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28/11/23
Red Planet Day
On the 28th November every year it is Red Planet Day, a day all about Mars! It is a day commemorating the launch of NASA’s spacecraft Mariner 4 in 1964. This was the first ever unmanned spacecraft to ever reach Mars, flying past the planet to observe it and take the first ever close up photos. It took almost eight months for the spacecraft to reach Mars, flying past it on July 14th 1965.
Since this first mission to reach Mars, other unmanned spacecraft have reached the planet too. Mariner 9 orbited Mars in 1971, which means it was able to travel around the planet, not just fly past. Then there was Viking 1, which successfully landed on Mars and was able to send the first colour picture of the surface back to Earth.
NASA is aiming to potentially send astronauts to Mars in the 2030’s as part of the exciting Artemis Program, which is also hoping to send astronauts back to the Moon too first.
Top 10 Mars Facts
1. No one is given credit for discovering Mars. It can be seen in the night sky without a telescope (you can also see Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn too) and people have known its there for a very long time. It stands out quite a bit, you can even see its red even just by looking up in the sky at it. Galileo Galilei, who made quite a few exciting discoveries about space, was the first person to see it in detail though, using a telescope to look at it in 1610.
2. Mars was named after a Roman God. Mars was the God of War and the name was chosen because of the planets red colour was similar to the colour of blood! Mars rode on a chariot pulled by two horses called Phobos and Deimos. The planet has two moons which are named after these two horses.
3. Mars is the second smallest planet in the Solar System and about half the size of Earth.
4. Mars is one of the rocky planets (like Mercury, Venus and Earth). The rock has iron in it, which becomes rusty turning the whole planet a red colour.
5. Mars is the forth planet from the Sun. It is further away than Earth so it takes longer to complete one orbit of the Sun. A year is 687 Earth days long, almost double the length of a year on our planet.
6. It is a lot colder on Mars than on Earth. Near the equator it can be about 20 degrees but at the poles at the top and bottom of the planet it’s more like -140 degrees. That’s incredibly cold!
7. The atmosphere on Mars has very little oxygen in it so if a human did visit they wouldn’t be able to breathe and would have to wear a spacesuit that provided oxygen at all times.
8. Mars has the largest volcano on it in the whole Solar System called Olympos Mons. Amazingly it is about three times the size of Mount Everest on Earth!
9. It was once thought there was no liquid water on Mars but actually it has been discovered that there is. Under the ice cap on its south pole a lake of water has been found.
10. Some asteroids that have crashed into Earth have actually been found to have come from Mars! Asteroids hit Mars and the debris from this has flown off back it into space and eventually crashed into Earth. Tests done on these asteroids have even suggested there was some kind of life once on Mars and fossils of micro organisms have been found in them!
All photos and illustrations in this blog post are Whizzbots and Public Domain Images.
Other images on the site may be Shutterstock or Creative Commons Images, which are credited appropriately.