it had been consuming with the constant adjustmant of solar panels and the operation of thousands of moving mechanisms, Mariner 9 switched off and waited.
The two Soviet craft, Mars 2 and Mars 3, unable to be programmed after launch, carried on with their missions. Mars 2's lander failed to make a smooth decent. On 27 November 1971 it crashed into the Martian surface at a piont noth of Hellas (44.2 degrees south, 313.2 degrees west).
Five days later, the Mars 3 lander was deployed. On the way down it transmitted blank frames for 20 seconds before all contact was lost. Having landed in the middle of a violent dust storm, it is thought that its parachute was dragged by 140-metre-per-second winds and was smashed to bits.
While Mariner 9 drifted silently in orbit, conserving it's energy, the Mars 2 and 3 orbiter modules took picture upon picture of dust-clouds, to the dismay of the devistated Russian team.
Out of the 5 craft that had been launched, only Mariner 9 succeeded in it's Mission.
In January 1972, the great dust storm - the largest storm seen on any planet in history - began to break up. Mariner 9 had approched to 1,370 kilometres of Mars and began mapping the southern hemishere from 25 degrees to 65 degrees south. It ran out of fuel on October 1972, but by that time it had taken 7,239 images of Mars.
Scientific concepts of Mars were once again about to be challenged.
Geology?
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When the dust-clouds subsided, they revealed a Martian landscape that was a geologist's dream.
There were immense volcanos - the huge Olympus Mons, three times the height of Everest, and the smaller - but still huge - Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons and Arsia Mons on the great Tharsis Bulge.
Scientists were awesrtuck by the Valles Marineris, the 7-kilometre-deep rift in the crust of Mars that stretches for a quater of the planet's circumfrence.
Also revealed were the huge impact basins of Hellas, Isidis and Argyre. These could be clues to the death of this once inhabitable world. For Mars was once inhabitable. Mariner 9 revealed features that looked like dried-up riverbeds, valleys, and other signs that large quantities of surface water had once been present.
On 8 February 1972, Marriner 9 passed over and photographed an area known as the Elysium Quadrangle. At 15 degrees north latitude and 198 degrees west longitude, frame MTVS 4205 showed a cluster of tetrahedral pyramidal forms present. The shadows cast are regular, showing that these forms are not illusions caused by albedo variations in surface soil colouration. The fact more than one image taken at different sun angles further backs up this evidence.
These pyramids tower a kilometre above the surrounding Elysium plane. It has been calculated that the volume of the largest is 1,000 times that of the Great Pyramid of Egypt and that it is ten times as high.
Carl Sagen belived these forms were 'small mountains, sand blasted for ages', but, he said that they warrented 'a carful look'.
There are four tetrahedral pyramids at Elysium - a larger and smaller pair in close proximity, facing each other across the plain. Scientists have tried to explain them as wind-faceted volcanic cones, or as the result of peculiar forms of erosion or soil-accumulation. But in Los Angeles, in the mid 1970s, wind-tunnel tests were done by NASA engineers to simulate the creation of formations similar to those photographed by Mariner 9. All this proved was that soil accumulation or wind sculpting would not provide for four equally spaced tetrahedal formations. It was not possibal to simulate an evenly spaced arrangement of objects in the wind tunnel to match the mathmatical distances one finds in the four major and minor pyramids in this area of Elysium. Other scientists have suggested glacial sculpting or eroded rotating lava blocks as to the formation of the pyramids, but again there is no evidence for glaciers on Mars, especially within the tropic area of the planet where Elysium lies, and no lava spillage has been clearly detected in connection with the formations.
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