Cosmiverse Lesson:

Manned spacecraft planned for this year  

Habitable planets
 may be common

All you need to know about the Red Planet

December 21 2003 at 10:36AM

Scientists have composed this factfile on Mars...

ORBIT: 227.9 million kilometres mean distance from the Sun, about half as much again as the distance between the Sun and Earth.

DIAMETER: 6 794km. By comparison, Earth's diameter is 12 756km.

MARTIAN DAY: 24 hours, 37 minutes and 22 seconds

MARTIAN YEAR: 669 martian days (687 Earth days)

TEMPERATURE: Average is -55°C. Minimum is -133°C at the poles in winter. Maximum temperature is 27°C in summer on equator

ATMOSPHERE: Composition 95.32 percent carbon dioxide, 2.7 percent nitrogen, 1.6 percent argon, 0.13 percent oxygen. Pressure at surface is less than 1/100th Earth's atmospheric pressure.

LANDSCAPE: Rocky, dusty and dry, although some scientists speculate water lurks close to surface. Northern hemisphere is smooth and flat, southern hemisphere is deeply cratered, rugged highlands. North pole has a large, permanent cap of what is believed to be mainly water ice. South pole has a small cap, which may be frozen carbon dioxide and almost disappears during the martian summer.

MAJOR FEATURES: Olympus Mons, at 26 000m, is the highest known volcano in the Solar System; Tharsis Dome, a mysterious bulge 10km high and 4 000km across; Valles Marineris, a canyon 4 000km long and up to 7km deep.

SPACE.com Exclusive: For Tom Hanks, Apollo 13 Was a Personal Adventure

By Robert Myers Producer 11 April 2000

Tom Hanks admits it. He was nervous about playing astronaut Jim Lovell.

"At first I was very intimidated by it," Hanks says. "Because along with a lot of the PR assumptions that had been made both by the media and sort of fomented by NASA as well, there was this sort of all-encompassing hero aspect of what an astronaut is. As though there is only one type of astronaut."

Red Mars: Characters (Wikipedia)

Plot (for more see: Plot Grids from Mars Project GHO)