The history is interesting but the planet will never be habitable again-if it ever was...
Not quite the dreams of canali etched into the surface of Mars by intelligent life, the dreaded martians. Percival Lowell just had it a bit wrong. Martian macro-water features might have been carved by catastrophic hydrologic events instead of the labors of lifeforms. If there was an ocean on Mars there must be sedimentary deposits left by that body of water. Maybe some healthy turbidite flows are recorded in the sedimentary record jolted by seismic activity when Mars' volcanoes were active. Still, thoughts of anthropomorphized aliens ambling about the surface in articulated bodies will continue to sell more books, tickets and cause the minds of children to wonder.
4
This is all good stuff. But the presence of water still won't make up for a lack of gravity if we are talking colonisation.
3
Uh...Mars has no gravity?
11
If you get the opportunity check out Brian Cox's 'The Planets' produced by the BBC. Excellent series that looks into the history of the planets including their prehistory.
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It would be very interesting to have a manned exploration of Mars
The Planet has an amazing untuched geology
There is a lot to explore and discover in the Solar System
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So, if Mars may have always been too cold, would that make Venus a more likely place for life to have generated during its more temperate times? It's a pity we can't go there.
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"other researchers point to ancient river deltas and other geological evidence of a northern ocean some 3.7 billion years ago".
Is it known, or can it be reasonably determined, what the average day and night time temperatures would have been during this period? And what the probability would have been for the existence of an atmosphere which would have helped to maintain a warmer climate?
It seems like recognized craters are always round.
At what angle would something have to impact a planet for it to make a non-circular crater, and are geologists on the lookout for those?
1
@Mtnman1963 Any angular impact will still create a mostly circular crater, although the ejecta from that impact will be distributed downrange more in the same direction it was traveling than evenly surrounding it as would a high-angle trajectory. There is a group of craters in South America from a bolide which impacted at such an oblique angle that the result is more like a series of gouges along the pathway.
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@mtnman1963 a couple of famous examples would be Schiller on the moon and the Sudbury Basin in Ontario.
2
Well, that’s arcane, but I love it.