Since Humanity began looking to skies MARS has been a great mystery, this planet resemble a lot to Earth, since Giovanni Schiaparelli observations in 1877 saying that he looks something like Chanells in the whole planet the interest for the planet continue growing. Red Planet took more importance in the Cold War between USA and USSR both send lots of probes to explore and take photos, a great success of that time was VIKING that landed there and took some samples and conducted some test searching for traces of life, results were negative. USSR have very bad luck in most of the mission sent there, loosing most of its fleet on route or crashing in the planet, last mission was Phobos and Deimos both we’re lost during orbital maneuvers but Phobos send last 2 photos before loosing contact of a massive object with a shadow of
the last probe was MARS 96 lost over the Pacific ocean after take off.
Mars Pathfinder looking a Rock
USA send in the 90’s a probe call MARS Observer that was lost during orbit procedure it was the most modern probe of NASA at that time, the NASA return to Mars on July 4, 1997 with Mars Pathfinder the first rover sending Live images, in all his life it sent 16,500 pictures and 2.3 million of bites of information. In my humble opinion the most successful mission is Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) that it has been on orbit since September 11, 1997, other probe there now is Mars Odyssey which mission is to make cartography of the different elements of the planet
Spirit Rover on Mars
Spirit Picture of a Crater
New Rovers Spirit & Oportunity has been 2 years on the planet and travel nearly
Mars south polar pictures
Nice links to get more information
http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/gallery/images_latestimages.html
http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/
http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/
No comments:
Post a Comment