New Photos of 'Astounding' Mars

www.space.com...

The gallery of "mars up close" pictures is great. But there is a little detail on one pic that I dont like :



You see the sort of can at the first plan of the photo : Still polluting mars ?!



[Edited on 14-10-2003 by Nans DESMICHELS]

A little bit of junk on Mars is not going to hurt it. At least compared to the millions of tons of it on earth.

Who's going to complain? Mars is very quickly being deconstructed as one of the most interesting places in the solar system. A manned mission to mars will be a trial run for Europa.

Here is a link to a similar image taken later on:

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

As you can see, this is on the actual Viking 2/Nasa website. They describe the scene as follows: "Viking 2 Lander close-up of the surface of Mars. The metal cylinder at right is the shroud for the surface sampler instrument, which was ejected after landing. To the left of it are trenches dug by the sampling arm, and at lower right part of a footpad can be seen."

This picture was taken on 09-25-1977. Notice in this picture, there have been two "scrapes" in the soil, instead of one.

This comes less than a month after the first color image of the same spot, that showed it still pristine:

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

This was taken on 09-05-1976, and was the first color image taken by Viking 2 on Mars.

It did not take them long to litter did it?

[Edited on 14-10-2003 by lonestar]

[Edited on 14-10-2003 by lonestar]