The Mars Global Surveyor

Mars has long been a particular goal for space exploration. The planet has excited the human imagination, perhaps because of the many literary and dramatic works that suggested civilizations on Mars, and certainly because of the long-ago error of the idea of the Martian canals, which also suggested that there might be a civilization on this planet. More recently, the discovery of a rock in the Antarctic named Sample ALH84001, which started its existence when it crystallized out of hot magma on the planet Mars some 4.5 billion years ago. Half a billion years later it became a space traveler when an asteroid or comet struck the planet and sent chunks of Martian crust flying into space, and it was then caught by the gravity of the Sun so that it drifted toward the center of the solar system until 13,000 years ago when it collided with Earth and landed in Antarctica. In 1984 it was picked up by scientists who have f

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le of Martian dunes as well as surface composition, ascertained with a gamma-ray spectrometer and the thermal emission spectrometer (Stofan, 1993, 22-31). NASA today has a timeline for the exploration of Mars that includes an ambitious program for studying the Martian soil and atmosphere, analyzing rock samples, and even bringing rocks back to Earth. In the year 2014, there will be a human mission to Mars (Raeburn & Sauls, 1999, 40). The current missions to Mars include the Mars Global Surveyor; the Russian Space Agency's Mars '96, a craft with instruments from Finland, France, Germany, Hungary and even America on board; and a second NASA probe called Mars Pathfinder. These three craft are the vanguard of a decadelong flotilla of Marsbound craft. The most propitious "launch window" for flights from earth to Mars, meaning the time when the relative positions of the planets mean that the journey can be undertaken with the least expenditure of fuel, occurs every 26 months, and NASA intends to send a pair of spacecraft through each of those windows between now and 2005. At least part of the reason for sending so many craft to Mars at once is the hope that if many craft are sent out, some will get through, something that has
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1476
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)