Word: planetful
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Stifled by budget cuts and foundering without clear-cut goals, NASA has scheduled only one Mars probe, the Mars Observer, which will go into orbit around the planet in 1993 to collect data on climate and geology. And while President Reagan agreed at the recent Moscow summit to a cautious joint communique describing "scientific missions to the moon and Mars" as "areas of possible bilateral and international cooperation," the Administration has been at best lukewarm to the concept of exploring Mars, jointly or otherwise...
Ever since they first peered into the night skies, humans have been awed and 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...
...study of Mars. By 1908, influenced in part by optical illusions and wishful thinking, Lowell had counted and named hundreds of canals, which he believed were 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...
Finally, in 1965, the triumphant mission of the U.S. spacecraft Mariner 4 brought some reality to musings about Mars. The craft flew past the planet at a distance of only 6,100 miles, transmitting 22 television pictures of a bleak, moonlike 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...
When Mariner 9 was successfully inserted into low orbit around Mars in 1971, a planet-wide dust storm obscured its vision for six weeks. After the dust settled, Mariner's cameras revealed a fascinating landscape: towering volcanoes, great canyons, lava flows and a multitude of craters in the red- hued plains. What excited scientists and Mars buffs the most, however, was the unmistakable traces of dry riverbeds and deltas etched into the rock, evidence that water had once flowed freely on the Martian surface. Had life evolved on Mars while water was still ample? And might living organisms still exist...