Is there life on Mars?
In order to celebrate the fact that Perseverance reached the Red Planet, I decided to write the overview of us, Terrestrians and our history with Mars. The NASA Mars Exploration Program currently has five operating missions on the Red Planet, all with the same goal: answer question “Is there life on Mars?”.
But let’s start from the very beginning, shall we?
God of War
It is hard to say when was the first time that Mars was recorded as a wandering object on the night sky, but it is known that by 1534 BCE ancient Egyptian astronomers already knew about its retrograde motion. Later, Babylonian scientists would regularly record the position of the planet, and thus make systematic observations of its behavior. They even developed some arithmetic techniques to predict the futu...