Word: martianize
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...pictures and information while it flies by the largest of the solar system's nine planets. Mars is also in for more scrutiny. The Soviet Union will probably launch Mars probes in both 1973 and 1975, and two U.S. Viking spacecraft are scheduled to land life detectors on the Martian surface...
...buttress their case, exobiologists have exposed microorganisms to simulated Martian environments (carbon dioxide, extreme cold, small amounts of water) in so-called "Mars jars." Some of the bugs readily adapted to the Martian conditions. For this reason, Western scientists were all the more concerned last week that the Russian lander might, if not completely sterilized, introduce earthly life forms to Mars...
Exobiologists have suggested a number of scenarios for the survival of Martian life. Sagan, for instance, theorizes that Mars may now be experiencing an ice age. As he explains it, the planet's northern hemisphere does not now receive the maximum possible dose of solar radiation because the Martian north pole is tilted toward the sun only when the planet is farthest from it. Yet in about 10,000 to 12,000 years, because of the slow precession of Mars (a wobbling of the planet as it rotates through space), the north pole will be tilted so that it receives...
...indeed develop under conditions radically different from those on earth. It did, for example, evolve during untold eons on earth when there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. To those primitive forms of life, in fact, oxygen would have been a poisonous gas. Thus instead of requiring oxygen, Martian organisms, like some terrestrial bacteria, might thrive in a carbon dioxide environment. To obtain water if they need it, Martian organisms may have evolved mechanisms to unlock the supply chemically bound into the rocks
...their bleak planet. If Martian creatures found intense ultraviolet radiation unbearable, Sagan speculates, they may have developed tough silicate shells that would protect them from it. The reason that Mars does not reflect back much ultraviolet radiation, he says whimsically, may be that all those turtle-like creatures are absorbing...