Why is mars known as the red planet

Countless stories since have taken place on Mars or explored the possibilities of its Martian inhabitants. Movies like "Total Recall" and take us to a terraformed Mars and a struggling colony running out of air. A Martian colony and Earth have a prickly relationship in "The Expanse " television series and novels.

And in the novel and its movie adaptation, "The Martian," botanist Mark Watney is stranded alone on the planet and struggles to survive until a rescue mission can retrieve him. Mars is a cold desert world. It is half the size of Earth. Mars is sometimes called the Red Planet.

It's red because of rusty iron in the ground. Like Earth, Mars has seasons, polar ice caps, volcanoes, canyons, and weather. It has a very thin atmosphere made of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon.

There are signs of ancient floods on Mars, but now water mostly exists in icy dirt and thin clouds. On some Martian hillsides, there is evidence of liquid salty water in the ground. The Latest from Mars. Are We Alone in the Universe? Mars has two moons named Phobos and Deimos.

This view of rover tracks on Mars is part of the free destination poster set. Kid-Friendly Mars Mars is a cold desert world. This page showcases our resources for those interested in learning more about Mars.

Mars Resources. NASA scientists are calling for a framework that provides context for findings related to the search for life. Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. It orbits the Sun at an average distance of million km, half as far again as the Earth, so human visitors would find it very cold. Although summers near the equator can be quite warm, the average temperature is 63 degrees Celsius below zero - similar to winters in Antarctica.

The nights are also bitterly cold. Both Mars moons are pockmarked with craters from meteor impacts. The surface of Phobos also possesses an intricate pattern of grooves, which may be cracks that formed after the impact created the moon's largest crater — a hole about 6 miles 10 km wide, or nearly half the width of Phobos. The two Martian satellites always show the same face to their parent planet, just as our moon does to Earth. It remains uncertain how Phobos and Deimos were born.

They may be former asteroids that were captured by Mars' gravitational pull, or they may have formed in orbit around Mars at roughly the same time the planet came into existence. Ultraviolet light reflected from Phobos provides strong evidence that the moon is a captured asteroid ,according to astronomers at the University of Padova in Italy.

Phobos is gradually spiraling toward Mars, drawing about 6 feet 1. Within 50 million years, Phobos will either smash into Mars or break up and form a ring of debris around the planet. The first person to observe Mars with a telescope was Galileo Galilei , in In the century following, astronomers discovered the planet's polar ice caps. In the 19th and 20th centuries, some researchers — most famously, Percival Lowell — believed they saw a network of long, straight canals on Mars that hinted at a possible civilization.

However, these sightings proved to be mistaken interpretations of geological features. A number of Martian rocks have fallen to Earth over the eons, providing scientists a rare opportunity to study pieces of Mars without having to leave our planet. One of the most controversial finds was Allan Hills ALH — a Martian meteorite that, according to a study, likely contains tiny fossils and other evidence of Mars life. Other researchers cast doubt on this hypothesis, but the team behind the famous study have held firm to their interpretation, and the debate about ALH continues today.

In , a separate meteorite study found that organic molecules — the carbon-containing building blocks of life, although not necessarily evidence of life itself — could have formed on Mars through battery-like chemical reactions. Robotic spacecraft began observing Mars in the s, with the United States launching Mariner 4 in and Mariners 6 and 7 in Those early missions revealed Mars to be a barren world, without any signs of the life or civilizations people such as Lowell had imagined there.

The Soviet Union also launched numerous Red Planet spacecraft in the s and early s, but most of those missions failed. Mars 2 and Mars 3 operated successfully but were unable to map the surface due to dust storms.

Its twin, Viking 2, landed six weeks later in a different Mars region. The Viking landers took the first close-up pictures of the Martian surface but found no strong evidence for life. Again, however, there has been debate: Gil Levin, principal investigator of the Vikings' Labeled Release life-detection experiment, forever maintained that the landers spied evidence of microbial metabolism in the Martian dirt. Levin died in July , at the age of A small robot onboard Pathfinder named Sojourner — the first wheeled rover ever to explore the surface of another planet — ventured over the planet's surface, analyzing rocks for 95 Earth days.

In , NASA launched the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which discovered vast amounts of water ice beneath the Martian surface, mostly in the upper 3 feet 1 meter. It remains uncertain whether more water lies underneath, since the probe cannot see water any deeper.

In , Mars passed closer to Earth than it had anytime in the past 60, years. That same year, NASA launched two golf-cart-sized rovers, nicknamed Spirit and Opportunity , which explored different regions of the Martian surface after touching down in January Both rovers found many signs that water once flowed on the planet's surface.

Spirit and Opportunity were originally tasked with three-month surface missions, but both kept roving for far longer than that. NASA didn't declare Spirit dead until , and Opportunity was still going strong until that dust storm hit in mid The robot confirmed the presence of water ice in the near subsurface, among other finds. Curiosity has also found complex organic molecules and documented seasonal fluctuations in methane concentrations in the atmosphere.

As noted above, InSight is investigating Mars' internal structure and composition, primarily by measuring and characterizing marsquakes. Perseverance, which is about the same size as Curiosity, landed on the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater in February along with a tiny, technology-demonstrating helicopter known as Ingenuity.

As of September , Ingenuity had made more than a dozen flights on Mars, showing that aerial exploration of the planet is feasible. Perseverance documented the 4-pound 1. The big rover has already collected several samples, part of a big cache that will be brought back to Earth, perhaps as soon as , by a joint NASA-ESA campaign. The Hope orbiter arrived at Mars in February and is studying the planet's atmosphere, weather and climate.

Tianwen 1 , which consists of an orbiter and a lander-rover duo, also reached Mars orbit in February The landed element touched down a few months later, in May.

The Tianwen 1 rover, called Zhurong, soon rolled down the landing platform's ramp and began exploring the Martian surface. This robot, named Rosalind Franklin, was supposed to launch in mid, but parachute problems and other issues delayed the liftoff until the next opportunity, in Mars and Earth align properly for interplanetary missions just once every 26 months.

Rosalind Franklin will search for signs of past Mars life, among other tasks. The robot will use a drill to go deep into the Red Planet, collecting soil samples from about 2 meters 6. Mars is far from an easy planet to reach. Notable examples include but are not limited to :. Robots aren't the only ones getting a ticket to Mars. A workshop group of scientists from government agencies, academia and industry have determined that a NASA-led manned mission to Mars should be possible by the s.

NASA is working on this goal via a program called Artemis , which aims to establish a sustainable, long-term human presence on and around the moon by the late s. The lessons and skills learned from this lunar effort will help pave the way for putting boots on Mars, NASA officials have said.