By Chuck Woodbury
I dream of going to Mars. When I see a photo (or illustration as below) about life on Mars I get mad that I was born too soon to be able to ever go there. It’s so easy and so fast these days to go anywhere on our own planet Earth if you have the money to get there. But Mars … that is still unknown and mysterious. There is so much to see. Yes, maybe it’s all the same — dirt, rocks and air you cannot breath (humans can remedy that if you give them enough time).
To me, the thrill of going to Mars would be to go where no man had gone before (thanks, Star Trek!). I think it would be scary to look up at the sky and see no trace of Earth, except a little pinpoint of light. Still, I would go if someone gave me the opportunity.
A couple of hundred years ago there were still places on Earth that had not been visited by modern men. I envy Lewis and Clark: they set off to explore the American West when it was still a mysterious and unknown place.
Here are a few images of Mars that I find interesting:
In this artist’s rendering, an astronaut on Mars is working in a lab where vegetables can be grown hydroponically. These crops will provide him and his fellow crew members with food. I guess you might feel cooped up after awhile in a place like this, but still, I would like to be part of the crew. It would be so exhilarating to learn to live totally on your own. Illustration credit: NASA
Evidence of the layered geological history of Mars is laid bare in this postcard from NASA’s Curiosity rover. The image shows the base of Mount Sharp, a Mars rover’s eventual science destination. The pointy mound in the center of the image is about 1,000 feet across and 300 feet high. Photo credit: NASA
I wrote in my essay that there are places on Earth that look like Mars. The image above shows a dry stream bed on an alluvial fan in the Atacama Desert of Chile. It reveals the typical patchy, heterogeneous mixture of grain sizes deposited together. On Mars, Curiosity has seen two rock outcrops close to its Bradbury Landing site that also record a mixture of sand and pebbles transported by water that were most likely deposited along an ancient streambed. Photo credit: UC Berkeley
Mars or Earth?
Below are two photos. I took one of them in Iceland. The other is of Mars, taken by NASA. Can you tell which is which? Pretty tough. The answer is below.
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In case you didn’t know, people DO live on Mars.
This Martian family is proof! As you can tell from their postcard, they read the RVtravel.com newsletter every Saturday.
The bottom photo is Mars.