Word: martian
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...remarkable photographs last July dashed the hopes of many scientists that some form of life may exist on Mars. But their pessimism may be premature. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Berkeley last week, Harvard Astronomer Carl Sagan suggested that a Martian version of Mariner 4 would have transmitted equally discouraging pictures of the Earth. "Had the Mariner 4 vehicle passed the same distance from the Earth that it did from Mars (6,000 miles) and obtained 22 comparable photographs," Sagan declared, "no sign of life on our planet would have been...
Happily joining the debate last week, another scientist at the A.A.A.S. meeting declared that the Mariner pictures do suggest the possibility of Martian life. New Mexico State University Astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930, said that the faint markings on seven of Mariner's 22 photographs coincide with the controversial and elusive "canals" and "oases" that he and others have mapped in telescopic observations of Mars...
...Melting Martian Frost. Tombaugh found that the largest crater in the best Mariner photograph is located where visual observations have spotted an oasis. Parallel markings in the southern part of the crater coincide with the position of a short canal mapped by Astronomer Percival Lowell...
...thorough cleansing before they leave the earth. At a conference on spacecraft sterilization sponsored by NASA at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, scientists explained how the chances of contaminating Mars will be reduced to less than 1 in 10,000 when the Voyager spacecraft makes a soft Martian landing...
...same issue of Science, other researchers offer much the same conclusion. All of which suggests that other Martian craters, predating those that Mariner saw, formed and vanished eons ago. What happened to them? All the researchers agree that they must have been eroded away - perhaps by swirling dust storms, perhaps by a flow of Martian water. "In any event," conclude Anders and Arnold, "the crater density on Mars no longer precludes the possibility that liquid water and a denser atmosphere were present on Mars during the first 3.5 billion years of its history." If there was water, there may have...