MARS
Mars is the fourth planet from the sun. It orbits the sun at a span of about 140 million miles. Looking up at Mars from Earth the planet Mars appears fiery red. The surface is almost exactly the same as the dry land on Earth. The time it takes Mars to rotate once on its axis is about half on hour longer than an Earth day. Phobos and Deimos are the names of the two moons of Mars. The atmosphere is cooler and drier than it was in the mid 1970's.Mars appears as a fairly bright, star-like object in the night sky of Earth. It moves through Earth's sky fairly rapidly, on a time scale of months. Because of the relative movements of Earth and Mars around the Sun, Mars appears to move backward in the sky for a short time around opposition, when the two planets are closest. As Mars and Earth orbit the Sun, the distance between them varies from about 75 million km (about 47 million mi.) at opposition to about 375 million km (about 233 million mi.) when the planets are on opposite sides of the Sun. This change in distance causes the apparent size of Mars to vary by a factor of 5 and its brightness to vary by a factor of 25. On February 25, 1995, Mars was at a distance of approximately 103 million kilometers (65 million miles) from
Huge landslides and large slabs called chaotic terrain are also found near the canyons. The possibility of ancient life on Mars and the Pathfinder examinations are credited with much of that attention. The structure of the Martian crust is about 40 km thick under the northern plains and 70 km thick at high southern latitudes. Mars is half the size of Earth and has two moons, Phobos, and Deimos. Additional analysis of the topography and gravity indicates that the northern lowlands were a likely zone of high heat flow early in Martian history, reflecting energetic convection of the Martian interior. "Earth's biggest volcano, the Big Island of Hawaii, has a base of 200 kilometers and rises only abut 10 kilometers above the oceanic plain. Massachusetts: Sky Publishing, 3rd Edition, 1990.
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