Mars is freezing, rusty and haunted. We can not stop looking at it.

is not crazy in astrobiology circles these days to have the opinion that the life that now envelops the Earth began on Mars, and then a pilgrim microbe was brought here on a wandering asteroid. We now know that the sky is an endless conveyor belt with cosmic debris of shiffling riffraff from planet to planet, even from star to star, personified by Oumuamua, the wandering comet of the outside of our solar system who sailed briskly through the planets last winter. In the fullness of time, everything happens everywhere.

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We Could All Be Martians , then, which could explain the apparently endless appeal of the red planet. The dream of exile to return to what could have been Eden. Elon Musk said that he wanted to die there, but he has not arrived yet going there right away.

I grew up terrified and curious about the place, having seen the previews of "Invaders of Mars." The movie showed a boy of my age, seeing a flying saucer come down under a hill, after which the inhabitants, including his parents, were kidnapped and turned into robots. My parents never let me see the whole movie.

He was paying homage to a part of a mythology that dated back to the beginning of the century, Mars being the dying house of a dying civilization of super intelligent beings – little green men – hanging on by cbads bringing water from the poles. These visions stem from a misunderstanding of the work of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who, in 1877, thought he saw long and thin lines that he called cbadi (cbads in Italian) which lacerated the surface of Mars. Percival Lowell, a mundane and astronomer took the concept seriously and began mapping what he thought were cities and cbads on the planet

All that good sci-fi melodrama went away when the images space show the real planet, crater and dust. ] So, here are some concrete facts. Mars is about half the Earth, so the gravity is lower there – only a third of what is on Earth and so you could jump higher, ie if you could take a breathing. The Martian atmosphere is mainly carbon dioxide and there is very little anyway, the pressure is less than one percent of the air pressure here. Ground temperatures range from 86 degrees Fahrenheit to -190 below. One day there are 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds a long time and a year is 687 Earth days.

Mars is red because it is rusty. Martian dust is full of iron oxide

It is, as would say a tourist brochure, a land of dramatic contrasts, with the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympia Mons, 15 miles high, and the Longest Canyon, Valles Marineris, 2500

To our knowledge, it is inhabited mainly by our own robots, such as rovers and Vikings we have. sent there, and the wreckage of the lost landers. Some 45 space missions – which have not all been realized – were launched to Mars by humans. There are five on the register, including the efforts of China and the United Arab Emirates planned for the summer of 2020.

Since then, any trace of past or present Martian life has aroused the enthusiasm of the public and perhaps Congress for the budget of the space agency . In 1996, scientists said they detected the fossil of a microbe in a March meteorite at a press conference that was accompanied by a statement by President Bill Clinton. But few scientists have accepted it.

Lately, a lot of solar system excitation where many of Jupiter's moons, Saturn and the other gaseous giants were found to be oceanic worlds hiding under ice shells. Some of them, like Europe's Jupiter and Saturn's Enceladus seem to inject salty plumes of water and maybe even germs into space .

Dennis Overbye joined The Times in 1998 and has been a journalist since 2001. He has written two books: "Lonely Hearts". of Cosmos, Scientific Research of the Secret of the Universe "and" Einstein in Love, a Scientific Novel ". @ Goodbye