Mars Red Planet

Mars is commonly called the red planet and is the closest planet to Earth (www.ESA.int). Therefore, humans want to make more discoveries about Mars. First, the atmosphere, geography, and weather of Mars has interested astronomers for many years. Second, traveling to Mars is a big goal for the humans of Earth. Furthermore, Mars’ atmosphere has many questions to be answered by astronomers.

First, Mars has some very interesting features on and around the planet. Mars used to be a warm and wet planet before it lost its atmosphere (Kluger, 2013). The reason Mars lost it atmosphere has questioned astronomers for years, but they might be close to figuring out what happened. NASA sent up a satellite named MAVEN in 2013 to survey the atmosphere. Many astronomers now believe that Mars’ atmosphere was destroyed when Mars was about 800 million years old(Kluger, 2013). How it got destroyed is another big question. The most popular theory as of now is that Mars wasn't big enough so it lost its outermost layer due to lack of gravity. Large meteoroids constantly pounding down on Mars’ surface made it lose most of the atmosphere. Mars’ atmosphere is now one percent as thick as Earth's (Kluger, 2013). Mars also has two

There are more than just government agencies like NASA trying to make it to Mars there are a lot more private companies like SpaceX. Space travel has a lot of timing involved because the most efficient time to launch anything to Mars only comes every twenty-six months which lands in the year 2020, which will be a big year. There will be four or more spacecrafts being sent to the red planet (Skuse, 2017). Spain and Norway will be sending MOXIE which will survey the weather and ground. China is sending a spacecraft to survey the atmosphere, soil, water and ice. SpaceX will be sending one up also but what it will survey has not yet been