Piecing Together Mars: From Discovery and Surprise Toward Understanding a Sister World

From ancient times through the telescopic era, the blood red planet Mars puzzled observers with its color, its seasonal features, and its variability - even inspiring the idea that alien engineers shaped its surface! Spacecraft revealed a more sober reality. An ancient cratered surface looked more like the Moon than Earth, colored red as rust, weathered and cut by fluvial channels and giant floods which flowed around the same time that only early bacteria ruled our planet. But Mars possesses some of the most dramatic landscapes in the Solar System with the largest volcanoes and canyons known. Join us on an authentic visual journey across the surface of Mars - based on real data as transmitted back by our instruments there and reconstructed on the dome of Morrison Planetarium. What you’ll see is real, in perspectives never before seen on Earth.

Speakers:

Carter Emmart, Director of Astrovisualization, American Museum of Natural History

Jeff Moore, Planetary Geologist, NASA-Ames Research Center