Mars, fourth planet in the solar system in order of distance from the Sun and seventh in size and mass. It is a periodically conspicuous reddish object in the night sky. Mars is designated by the symbol ♂.
Sometimes called the Red Planet, Mars has long been associated with warfare and slaughter. It is named for the Roman god of war. As long as 3,000 years ago, Babylonian astronomer-astrologers called the planet Nergal for their god of death and pestilence. The planet’s two moons, Phobos (Greek: “Fear”) and Deimos (“Terror”), were named for two of the sons of Ares and Aphrodite (the counterparts of Mars and Venus, respectively, in Greek mythology).
In recent times Mars has intrigued people for more-substantial reasons than its baleful appearance. The planet is the second closest to Earth, after Venus, and it is usually easy to observe in the night sky because its orbit lies outside Earth’s. It is also the only planet whose solid surface and atmospheric phenomena can be seen in telescopes from Earth. Centuries of assiduous studies by earthbound observers, extended by spacecraft observations since the 1960s, have revealed that Mars is similar to Earth in many ways
Like Earth, Mars has clouds, winds, a roughly 24-hour day, seasonal weather patterns, polar ice caps, volcanoes, canyons, and other familiar features. There are intriguing clues that billions of years ago Mars was even more Earth-like than today, with a denser, warmer atmosphere and much more water—rivers, lakes, flood channels, and perhaps oceans. By all indications Mars is now a sterile frozen desert. However, close-up images of dark streaks on the slopes of some craters during Martian spring and summer suggest that at least small amounts of water may flow seasonally on the planet’s surface, and radar reflections from a possible lake under the south polar cap suggest that water may still exist as a liquid in protected areas below the surface.
Carbon dioxide constitutes 95.3 percent of the atmosphere by weight (see the table), nine times the quantity now in Earth’s much more massive atmosphere. Much of Earth’s carbon dioxide, however, is chemically locked in sedimentary rocks; the amount in the Martian atmosphere is less than a thousandth of the terrestrial total. The balance of the Martian atmosphere consists of molecular nitrogen, water vapour, and noble gases (argon, neon, krypton, and xenon). There are also trace amounts of gases that have been produced from the primary constituents by photochemical reactions, generally high in the atmosphere; these include molecular oxygen, carbon monoxide, nitric oxide, and small amounts of ozone.
The lower atmosphere supplies gas to the planet’s ionosphere, where densities are low, temperatures are high, and components separate by diffusion according to their masses. Various constituents in the top of the atmosphere are lost to space, which affects the isotopic composition of the remaining gases. For example, because hydrogen is lost preferentially over its heavier isotope deuterium, Mars’s atmosphere contains five times more deuterium than Earth’s.
Although water is only a minor constituent of the Martian atmosphere (a few molecules per 10,000 at most), primarily because of low atmospheric and surface temperatures, it plays an important role in atmospheric chemistry and meteorology. The Martian atmosphere is effectively saturated with water vapour, yet there is no liquid water present on the surface. The temperature and pressure of the planet are so low that water molecules can exist only as ice or as vapour. Little water is exchanged daily with the surface despite the very cold nighttime surface temperatures.
Isotopic measurements suggest that larger amounts of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon were present in the atmosphere in the past and that Mars may have lost much of its inventory of volatile substances early in its history, either to space or to the ground (i.e., locked up chemically in rocks). Mars once had a much thicker atmosphere that was mostly lost to space through the solar wind and the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation, which were much more intense in the early solar system.
To the Earth-based telescopic observer, the Martian surface outside the polar caps is characterized by red-ochre-coloured bright areas on which dark markings appear superimposed. In the past, the bright areas were referred to as deserts, and the majority of large dark areas were originally called maria (Latin: “oceans” or “seas”; singular mare) in the belief that they were covered by expanses of water. No topography can be seen from Earth-based telescopes. What is observed are variations in the brightness of the surface or changes in the opacity of the atmosphere.
The dark markings cover about one-third of the Martian surface, mostly in a band around the planet between latitudes 10° and 40° S. Their distribution is irregular, and their gross pattern has been observed to change over timescales of tens to hundreds of years. The northern hemisphere has only three such major features—Acidalia Planitia, Syrtis Major, and a dark collar around the pole—which were once considered to be shallow seas or vegetated regions. It is now known that many of Mars’s dark areas form and change as winds move dark sand around the surface or sweep areas free of bright dust. Many of the bright areas are regions of dust accumulation. The canals that figured so prominently on maps made from telescopic observations around the turn of the 20th century are not visible in close-up spacecraft images. They were almost certainly imaginary features that observers thought they saw while straining to make out objects close to the limit of resolution of their telescopes. Other features, such as the “wave of darkening” and the “blue haze” described by early observers at the telescope, are now known to result from a combination of the viewing conditions and changes in the reflective properties of the surface.
For telescopic observers the most striking regular changes on Mars occur at the poles. With the onset of fall in a particular hemisphere, clouds develop over the relevant polar region, and the cap, made of frozen carbon dioxide, begins to grow. The smaller cap in the north ultimately extends to 55° latitude, the larger one in the south to 50° latitude. In spring the caps recede. During summer the northern carbon dioxide cap disappears completely, leaving behind a small water-ice cap. In the south a small residual cap composed of carbon dioxide ice and water ice lingers over the summer.
The composition of the seasonal polar caps was the subject of debate for nearly 200 years. One early hypothesis—that the caps were made of water ice—can be traced to English astronomer William Herschel, who imagined them to be just like those on Earth. In 1898 an Irish scientist, George J. Stoney, questioned this theory and suggested that the caps might consist of frozen carbon dioxide, but evidence to support the idea was not available until Dutch American astronomer Gerard Kuiper’s 1947 detection of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The reasons that some cloud-top regions appear dark when viewed in ultraviolet light are not fully known. Materials that may be present in minute quantities above the cloud tops and that may be responsible for absorbing ultraviolet light in some regions include sulfur dioxide, solid sulfur, chlorine, and iron(III) chloride.
The characteristic temperature in the lower atmosphere is about 200 kelvins (K; −100 °F, −70 °C), which is generally colder than the average daytime surface temperature of 250 K (−10 °F, −20 °C). These values are in the same range as those experienced on Earth in Antarctica during winter. In summer above a very dark surface, daytime temperatures can peak at about 290 K (62 °F, 17 °C). Above the turbulent layer close to the surface, temperature decreases with elevation at a rate of about 1.5 K (2.7 °F, 1.5 °C) per km (about 2.4 K [4.3 °F, 2.4 °C] per mile) of altitude.
Unlike that of Earth, the atmosphere of Mars experiences large seasonal variations in pressure as carbon dioxide, the main constituent, “snows out” at the winter pole and returns directly to a gas (sublimes) in the spring. Because the southern winter cap is more extensive than the northern, atmospheric pressure reaches a minimum during southern winter when the southern cap is at its largest. The pressure varies annually by 26 percent as some 7.9 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide leave and reenter the atmosphere seasonally. This is equivalent to a thickness of at least 23 cm (9 inches) of solid carbon dioxide (dry ice) or several metres of carbon dioxide snow averaged over the vast area of the seasonal polar caps
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Mars has Two moons namely:-
Mars is the fourth planet out from the Sun. It moves around the Sun at a mean distance of 228 million km (140 million miles), or about 1.5 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. Because of Mars’s relatively elongated orbit, the distance between Mars and the Sun varies from 206.6 million to 249.2 million km (128.4 million to 154.8 million miles). Mars orbits the Sun once in 687 Earth days, which means that its year is nearly twice as long as Earth’s. At its closest approach, Mars is less than 56 million km (35 million miles) from Earth, but it recedes to almost 400 million km (250 million miles) when the two planets are on opposite sides of the solar system.
Mars spins on its axis once every 24 hours 37 minutes, making a day on Mars only a little longer than an Earth day. Its axis of rotation is inclined to its orbital plane by about 25°, and, as for Earth, the tilt gives rise to seasons on Mars. The Martian year consists of 668.6 Martian solar days, called sols. Because of the elliptical orbit, southern summers are shorter (154 Martian days) and warmer than those in the north (178 Martian days). The situation is slowly changing, however, such that 25,000 years from now the northern summers will be the shorter and warmer ones. In addition, the obliquity, or tilt, of the axis is slowly changing on a roughly one-million-year timescale. During the present epochs the obliquity may range from close to zero, at which times Mars has no seasons, to as high as 45°, when seasonal differences are extreme. Over hundred-million-year timescales the obliquity may reach values as high as 80°.