The Red Planet has always been one of the most mysterious objects in the sky for humans. Even ancient astronomers discovered that this celestial body and several others behave completely differently than other objects. Unlike other stars, they constantly change their position in the sky.
Actually, self
The name "planet" came to Russian and other European languages from ancient Greek, where it literally meant "wandering". Although the differences between planets and stars were discovered long before the Greeks by the Sumerians and Babylonians, nevertheless, today we use the heritage of precisely ancient civilization. The planets were named according to the associations they evoked among the Greeks and Romans. The pale color of Venus was associated with sea foam, as a result of which she became identified with the goddess of love. Mercury, which moves the fastest in the night sky, was associated with the famous messenger of the gods (Hermes in the Greek version). Red-faced Mars could not help butevoke associations with fires and destruction. For which he received the name of the god of war.
And this planet attracted attention not only in antiquity. It arouses interest in us today. Perhaps, among all the cold bodies of the solar system, Mars is the most frequent guest in human art. The ancients associated it with the divine essence. During the Renaissance, when more was known about the planets, Mars began to inspire even more bizarre fantasies. The question of whether there is life on Mars has often been played up in science fiction novels. So, one of the first science fiction writers HG Wells in
his "War of the Worlds" describes the terrible Martians, far ahead of the earthlings in technological development and arrived to destroy our civilization. And Edgar Burroughs, on the contrary, draws the Martian society noble and strong, although surprising from the point of view of an earthling who got into this company.
And what will science tell us: is there life on Mars?
Very often, fantastic stories, as noted above, are inspired by writers and directors precisely by scientific ideas and ideas about the limits of the possible. For the first time, scientists took a rational look at the question of whether there is life on Mars back in the 17th century. Then it was discovered through telescopes that the red planet has polar caps and a number of other characteristics similar to those of the earth. This, of course, gave rise to the idea of the possible existence of flora and fauna there. Such circumstantial evidence was discussed by Earth scientists right up to the era of spaceflight.
At the endIn the end, there was only one way to reliably put an end to the debate about whether there is life on Mars or not. So, the first artificial object was launched to the planet in 1962, but control was lost. It was the Soviet apparatus Mars-1. Mars 2 reached the surface of the planet, but crashed on landing. And only Mars-3 in 1971 safely reached the target and helped to conduct a number of valuable experiments. Thanks
the Soviet Mars program and the American Viking program finally had a close acquaintance with this celestial body.
Unfortunately or fortunately, the spacecraft not only did not find traces of life, but the conditions with which they were met by the red planet spoke of the impossibility of the existence of complex organisms there. However, the fact that the atmosphere of Mars is mostly carbon dioxide leaves serious hopes for finding traces of life in the past. The fact is that carbon dioxide is a product of plant life. And then its presence can be explained if life on Mars really existed once.
Already in the 2000s, spacecraft were again sent to the planet to study. "Phoenix" in 2008 and Curiosity ("Curiosity") in 2012. The latter is a whole research station. Its goal is to carefully study the soil of the planet. After all, previous studies have shown that there can not be a complex life. But whether there is microbial life on Mars, and if so, where and at what depth it will be found, remains a very curious mystery. foundationfor these hopes are the meteorites of Martian origin, which once fell to Earth. Surprisingly, traces of primitive bacteria were found there. In addition, there is reason to believe that water has survived on the planet today. And this gives a significant head start for life in all its manifestations.
