Water-ice clouds, polar ice and other geographic features can be seen in this full-disk image of Mars from 2011. NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover touched down on the planet on August 6. Take a look at stunning photographs of Mars over the years. Check out images from the Mars rover Curiosity.
Editor's note: Greg Bear is an internationally bestselling science-fiction author of many books, including "Moving Mars," "Darwin's Radio" and "Hull Zero Three." As a freelance journalist, he covered 10 years of the Voyager missions at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
(CNN) -- Every now and then, I spend time on Mars. I dig my naked toes into the fine, red-orange soil, watch how it clings to my skin -- and feel an incipient itch. The iron-rich dust is pretty alkaline. The air -- or lack of it -- also makes me itch. Pretty soon, I'll break out in what the locals call "vacuum rose," as the blood boils in capillaries beneath my skin, because the air on Mars is pretty nearly a vacuum.
That doesn't mean the atmosphere can't kick up a planet-girdling storm when the weather is just right. Right now, as evening approaches, the sky is a dusty pink, tending to brown-black in the east. The sun is a brilliant disk in the west, one-third smaller than I'm used to on Earth and not nearly as warming. Feathery layers of dust fan out around the lowering sun, and a few smeared-out ice-crystal clouds glint silvery gray, but the rest of the sky is clear, and the stars above stand out brighter and sharper than night on Mauna Kea.
One of Mars' two moons, Phobos, or "Panic," named after one of the war-god's dogs, is little more than a big, tumbling rock. The second dog or moon is Deimos, "Terror." Phobos is blacker than sin, blacker than soot, but still visible to my naked, freezing eye. It's cold out right now, about -40 degrees Fahrenheit. Martians call this a balmy summer evening.
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Of all the planets apart from Earth in our solar system, Mars is the most hospitable. Yeah. Right. Better keep my visit short. And yet, despite the discomfort, the danger, I love it here. I love coming back for these imaginary vacations. The sights are amazing.
Trudging up the slope of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system, you'll hardly notice the climb, it's so gradual. But by the time you've finished the 180-mile journey, you're about 14 miles higher than the datum -- what passes for sea level here. Fourteen miles. Mount Everest is about 5½ miles.
There are no seas. But once very likely there were seas, possibly big ones. Mostly shallow, basic and even fizzy, especially around out-gassing volcanic vents, all just right for potential extremophiles. Extremophiles are life forms that adore conditions we find harsh. For them, Mars could have been heaven.
And here's where the romance of Mars gets really good.
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I'm going back in time. ... Can't stop myself. Jonathan Swift somehow guessed the correct number of Mars' moons (two). Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli saw what he described as "channels," or canali. Arizonan Percival Lowell, knowing a good PR move, then made "canali" into "canals."
H.G. Wells had us invaded by octopoid, blood-drinking Martians tired of living on their old, worn-out world.
Edgar Rice Burroughs upped the ante on Lowell's canals by populating the ancient red planet with gorgeous, oviparous princesses and warlike, four-armed green Martians.
In a few decades, Mars heated up.
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Ray Bradbury sealed the deal by making us all Martians. He sent us there; we stared into the water in the canals -- and our reflections, the faces of new Martians, stared back.
But not even Ray, back when he wrote "The Martian Chronicles," could have imagined how the real story might play out.
The "canals" aren't there any more. We can't find them, don't see them. But if evidence of Martian lakes and oceans pans out, Mars might have been hospitable to life hundreds of millions of years earlier than Earth. Earth was still cooling down from its natal heat, still barraged by asteroids, and life, if it developed at all here, was probably getting the crap kicked out of it on a regular basis. Starting over again and again from scratch, or not starting at all.
Until -- and this is just speculation, but it may have a foundation in fact -- until something big hit Mars and sprayed the seeds of Martian life across the gulf of space to land on Earth. Backwash. Martian spitballs.
We've analyzed small meteorites knocked loose from Mars. They fell onto Antarctica, and some scientists have taken the very controversial view that there is evidence of life in them. Not proven, not certain, but ...
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My vacation on Mars could really be a homecoming. We may all be Martians. Wouldn't that be utterly cool to know? Scientists need to know. But you don't have to be a scientist to find the science of Mars compelling. Maybe an interest in genealogy will do.
The challenge of getting to Mars is extreme. It's close as planets go, every now and then approaching less than 40 million miles to Earth -- but missions to Mars can spend months or years in space, depending on the economics and fuel load. Landing is tricky because aero-braking and parachutes are far less effective than in Earth's thicker atmosphere.
In the 1970s, the Viking landers came down on their own rockets, but they didn't carry rovers and looked around from a fixed position. Still, they sent us our first clear pictures of Mars from the surface.
Engineers like making tough jobs look impossible, sometimes. In 1997, Pathfinder bounced down, literally, within a big cluster of very tough beach balls, which then deflated and released Sojourner, a cute-as-a-bug wandering robot. In 2004, Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, both came down bouncing as well.
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Curiosity, too large for that kind of landing, made its final descent winched from a Rube Goldberg, rocket-powered flying crane. But doubtless you know that story. The animation and videos are astonishing. And they're only going to get better.
Why do we capital-N Nerds love Mars so much?
Because it's beautiful, it's tough, it's buried in our mythic, childhood memories. It's covered with human triumphs but also with sad stories of failure. This time, the engineers and scientists are jubilant.
We're back, baby. Earth is definitely our mother, but maybe, just maybe, we're going to learn who's our papa.
It would be fun to be a Martian.
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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Greg Bear.
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This image was captured in 1976 by Viking 2, one of two probes sent to investigate the surface of Mars for the first time. NASA's Viking landers blazed the trail for future missions to Mars.
The Valles Marineris rift system on Mars is 10 times longer, five times deeper and 20 times wider than the Grand Canyon. This composite image was made from NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which launched in 2001.
The Nili Fossae region of Mars is one of the largest exposures of clay minerals discovered by the OMEGA spectrometer on Mars Express Orbiter. This image was taken in 2007 as part of a campaign to examine more than two dozen potential landing sites for NASA's new Mars rover, Curiosity, also known as the NASA Mars Science Laboratory.
NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander descends to the surface of Mars in May 2008. Fewer than half of the Mars missions have made successful landings.
Phoenix's robotic arm scoops up a sample on June 10, 2008, the 16th Martian day after landing. The lander's solar panel is seen in the lower left.
In 2006, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured a 360-degree view known as the McMurdo panorama. The images were taken at the time of year when Mars is farthest from the sun and dust storms are less frequent.
The European Space Agency's Mars Express captured this view of Valles Marineris in 2004. The area shows mesas and cliffs as well as features that indicate erosion from flowing water.
This view is a vertical projection that combines more than 500 exposures taken by Phoenix in 2008. The black circle on the spacecraft is where the camera itself is mounted.
A portion of the west rim of the Endeavour Crater sweeps southward in this view from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity in 2011. The crater is 22 kilometers (13.7 miles) across.
A photo captured by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor in 2000 offers evidence that the planet may have been a land of lakes in its earliest period, with layers of Earth-like sedimentary rock that could harbor the fossils of any ancient Martian life.
A U.S. flag and a DVD containing a message for future explorers of Mars, science fiction stories and art about the planet, and the names of 250,000 people sit on the deck of Phoenix in 2008.
A rock outcrop dubbed Longhorn and the sweeping plains of the Gusev Crater are seen in a 2004 image taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit.
Although it is 45 kilometers (28 miles) wide, countless layers of ice and dust have all but buried the Udzha Crater on Mars. The crater lies near the edge of the northern polar cap. This image was taken by NASA's Mars Odyssey Orbiter in 2010.
NASA's Opportunity examines rocks inside an alcove called Duck Bay in the western portion of the Victoria Crater in 2007.
Pictured is a series of troughs and layered mesas in the Gorgonum Chaos region of Mars in 2008. This photo was taken by Mars Orbiter Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor.
An image captured in 2008 by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows at least four Martian avalanches, or debris falls, taking place. Material, likely including fine-grained ice and dust and possibly large blocks, detached from a towering cliff and cascaded to the gentler slopes below.
This 2008 image spans the floor of Ius Chasma's southern trench in the western region of Valles Marineris, the solar system's largest canyon. Ius Chasma is believed to have been shaped by a process called sapping, in which water seeped from the layers of the cliffs and evaporated before it reached the canyon floor.
Pictured is the Martian landscape at Meridiani Planum, where the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity successfully landed in 2004. This is one of the first images beamed back to Earth from the rover shortly after it touched down.
An image from the Mars Global Surveyor in 2000 shows potential evidence of massive sedimentary deposits in the western Arabia Terra impact crater on the surface of Mars.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captures a dust devil blowing across the Martian surface east of the Hellas impact basin in 2007. Dust devils form when the temperature of the atmosphere near the ground is much warmer than that above. The diameter of this dust devil is about 200 meters (650 feet).
Soft soil is exposed when the wheels of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit dig into a patch of ground dubbed Troy in 2009.
An image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the floor of the Antoniadi Crater in 2009.
The larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos, is seen in 2008 from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Earth and the moon are seen in 2007 from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. At the time the image was taken, Earth was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars.
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