November 28 is recognised as Red Planet Day to commemorate the launch of one of the most important space missions to Mars. The American spacecraft Mariner 4 was launched on this date in 1964 with the intention of reaching Mars, which it did in July 1965 and returned images of.
It was the first time a spacecraft made a flyby of the red planet, making it the first time a spacecraft has ever taken up-close pictures of another planet. Since then, there has been a great deal of interest in Mars, and missions have been launched. As a result, the idea of establishing a human colony on Mars has now also been proposed, as enthusiastically expressed by billionaire Elon Musk.
Here’s a quick look at how, thanks to significant space missions that helped enhance knowledge about it, Mars came to dominate the popular imagination.
In order to answer the multibillion-dollar puzzle of how and why Mars lost its atmosphere, the UAE mission will investigate the Martian atmosphere. The 15 kg total weight of the five scientific payloads carried by India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, a technological demonstration project, collected data on the planet’s surface geology, morphology, atmospheric processes, surface temperature, and atmospheric escape mechanism.
