Have you ever been to Mars and wondered why it is such a difficult question to answer? Mars looks like a slice of the Sun, but there is water on Mars, it has been there for billions of years, and even our very existence is based on it. If you want to learn about Mars, you may be surprised at how much there is to know.
The size of the solar system, all the planets, all the giant gas giants are part of the same solar system, and that is in fact the main body of our solar system. Mars is the smallest of them all. It is a little larger than Neptune and a little smaller than Jupiter. NASA publishes the most current research and analysis of Mars.
It is not the closest planet to the Sun, that honor goes to Venus, but Mars is the closest to our own Sun. The distance between Mars and our Sun is huge, many millions of miles.
Just a few of the things we know about Mars and facts about the Sun are:
Mars was a star long ago in the early solar system. It is still going, it is still out there and it will keep going until its Sun runs out of fuel. It is a little bit like a burning ember in a star, and we have caught that flame in a cloud of interstellar dust.
Mars is a rocky planet, it is not a gas giant, but that is not all that mars is like. Mars has been the subject of much speculation for many years now. It has always been thought that Mars was at some point a habitable planet. If the two planets were so close that a small life form could have formed on the surface, it would mean that our planet is old enough to have had life.
We do know for sure that Mars has liquid water, but the water is so cold that even in a climate with mild temperatures(just below freezing), the water freezes and hardens to rock and ice. There may be some dust, and it is possible that a hint of methane gas could be there, but the water would still be frozen solid. That makes Mars a dead planet, or at least, a dead red planet.
Jupiter is in a perfect place for life, but it is not there now. Jupiter is too hot for life, but Mars is a perfect place for life to exist.
The problem with Mars is that it is not in the right place to be able to see the planet, the Sun, and the Sun’s other planets. Mars is in the same part of the solar system as Jupiter, and the two are separated by a vast distance. Saturn is one of the planets as well.
For now, Mars is close enough to the Sun that it does get a lot of the same radiation from the Sun as Jupiter, and that is why the two planets are so close. We are lucky, in a way, that we live on a planet that is so close to our Sun. The Sun is not protected by the Earth and the Moon, and thus we cannot be protected from its radiation.
We have to learn more about the space between Earth and Mars and how life could have been formed there. We should do everything we can to keep a look out for life on Mars.
