Mars day, part I

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1. I’m Doug Johnson. And I’m Faith Lapidus with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Mars Day at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington is a celebration of our solar system’s most famous planet. The event, on July sixteenth, was a rare chance for planetary scientists to share with the public the mysteries of Mars.

2. Of all the planets, none has captured the world’s imagination like Mars. Its reddish color and changes in brightness over time make the planet an unforgettable sight.

3. In “Cosmos,” the television science series from the nineteen eighties, scientist Carl Sagan talked about some traditional ideas about Mars. Some of these ideas are from the English science fiction writer H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.” Others are from the mistaken science of Percival Lowell, the American astronomer who believed intelligent beings lived on Mars.

4. Wells described Martians as threatening. Lowell imagined them as the hopeful engineers of great works. Carl Sagan said that both ideas influenced the public deeply.

5. Today, Mars continues to excite -- not as the object of science fiction but of scientific study. Space scientists have collected a wealth of information from spacecraft that have orbited, landed on and dug into the Martian surface.

6. The Smithsonian’s Mars Day offered a chance for people of all ages to touch Mars, or at least a piece of it. Allison and Alycia from Silver Spring, Maryland, brought their children, Grace, Sam, Ryan and Emma. They heard about Mars and its geology from experts. They could see a test version of the Viking landers that reached Mars in July of nineteen seventy-six.

7. They also saw meteorites known to have come from the red, or reddish, planet. Eight-year-old Sam learned that the ancient description of Mars as red is not exactly right.

8. It’s actually really orangish more than it’s red and it’s also kind of brown too. It’s not really red.” Emma is six. She found out about the volcanic activity that has shaped the surface of Mars. That the closest thing to Mars—the stuff—is from volcanoes mostly.”

9. Orbiting spacecraft have shown a huge mountain on Mars called Olympus Mons. It is over twenty-five kilometers high and the largest known volcano in the solar system. Volcanoes on Mars suggest to Sam that the same kinds of processes that take place on Earth happen on other worlds.

10. “You’ll find something on Earth as close to what is pretty much on Mars. Like the volcanic rocks because I actually think those are very interesting.”

11. Mars Day offered Allison and Alysia’s children a chance to learn more about a world that humans may set foot on within their lifetimes. Emma is already looking forward to that day.

12. “There are all sorts of rovers and stuff up there that are waiting to be discovered when people go up there.”

13. Can a space rock be a rock star? Meet Allan Hills 84001. American scientists discovered this meteorite in Antarctica in nineteen eighty-four. But it formed on Mars long before that. Scientists believe it is more than four billion years old.

14. Allan Hills 84001 is as close as any meteorite comes to being world famous. Visitors to Mars Day crowded around a piece of the meteorite in the huge Milestones of Flight Gallery. They were listening to an expert who is in charge of meteorites at the Smithsonian.

15.  “I’m Cari Corrigan. I’m a geologist over at the Natural History Museum. I curate the Antarctic meteorite collection at the museum, so we have about nineteen thousand six hundred seventy-five to be, you know, really vague.”

16. ari Corrigan does research on meteorites from Mars and the moon. She says the best places to find meteorites are very cold or very dry places. “They fall all over the Earth, not just Antarctica, but the best places for us to find them are the deserts because they don’t get weathered and they don’t break down as easily.”

17. Cari Corrigan says the search for Antarctic meteorites started in the late nineteen seventies. There are about forty Martian meteorites worldwide although there may be more hidden in collections around the world.