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Mars 1 Research Paper

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1.0 Introduction
Looking back on the 50 years of space exploration history, Mars is consistently being discussed as one of the most important target of study in this area. From the first mission, Mars 1M No.1 failed to reach Earth orbit in 1960, till today’s MAVEN team has been working on Mars for over one Earth year (Space.com Website), Mars exploration experienced dozens of failures, especially in earlier days. However, recently, missions are returning more and more surprising data as technology improved, and the steps of Mars exploration will never stop. In some ways, as a member of Solar System, Mars is the one that is most like the Earth. For this reason, publics and scientists are fascinated by the myth of life beyond Earth, and also …show more content…

Starting in 1960, a series of space probes were launched and failed before completing their missions. In 1962, Mars 1 collected plenty of interplanetary data, but lost contact on its way to Mars. Then, on July 14, 1965, the U.S spacecraft Mariner 4 successfully reached Mars and sent 21 photos back to Earth. This event was recorded as the first successful completed mission in the human mars exploration history (NASA Website).
1970s-1980s
In 1971, the Soviet Union launched two probes in May, Mars 2 and Mars 3. The Mars 2 lander crashed on surface of Mars. For the Mars 3, its lander landed softly and became the first successful landing on Mars, but it only worked for a few seconds (The Planetary Society). However, their orbiters both successfully completed their missions, and sent back valuable information, which are important for future research on Mars’ surface temperature, atmosphere, also the Martian gravity and magnetic fields (NASA Website). At the same time, NASA continued their Mariner program and launched Mariner 9, after the failure of Mariner 8. Mariner 9 reached the planet on November 13, 1971, became the first successful orbit. The huge progress from this mission is that it returned back numerous high-resolution images, and these images offered much more details about …show more content…

From the image taken from space, it is clearly to see that Mars has the ancient fluvial-like surface features. Thus, many scientists predict that they were formed by the action of water. Currently, Liquid water does not flow on the surface of Mars. However, permanent ice caps were found at both of Mars’ poles, and they are mostly made up of solid carbon dioxide. Additionally, significant amounts of hydrogen was found in the upper soils of Mars (Smith et al., 2011). If Mars is wet many years ago, it may be went through a long-term climatic changes. From previous missions, a plenty of olivine was found around the landing sites of the Sight Rover. The finding of the olivine give an indication that Mars may be experienced some physical weathering processes, because the resistant minerals such as olivine has a significant interaction with the Martian atmosphere (Schröder et al.,

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