Mars Red Ruby of the Night

       Mars.

       The word brings to mind all the mystery and imagination by humans.  Since ancestral man began paying attention to the five wandering stars that moved among the fixed star patterns, Mars has beckoned.

       Tonight and all through the Summer of 2014, Mars beholds your attention with just a look to the south when twilight descends.  Far from its red brilliance when it was opposite Earth in April, Mars is still a ruby red eye-catcher in the Summer darkness.  Watch Mars move against the backdrop of stars during the next months by checking its relationship to the bright, white star Spica, both celestial objects in the sprawling lady of the night, Virgo the Virgin.

       When you look at Mars, you’re looking at the one celestial object that has inspired more science fiction and questions of science facts than any other stargazing sight. Sure, plenty has been written about the Moon, but it is Mars where the hope of life has tantalized the writers of books, movies and documentaries.

Percival Lowell's Martian "Canals"

       Everyone probably has a favorite Mars movies (mine being “War of the Worlds” 1953 and “Red Planet” 2000) and maybe a science fiction or fact book (again, my favs are “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein and “Mars 3-D” by Jim Bell).  Just 100 years ago, a Boston aristocrat with eccentric ways, Percival Lowell, was enjoying the afterglow of his three best sellers: “Mars” (1895), “Mars and Its Canals” (1895) and “Mars As the Abode of Life” (1908). Lowell, who built his observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. and later began the search for Planet X, aka Pluto, is responsible for popularizing the popular notion that Mars had a dying civilization calling to Earth for help. That was the inspiration for H.G. Wells and his Earth invasion by Martians in “War of the Worlds.”

       Mars is the only planet that we see the surface, easy to do with even a small, backyard telescope when the Red Planet is at opposition every two years. The white polar caps and dark, angular markings are apparent against the orange-red of the assumed deserts. Until the Space Age began in the 1960s, the exact nature of the dark markings was unknown.  Details in large, professional telescopes were often best seen with the naked eye instead of photography because of limits of the films being used and unsteady atmosphere of Earth. Yet hundreds of features were recorded and given exotic names from Martian mythology, like Elysium, Sineus Sabous, Hellus and Syrtis Major.

       Authors have continually imagined Mars as an abode for life—if only the visiting astronaut.  Edgar Rice Burrough’s series of planet Barsoom and hero John Carter is legendary; as are the terraforming concept books of Kim Stanley Robinson: “Red Mars” (1993), “Green Mars” (1994) and “Blue Mars” (1996).  A friend called me just the other day to ask if I’d read a new best seller, “The Martian” by Andy Weir, which he plowed through in a couple sittings—then re-read it! It’s on my list, and debuted 12^th on the New York Times Best Selling Fiction list.

       And the movies are filled with Martian drama and comedy, from the 1964 “Robinson Crusoe on Mars” to the comedy “Mars Attacks” (1996). The movie rights to “The Martian” have been bought and Hollywood will soon bring us the story of an astronaut stranded alone on the Red Planet.  The fascination with Mars is timeless.

       The first Martian surface feature was sketched by Dutch Astronomer Christiaan Huygens in 1659, the triangular patch called Syrtis Major. This feature was rediscovered in the 1970s to be a plateau of a shield volcano form billions of years ago.

Mars from Hubble Space Telescope

With the 21^st Century invasion of Mars by American spacecraft that are in orbit and crawling on the surface, the real Mars is just as fascinating and mysterious as anything written in fiction—minus the aliens, of course. 

Many people are surprised that Mars is half the size of Earth at just 4,200 miles wide.  It is a cold world, and without a protective, thick atmosphere and shield of a magnetic system, the surface is bombarded by damaging ultraviolet rays of the Sun and cosmic rays of the Universe.

Mars is more like Antarctica, super cold, yet windy with sand being blown around everywhere.  There are eight huge volcanoes larger than anything on Earth that once belched ash around the planet.  The iron dust rusted from moisture in the air, and everything on Mars is coated with it. NASA’s rovers have a brush to scrape off the paper-thin layer of rusted volcano ash—giving the Red Planet its name since antiquity.

Looking up at Mars in the Summer of 2014 is an amazing time.  With two American rovers, two NASA orbiters, and a European robot in orbit, never has so much data on one planet been accumulated with such continuity—the satellites watching the Earth an obvious exception.

We know Mars had a watery past with a hemisphere covered with oceans. The huge volcanoes dormant for maybe 3 billion years (we think?) must have created a vast network of tube caves.  The protection of caves from the harsh space environment sterilizing the Martian surface could allow all kinds of life to flourish.  And there is plenty of evidence of underground water seeping to the surface, not to mention the billions of gallons of water frozen at the poles and buried just a few feet beneath the surface.

       There is no rain on Mars, but the polar lander Phoenix detected snow in the atmosphere that didn't reach the ground. Another discovery of the 1998 stationary lander was the melting of ice in front of the cameras—sublimating from solid water to a gas without taking liquid form.

Yet, Mars is a lot like Earth—more so, of course, than any other world in the Solar System. There are clouds and dust devils that have left squiggly lines in the deserts (and cleaned off solar panels on rovers). Evidence of flowing water is everywhere, from tapered islands in ancient rivers to pebbles in a dry creek that was in the path of NASA’s latest billion-dollar rover, Curiosity.

The imagery of Mars from the surface and orbit is astounding.  So alien in form and style that a display of Martian space art is on display through September 14 at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC.  

The surface of Mars has rocks like Earth. Of course there’s lots of vesicular basalt from volcanoes. Breccias from water sediments are also easy to find. And there is rocky andesite, volcanic sulfur and hematite that have rolled up in millions of balls the size of blueberries across the Meridinia plains that Mars rover Spirit in its amazing eight year trek.

It’s true that the surface of Mars can get a warm as 60 degrees F. on a hot summer day.  But the thin atmosphere doesn’t hold the heat well, so at your knees it might be 40 degrees and at the top of your head six feet off the ground it’s only 20 degrees or less! The thermal changes might pose problems for large structures, though six landers have operated within their limits designed by spacecraft engineers.

Martians are big our minds, and though we know they won’t be waving at us, all the evidence to support life has been discovered by American robots.  It might take astronaut cave explorers to turn over a rock and see the first alien cockroaches scatter.

So there’s plenty to think about when looking at Mars in our Summer evenings this 2014.  Let your mind go wild and join some great thinkers who have brought us both Martian fact and fiction.