Destination Mars Read Online Free PDF

is this: until we go to Mars, sift through the soils, test its properties, and search cracks, crevices, caverns, glaciers, the polar caps, the equatorial regions, and everything in between for microbial (or other) life, we will probably not know the answer. And it may well take the hand of humanity present on the surface of that cold, ruddy world to make this work—robots are simply too limited and too inflexible.
    It's almost time for us to visit the red planet. But first, let's look back a few millennia, to a time when Mars was not a destination, not yet even a plane, but a harbinger of death and destruction in the night sky.

O f course, long before NASA's Vikings invaded Mars, the planet had been prominent in the mind of humanity. Viking was simply a logical outgrowth of our curiosity; a byproduct of the heyday of space exploration in the 1960s and early 1970s. This was a time of great political rivalries when the United States and the Soviet Union sought to show the world which political system was superior in both technological and economic achievement. It was, true to the time, a flexing of national muscles and a brute-force approach to space exploration—a war without bullets or bombs. America won the moon first and, despite some close misses by the Soviets, Mars as well.
    But the interest in Mars goes as far back as its visage in the night sky. Every major culture worshipped it until the Age of Reason; most commonly as a baleful godly eye. The late Babylonians addressed Mars as Nergal, representing fire, destruction, and war; in their system, Mars won out over the god of the sun, who was an earlier incarnation of Nergal, god of the underworld.
    The Hindus referred to Mars as the deity Mangala, born of the sweat of Shiva (another cosmic troublemaker), meaning “auspicious,” “a burning coal,” and “the fair one.” In Sanskrit, the name is Angaraka, a celibate (and probably frustrated) god of war. Egypt first called the red planet Horus Am Akhet (Horus on the horizon), then later Her Deshur (Horus the red). The city of Cairo is named after Mars, from Al Qahira, an ancient Arabic name for the planet.

    The ancient Chinese and Koreans saw Mars as a portent of bane, grief, war, and murder. It was named “fire star.” This followed the Chinese mythology of the Five Elements: wood, earth, metal, water, and of course fire. One can guess where Mars fell in the lineup.
    Plato's Greece called Mars Ares, the son of Zeus and Hera (of course he would be a warrior with these two for parents). Two of Ares's three children were Phobos (fear) and Deimos (terror), after whom Mars's two moons are named. Later Greece referred to the planet as Pyroeis, meaning “fiery.” In either identification, it's difficult to get past the idea that Mars portended a bad day.
    When Rome came onto the scene, it adopted the gods of Greece under new names. Ares became Mars, born of the goddess Rhea-Silvia, and producing two sons, Romulus and Remus. This led to the founding of Rome, so perhaps their warlike ways were preordained, as Mars was the most widely worshipped of their gods.
    By the Middle Ages, Europeans characterized Mars's influence over humanity in more detail:
    Mars rules catastrophe and war, it is master of the daylight hours of Tuesday and the hours of darkness on Friday, its element is the fire, its metal is iron, its gems jasper and hematite. Its qualities are warm and dry, it rules the color red, the liver, the blood vessels, the kidneys and the gallbladderas well as the left ear. Being of the choleric temper it especially rules males between the ages of 42 and 57. 1
    Interestingly, while they may have missed the boat regarding gallbladders and “daylight hours on Tuesday,” NASA rovers have found hematite and, of course, oxidized iron in abundance on the Martian surface.
    In any ancient culture, Mars was one of a handful of planets visible to the naked eye, and the only one of marked color, so the planet demanded