WATER ON MARS
The fourth planet from our Sun, Mars, is named after the Roman god of war, so dubbed because of its bloody-red colour. In 1897, novelist H. G. Wells wrote in his book The War of the Worlds that this colour was owed to organic red weeds that covered the planet’s surface. However, when Mariner 9, the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, cruised around the red world, it revealed an endless landscape of dry, barren desert. In stark contrast to an abundant bounty of weed life, the reality of the Red Planet is a desolate biome covered in iron-rich dust and rocks.
But on and underneath the rocky surfaces, chasms and crevices of this world, there’s a
