Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System after

Mercury. In English, Mars carries a name of the Roman god of war and is often referred to as the
'Red Planet'.

Why Mars is red? When this happened, the iron within the dust reacted with oxygen, producing
a red rust color. So, Mars is red because it has a layer of rusty dust covering its entire surface!
Mars has some of the largest dust storms in the galaxy, in which the red dust gets whipped into
the light atmosphere surrounding the planet.

The layer of dust is thin, usually just a few centimetres and when NASA’s phoenix lander dug
down beneath this dust layer in 2008, it discovered that the surface below was actually brown
volcanic rock, much like Earth. Earth also has a lot of Iron, but it is mostly found deep in the
Earth’s core. It is thought that Mars used to be much more similar to Earth than it is now. But
when Mars lost its atmosphere, the volcanoes on the planet pushed up the iron from below and
blew it out onto the surface.

So how did Mars end up with all this Iron Oxide floating around? Iron alone is not red, to
become iron oxide it needs to react with a good amount of oxygen. As we know, Mars has only a
tiny percentage of oxygen in its atmosphere, 0.13% compared with Earths 21%, so how did this
happen?

A planet with very little oxygen producing huge amounts of an element requiring oxygen is not
so easy to explain. The one thing it does tell us is that at some point in history, there was a lot
more oxygen on Mars. Currently all of the water on Mars is in the form of ice. This can be seen
on the surface of the north polar ice cap. Research carried out in 2012 suggested that billions of
years ago Mars once had a lot of liquid water on its surface, as much as is found in our Arctic
Ocean!
Objectives

1. identify if mars can really support life

2.support evidence showing that mars can sustain life

3.

Assumption:

Billion years ago found on many researches that Mars hold and sustain water but in the form of
ice that evidence prove that Mars hold and support Life Billion years ago. Life is dependent to
water and all we need to survive is water that Mars can sustain in the past and now we are
seeking for the technology that will bring that capability of Mars to sustain and support life.
The confirmation that liquid water once flowed on Mars, the existence of nutrients, and the
previous discovery of a past magnetic field that protected the planet from cosmic and solar
radiation, together strongly suggest that Mars could have had the environmental factors to
support life.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki

Four billion years ago, the Martian surface was apparently quite habitable, featuring rivers, lakes
and even a deep ocean. Indeed, some astrobiologists view ancient Mars as an even better
cradle for life than Earth was, and they suspect that life on our planet may have come here long
ago.

Michael Finney, co-founder of The Genome Partnership, a nonprofit organization that runs the
Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conferences.
One new study compares patterns on the surface of Mars made by mineral deposits with similar
patterns on Earth in a wide variety of environments in locations including the Oregon Cascades,
Hawaii and Iceland. The Earth data was compared to Martian mineral data collected by the
Curiosity rover and the NASA CRISM spectrometer, which is currently aboard the Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the planet.

By analyzing these patterns, scientists found evidence that Mars had at least one long period of
severe rainstorms and flowing surface water which was followed by temperatures that froze this
water.

"If this is so, it is important in the search for possible life on Mars," Briony Horgan, a co-
investigator on the Mars 2020 mission who presented this work at the Goldschmidt
Geochemistry Conference in Barcelona, Spain earlier this week (Aug. 19), said in a statement.

"We know that the building blocks of life on Earth developed very soon after the Earth's
formation, and that flowing water is essential for life's development. So evidence that we had
early, flowing water on Mars, will increase the chances that simple life may have developed at
around the same time as it did on Earth," she added

As outrageous as it may sound to us now, a prominent 19th century astronomer named Percival
Lowell was convinced not just that there was life on Mars, but that this life was intelligent and
had built cities and a complex network of canals across the face of the planet. The theory went
that Mars was once lush, but now was drying out, so the Martians had engineered the canals to
route water down from the planet's polar ice caps to feed their civilization. Though Lowell
popularized the idea, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli was the first to propose Martian
canals in the 1870s.

A Martian meteorite discovered in Antarctica in 1984 called ALH84001 was found to have a
mineral called magnetite that on Earth is associated with the presence of microorganisms. The
meteorite is thought to have formed on Mars at least 16 million years ago, and landed on Earth
roughly 13,000 years ago. Carbonate materials in the meteorite also indicate that liquid water
was present when they formed. Finally, some have claimed that small structures inside the
meteorite appear to be fossilized nanobacteria, though this idea has been controversial