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Named After the Roman God of War, Mars...
Named After the Roman God of War, Mars...
The Romans and Greeks associated the planet with war because of its red color, resembling the color of blood. While the Greeks named it Ares, the Romans named it Mars. Other civilizations also associated the color of the planet with its name. Egyptians named it "Her Desher," meaning "the red one," while ancient Chinese astronomers dubbed it "the fire star."
Mars formed at the same time our solar system formed, about 4.5 billion years ago. Our solar system formed when a massive cloud of dust and gasses drifted into our galaxy and began to condense due to its own gravity. Most of the matter collected in the center, forming the sun, while the rest of it condensed around the center into asteroids, planets and moons. Mars was formed as gravity pulled the dust and rocks together, forming the 4th planet in our solar system.
ThoughtCo
How Mars Changed
How Mars Changed
An artist's impression of ancient Mars and its oceans based on geological data. Wikipedia
Stock illustration of Mars. Newsweek
Mars and Earth are relatively close and formed among the same materials, resulting in many similarities in the early solar system. Mars had a warm and thick atmosphere and rivers, lakes, streams, and a giant northern ocean, however, Mars lacked a strong magnetic field like Earth and NASA has found its atmosphere suffered greatly from a process known as sputtering. Solar wind slowly knocked gasses out of it and a lack of atmosphere resulted in the dry and cold planet we know today. Sputtering is a lot less severe than before because the Sun's solar winds were much more intense at the during the formation of the solar system.
Click To Find Out How We Know
Click To Find Out How We Know
Through NASA's MAVEN mission, we were able to find the difference of abundance between the amount of a light isotope of argon to a heavy isotope of argon of the upper atmosphere compared to the surface. The light isotope will be easily knocked out of the atmosphere by solar wind leaving the upper atmosphere leaving the upper atmosphere with a higher fraction of heavy to light argon than the surface. The only way argon can dissapear is through physical means such as sputtering because of it's properties as a noble gas, making it a proper way to research sputtering's effect on Mars. They found that 65% of the argon in the atmosphere was lost since the formation of the planet. They also found that a considerable amount of carbon dioxide had escaped the atmosphere as well, but that could be through chemical processes. This means that overtime the atmosphere became lighter and thinner so that it could no longer hold as much heat and therefore no longer able to support liquid water. The water froze and became buried underground until it became the dry and cold desert it is today.
From the naked eye, Mars is visible in the sky... go outside at night and look for it! It is easily distinguishable by its darker, red shade:
Mars was first discovered as a planet by Galileo Galilei in 1610, as the well known scientist studied it with a telescope and noticed its path did not follow those of common stars.
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