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Mars has an ultrathin atmosphere raked by the Sun's deadly subatomic particles.
It has ice caps, large volcanoes, scarce clouds, dust storms, and evidence of ancient rivers and possible oceans.
Imagination
Imagination
Mars was widely theorized as home to a dying extraterrestrial civilization, triggered by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who observed the planet from Milan during its close approach to Earth in 1877. He believed that his telescope showed a vast planetwide network of channels etched into the surface. An issue was that the Italian for channels (canali) is very close to the English word for artificial waterways: "canals."
Percival Lowell continued the theory, believing that Mars has a gigantic system of canals.
One of Lowell's drawing of Mars' canal network.
Reality
Reality
NASA's Mariner 6 and 7 proved the theories found nothing interesting. Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to enter its orbit around another planet.
Water
Water
Mars has scars of water-river valleys and maybe ancient oceans. Mars is different from when it was a billion years ago. It had a much thicker atmosphere, pimped out from volcanoes, but lost it as it possibly leaked into space due to the planet's weak gravity or because it's smaller than Earth, so it lost its internal heat faster.
Without an atmosphere, water boils away and disappears or may also have seeped into the porous impact-shattered rock in Mars' giant craters. Near the equator, ice could be 400 meters down. judging by impact craters showing evidence of ejected ice slurry. History of water on Mars is complex, without the correcting effect of a big moon.
slurry: mixture of denser solids in liquid, usually water
Mars' south pole is permanently covered by a small ice cap of frozen carbon dioxide never less than 400 km across.
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