Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...manned trip to Mars, long the stuff of science fiction, now appears to be just a matter of time. The mystic planet, glowing red and ever brighter in the night skies, is heading toward its closest approach to the earth in 17 years this September, tantalizingly near and beckoning. After a hiatus of a dozen years, during which neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union mounted missions to & Mars, a spacecraft is once again on its way, opening a new era in the exploration of the earth's closest planetary neighbor. During the next decade or so, the Soviets will...
...intrigued by Mars' baleful red glare. Ancient civilizations bestowed on the planet the name of their god of war. It was named Ares by the Greeks, Mars by the Romans. When the first telescopes revealed that the planets were neither specks of light nor gods but worlds, perhaps like earth, the notion grew that Mars might harbor life. Noting variations between the bright and dark areas of the planet, British Astronomer Sir William Herschel in 1784 attributed them to "clouds and vapors" and concluded that Mars had an atmosphere and that "its inhabitants probably enjoy a situation in many respects...
...part of a large network conveying water from the polar ice caps to the parched cities of an arid and dying planet. Lowell's observations and musings, in turn, inspired British novelist H.G. Wells to write The War of the Worlds, a dramatic account of an invasion of the earth by octopus-like Martians. In 1938 a radio adaptation of that novel by another man named Welles -- Orson, that is -- panicked many Americans who believed that a real Martian invasion was under...
...landscape, pockmarked by craters and showing no signs of life. Even so, hope persisted. To demonstrate that a Mariner flyby at a distance of thousands of miles might completely overlook a thriving civilization, a young and still unknown Carl Sagan that same year sifted through a thousand pictures of earth shot by a weather satellite orbiting only 300 miles up. In a paper entitled "Is There Life on Earth?" he reported that only one photograph, of a snow-covered superhighway cutting a straight line through a forest, showed any evidence of man's presence on this planet...
...first soil sample briefly breathed new life into the Mars mystique. After being moistened inside the lab, it suddenly released an unexpectedly high burst of oxygen, setting off a flurry of speculation among scientists on earth. Did the oxygen come from some tiny form of Martian life in the soil? After further tests failed to confirm those first results, scientists reluctantly concluded that the large amount of oxygen had probably been produced by a simple chemical reaction between water vapor and some unidentified oxygen-rich compound in the soil sample...