February 23, 2009 - Exploring a New Mars

Published in cooperation with The Planetary Society

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The Week in Space

February 23 - March 1, 2009

Exploring a New Mars When Mariner 4 made the first successful flyby of Mars in 1965, it revealed Mars to be a dead planet and not, as some had imagined, the home of intelligent creatures who had once built an extensive network of canals. To learn more about this “new” Mars, NASA sent a pair of spacecraft in 1969 to conduct futher investigations. Mariner 6, launched forty years ago this week, conducted remote atmospheric studies and returned forty-nine distant and twenty-six closeup images of Mars. Mariner 6 and 7 photographed twenty percent of the Red Planet’s surface, leaving much of Mars to be explored by future spacecraft. This recent false-color image from the orbiting Mars Odyssey spacecraft shows a junction of canyons over two miles deep in the Noctis Labyrinthus region of Mars.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/ASU