Esquire: The Five-Minute Guide to Mars
Newsweek: NASA: Mars Is All Wet
AFP: NASA: Mars once "drenched" with water
Okay, you're an astronaut who has just landed on Mars. It's taken you a mind-numbing eight months to get here, so it's time to stretch your legs. Because the atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide, you'll first need to strap a massive air tank on your back. Good news, though: You weigh 62 percent less here. Since you've landed close to the equator, daytime temperatures hover around a comfortable 70 degrees. Red dust is everywhere, and millions of smallish rocks litter the soil. In the near distance you'll see the Valles Marineris, a vast crevice nine times as long and four times as deep as the Grand Canyon. Olympus Mons, an extinct volcano three times the height of Mount Everest, rises in the distance. What's that billowing over its massive peak? Mission control warned you about the fierce dust storms that periodically engulf the entire martian surface, but you were hoping not to encounter one so soon. You have only one course of action: Grab your equipment and hunker down in your spacecraft for what could be months.
Posted by gwen at March 2, 2004 08:12 PM