Mars The Red Planet: Mars, named for Roman god of war, has long been an omen in the night sky. The planet's red rusty surface tells a story that billions of years ago the fourth planet from the sun could have been earth's smaller twin with liquid water on its surface or __ maybe life.
LONGER YEAR AND SHIFTING SEASONS:
With a radius of 2,106 miles. Mars is the seventh-largest planet in the solar system and about half the diameter of the earth. Its surface gravity is 37.5 percent of Earth's.
ATMOSPHERE
Mars's atmosphere is mostly made of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon. By earth standards, the air is preposterously thin; air pressure atop Mount Everest is about 50 times higher than it is at the Martian surface. Despite the thin air, Martian breezes can gust up to 60 miles an hour, kicking up dust that fuels huge dust storms and massive fields of alien sand dunes.
Once upon a time, though, wind and water flowed across the red planet. Robotic rovers found clear evidence that billions of years ago, lakes and rivers coursed across the red planet's surface. This means that at some point in the distant past Mars atmosphere was sufficiently dense and retained enough heat for water to remain liquid. Not so today: Though water ice abounds under the Martian surface and it's polar ice caps, there are no large bodies of liquid water on the surface today.
Mars also lacks an active plate tectonic system the, geologic engine that drives our active earth, and is also missing a planetary magnetic field. The absence of this protective barrier makes it easier for the sun's high energy particles to strip away the planet's atmosphere, which may help explain why Mars's atmosphere is so thin.
HIGHS AND LOWS:
Like other planets, Mars also has mountains, valleys, and volcanoes, but the red planets are by far the biggest and most dramatic Olympus Mons, the solar system's largest volcano, towers some 16 miles above the Martian surface, making it three times larger than Mount Everest, but the base of Olympus Mons is so wide__ some 374 miles across__ that the volcano's average slope is slightly steeper than a wheelchair's ramp. The peak is so massive it curves with the surface of Mars.
Mars also has the solar system's lowest lows. Southeast of Olympus Mons lies Valles Marineris, the Mars iconic canyon system. The gorges span about 2,500 miles and cut up to 4.3 miles into the Mars surface, the network of the chasm is four times deeper__ and five times longer than Earth's grand canyon, and at it's widest, it's a staggering 200 miles across.
Mars core
Its core is likely made of iron and nickel, like Earth's, but probably contains more sulfur than ours.
The best available estimates suggest that the core is about 2,120 miles across, give or take 370 miles __ but we don't know the specifics.
NASA'S Insight lander aims to unravel the mysteries of Mars's interior by tracking how seismic waves move through the red planet (Mars). Mars northern and southern hemispheres are wildly different from one another. More researchers of NASA is researching more about this planet.
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