“Mars”
Physical Science
April 9, 2012

When a person thinks of Mars he may think of many wonders. Some dream of traveling Mars while others simply wonders if there is life on Mars. I will talk about both dreaming and life on Mars, but first I would like to talk about the history of Mars. In 1968, NASA struggled to get the Apollo program back on track in the wake of the devastating launch pad fire on January 27, 1967, that had taken the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee. While the nation awaited the resumption of the race to the moon, NASA scientist quietly continued their work on the Mars exploration program. At the time, planetary scientists were still grappling with the surprising results of Mariner 4 – a small pile of photographs of a desolate, crater-pocked world that seemed incapable of supporting life. Mariner 9 would complicate the picture, revealing an active planet, with volcanoes, canyons, and channels apparently carved by catastrophic floods. With those discoveries, the prospects for finding life on Mars – or at least evidence of ancient life – would rise again. But in 1968, Mariner 9 was still three years away. NASA’s decision to launch a mission to search for life on Mars was made at a time when few believed there was any life to be found. The Greeks named the planet after Ares, the god of war. The Romans later renamed it after their god of war: Mars. Little more was learned about Mars until the Renaissance, which marked the dawn of modern astronomy. During the Renaissance, Mars played an important role in one of the fiercest intellectual battles in the history of Western civilization: the debate over whether Earth was the center of the universe. The Greeks were the first to place the Earth in that exalted position. As they watched the heavens revolve above them, the constructed a marvelous theory in which the Earth sat at the center of what they thought was a perfectly symmetrical universe. The mathematician and astronomer Eudoxus was one of the first to propose a theory of the universe. He advanced his ideas in the fourth century. It was simple, harmonious picture in which the planets moved in perfect circles around the Earth. For a time, the theory put forth by Eudoxus seemed to work – it provided a simple explanation of what early astronomers saw in the sky above them. But, as often happens in science, the theory began to crumble under the weight of new observations. Many people dream of Mars and a lot of people may ask “why”? Mars is fascinating planet filled with many wonders and dreams. Mars has held an unshakable grip on the human imagination for thousands of years. As ancient astronomers watched the stars sweep majestically across the black dome of the sky, they focused their attention on a strange reddish object that didn’t seem to follow the laws of the heavens. Nearly all the stars seem to move along the same arc, but Mars was one of only a handful of stars that did not follow the proper trajectory. The Greeks called these objects planets, meaning “wanderers.” Mars stood out from the other “wanderers” and not just because of its striking color. All of the visible planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – drifted slowly in a narrow band across the constellations of the zodiac. With the exceptions of Mars, the visible planets all appeared to move in a constant direction across the constellations. The motion of Mars was more complicated, however. After moving in one direction for months, it would reverse course, moving backwards through the zodiac. Scientist claim to have discovered life on Mars. In the spring and summer of 1995, in a NASA laboratory in Houston where the first moon rocks were studied, two researchers were secretly working to try to confirm and interpret the most explosive scientific data they had ever seen. They decided to guard their findings carefully until they had tried every possible way to disprove them. Theirs was the scientific find of the century, or even more –if it proved to be true, one of the most profound scientific discoveries of all time. “We spent a year or even a year and a half trying to debunk ourselves,” said one of the researchers, Everett K. Gibson, Jr. He and David S. McKay had been colleagues at the Johnson Space Center in Houston from the time they had worked together during the Apollo missions, analyzing rocks brought back from the moon. McKay had helped train the lunar astronauts. But nothing discovered in the lunar samples could compare with what they now held in their hands. “This could be a breathtaking conclusion,” NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin said when he learned of it. He personally interrogated the scientists for two and a half hours before making up his mind about their claim. When he finished debriefing them, he asked NASA public affairs officials to call a press conference. McKay and Gibson had been immersed in the examination of a four-and-a-quarter-pound, gray-green rock that had been found in the ice in Antarctica in 1984. The rock, about the size of a large potato, is about 4.5 billion years old. It fell to the Earth as a meteorite 13,000 years ago. The nature of the rock was not determined until 1993, when researchers discovered that it was of the rarest of all known meteorites –a meteorite from Mars, blasted from the Martian surface by the impact of an asteroid, perhaps, or by some other cataclysmic event. Only 12 such Martian meteorites are known. They were identified as pieces of Mars based on their chemical composition, which differs from that of the Earth and the moon. The rock McKay and Gibson were studying left Mars 16 million years ago and then drifted through the solar system until it was captured by Earth’s gravity and fell the Antarctic ice. They had studied it for about a year when they realized that they were on the verge of what could be a colossal discovery. The press conference the Goldin had asked for was held in Washington on August 7. There, McKay and Gibson made their dramatic announcement: They reported that they had found a chain of evidence suggesting the presence of life on Mars. McKay stated that the rock contained organic material and fossils of extremely small organisms of some kind which is a line of evidence of their proposal. Schopf argued that there are many ways organic chemicals can be formed in the absence of life. He also argued that the fossil-like structures might be what are called pseudo-fossils, mad of minerals, not from the remnants of living organisms. Even today there is a lot of controversy on the topic of ‘life on Mars.’ No one knows for sure whether there really is life on Mars or not, but everyone has their own opinion about the topic. When talking about Mars the topic can be very controversy, but I hope to have opened some eyes. This history of Mars, dreaming of all the fascinations of Mars, and wondering if there is life on Mars can all be very strong subjects to talk about, but they are all very interesting.

Goldsmith, Donald. The Hunt for Life on Mars. Harmondsworth: Penguin Group, 1997.
Washburn, Mark. Mars At Last!: The Red Planet Revealed from Man’s First Sighting to the Viking Touchdown. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977.
Wilford, John Noble. Mars Beckons: The Mysteries, the Challenges, the Expectations of Our Next Great Adventure in Space. New York: Alfred A. Knopg, 1990.