Part of the problem is the low temperatures on the planet.
AROUND THE FACE OF MARS MOVIE
In most ways, however, the depiction of Mars in this movie is remarkably accurate.Īlthough the atmosphere contains small amounts of water vapor and occasional clouds of water ice, liquid water is not stable under present conditions on Mars. Astronomers have noted that the martian winds could not possibly be as forceful as depicted in the film. The issue of how strong the winds on Mars can be plays a big role in the 2015 hit movie The Martian in which the main character is stranded on Mars after being buried in the sand in a windstorm so great that his fellow astronauts have to leave the planet so their ship is not damaged. In the absence of surface water, wind erosion plays a major role in sculpting the martian surface ( Figure 10.24). It is this fine dust that coats almost all the surface, giving Mars its distinctive red color. The wind is able, however, to loft very fine dust particles, which can sometimes develop planet-wide dust storms. While winds on Mars can reach high speeds, they exert much less force than wind of the same velocity would on Earth because the atmosphere is so thin. The proportions of different gases are similar to those in the atmosphere of Venus (see Table 10.2), but a lot less of each gas is found in the thin air on Mars. (This is how thin the air is about 30 kilometers above Earth’s surface.) Martian air is composed primarily of carbon dioxide (95%), with about 3% nitrogen and 2% argon. The atmosphere of Mars today has an average surface pressure of only 0.007 bar, less than 1% that of Earth. Therefore, the guiding principle in assessing habitability on Mars and elsewhere has been to “follow the water.” That is the perspective we take in this section, to follow the water on the red planet and hope it will lead us to life. But where (and how) should we look for life? We know that the one requirement shared by all life on Earth is liquid water. Of all the planets and moons in the solar system, Mars seems to be the most promising place to look for life, both fossil microbes and (we hope) some forms of life deeper underground that still survive today. Summarize the evidence for and against the possibility of life on Mars.Describe the evidence for the presence of water in the past history of Mars.Explain what we know about the polar ice caps on Mars and how we know it.Describe the general composition of the atmosphere on Mars.Now Mars Express, a probe launched by the European Space Agency to orbit Mars in 2003, has captured a new image.By the end of this section, you will be able to: Or, the opposition maintained, perhaps NASA wasn't looking hard enough. So a new photo came from the Mars Global Surveyor probe in 1998, and another in 2001, and each time the massif looked less like a face and more like an outcropping of rock. But the firestorm of interest became so intense - along with complaints that NASA was hiding something - that in the 1990s an exasperated Daniel Goldin, then NASA's chief, promised that the next time an American spacecraft passed over Cydonia, it would take a picture. The Viking science team didn't think much of the whole thing, believing it was probably an accident of lighting. Hoagland said he had been a consultant for CBS News during the Apollo moon landings, and later did public relations for New York's Hayden Planetarium.
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