Back to School with Planet, Week 4 | Mars or Earth?
This is the fourth installment of our Back to School with Planet series, a weekly update for K-8 students interested in learning more about the science we do with Earth and Space. Learn more about this series here.
You can find this entry in Spanish here / Puedes encontrar este texto en español aquí.
You can find this entry in German here / Hier findet ihr den Blogpost auf Deutsch
Mars: The Red Planet. Sometimes our nearest neighbor beyond the Moon (switching off with Venus depending on the time of the year). A cold, desolate desert of a planet — currently the only planet in our Solar System inhabited solely by robots.
What could this red world possibly have in common with Earth?
It turns out, quite a lot!
Around 3.5–4 billion years ago, Mars and Earth had a lot of similarities. Mars was much warmer and wetter than it is today, with rain, rivers, lakes and possibly even an ocean. Today, all of Mars’ water is locked up in ice in the polar regions and in wispy clouds, but we can see the features that all of this water left behind so long ago. This is significant because on Earth, anywhere there’s water, there’s usually some kind of life that’s managed to thrive there! So, scientists have been closely studying Mars to determine what…
