Mars

Our perceptions of Mars have changed a lot since the first space-probes visited it in the 1960s and 70s. There are no canals and definitely no little green men, but that hasn't stopped the red planet from making the headlines on a regular basis, especially in the last few years. Part of this is due to the fantastic images that have been posted on the Internet from the Pathfinder and Global Surveyor missions, and also the immense publicity surrounding the apparent evidence of life in the Martian meteorite ALH84001. Yet there's a lot more to Mars than just the search for life.

If the Moon represents mankind's first tentative "small step" into the universe, then Mars stands for the "confident stride" that should have followed, but never did.

So what happened? The world has changed a lot in the twenty-nine years since Apollo 17 left the lunar surface and it is clear that any manned expedition to Mars is going to have to be much more than a "flags-and-footprints" mission in order to justify the huge effort required. Learning about Mars can teach us a lot about Earth and maybe a lot about life itself. Yet perhaps most importantly, Mars represents a new frontier, a driving force for mankind to expand and improve itself, rather than stagnating in an attempt to conserve what it has already got.

But is a Mars mission so expensive and so dangerous that we couldn't possibly attempt it for another 30 years? Well, that was the accepted opinion for a long time, but in recent years there has been some radical rethinking and now - as described on the following pages - a manned mission to Mars isn't as unlikely as was once thought...

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