"About Mars" Topic

"For a long time Mars seemed to be the most likely abode for life outside the Earth, and for that reason it has always been of cardinal importance in sf. Its surface, unlike that of Venus, exhibits markings visible (albeit unclearly) with the aid of optical telescopes, and has a distinct red colour. Early observers interpreted what they saw in terms of analogies with terrestrial phenomena: blue-green tracts interrupting the red were thought to be oceans or vegetation; the polar caps, seen to wax and wane with the seasons, were generally held to be of snow and ice; changing patterns of light and dark suggested cloud cover or forests. The presence of life – including intelligent, humanoid life – was considered likely if not certain by many scientists well into the early twentieth century. In 1877 Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) reported an intricate network of canali (literally "channels"), a word widely interpreted as "canals". The US astronomer Percival Lowell, in Mars (1895) and its successors Mars and Its Canals (1906) and Mars as the Abode of Life (1909), built up an image of a cool, arid world with great red deserts and a few areas of arable land, but perfectly capable of sustaining life. Lowell argued for the presence of an ancient, advanced, politically mature Martian civilization, which had constructed the canal system in response to the increasingly inhospitable climate of a cooling, drying, dying world, and this vision informed much of the early sf about Mars. The photographs taken during the Mariner probe flyby in 1965 and the landing of the Viking probes in 1976, however, revealed that Mars is extremely cold and has virtually no atmosphere; although there really are gigantic channels, possibly caused by water in the distant past, the intricate network reported by Schiaparelli does not exist, and nor do the tracts of vegetation. The data returned from more recent missions – Pathfinder (1996), Global Surveyor (1996), Odyssey (2001), Mars Exploration Rover (2003), Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (2005) and Phoenix (2007) – have vastly expanded scientific knowledge of Mars and generally confirmed the impression provided by Mariner and Viking, while bolstering the view that water once flowed on the planet's surface, and may yet reside in substantial quantities beneath the surface and/or at the poles…"
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Amicalement
Armand

I can remember when the Pathfinder mission landed in 1996. All the pictures it sent back had a orange tint to them. Then we found out that the REAL pictures did not have an orange tint to them. The manager in charge of the mission said Mars should have an orange tint to it. So he had all the monitors color adjusted showing orange tint. He also ordered all the pictures to have an orange tint.

Now, we know there is no orange tint to the sky or ground. hahahaha Wonder how many millions of dollars it took to prove a NASA manager wrong. lol

Back in 2004, there was a meeting of conservatives at the Bellagio here in Las Vegas about the imminent colonization of Mars by the 'right people'.
The weirdest thing about the meeting was there wasn't one scientist in the bunch. There were plenty of religious types declaring that Mars was the future site of the Shining City and stuff. But as far as I could tell, not one scientist.