He is our neighbor and perhaps that is why he fascinates us. The fourth planet in our Solar System was one of the first worlds to be observed by the human being’s telescope, but its terrain has only been traveled by space robots.
Mars owes its name to the god of war in Roman mythology (Ares, according to the Greeks), son of the gods Jupiter and Juno (or Zeus and Hera), associated throughout history with the color red like blood, precisely the tonality that predominates on this planet due to the amount of iron oxide on its entire surface .
This is the second smallest planet , behind Mercury, measuring about half that of planet Earth. Phobos and Deimos (discovered in 1877) are the names of the two satellites that orbit around it , which were also baptized with references from mythology. In this case, the inspiration came from Book XV of the Iliad , in which the god Ares invokes his two sons, fear (Phobos) and terror (Deimos).
Mars is also part of the 4 telluric (rocky) planets of the Solar System , made up of Mercury, Venus and Earth. It was precisely the rocky structure, as well as its appearance similar to our planet, one of the reasons why it was thought for years that this planet could harbor life .
Since the mid-nineteenth century, many scientists have speculated on this topic, but there is no evidence or evidence to verify these hypotheses. Even the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli , one of the greatest scholars in the history of ancient astronomy who determined up to eleven thousand measurements of binary stars, came to describe the presence of channels designed to transport water, supposedly useful for some Martian civilization . However, although in 2015 NASA finally found traces of salty liquid water , as we well say, the reality of this idea of extraterrestrial life on Mars is practically nil.
Although man has not yet stepped on its surface, he has already sent some Earth “representatives” to this planet to take samples and photograph some of its most remote regions. In this gallery we show you some of the most iconic images in the history of the exploration of the red planet .
