Mars, as well as being The Bringer of War Mars is also known as the 'Red Planet', because it looks red from Space.  It is also the planet which people used to think was home to aliens.   There have been numerous stories about it being the home of a hostile civilization, the base of an advanced species of human and even the home of a dying civilization!   Also many astromoners, such as Percival Lowall, claimed that it had canal-like markings, indicating that an advanced alien species lived there.  In1964 however, the Mariner 4 probe - to the disappointment of many people - confirmed that at present, there are no signs of an advanced civilizations but that there are dried up riverbeds which means that there was once water on Mars which in turn means it was actually capable of supporting life once.  This must've been a very long time ago though.

Although Mars is smaller than the Earth, it actually spins quite a bit more slowly so that a Martian day lasts only 41 minutes longer.   Also, Mars has a similar axial tilt as we do, so a Martian year is made up of four seasons.  The years themselves however are 687 days long, so each season would last 6 months!  The surface of Mars appears red to us because it contains Carbon Oxide.   This is why it's named after the Roman God or War - because it looks like the colour of spilled blood.  Its two moons also have names to fit in with the 'war' theme (see below).

Mars also has the largest volcanic mountain in the Solar system - Olympus Mons, which is 27 kilometres high and 600 km across!  Not only that but it has a collection of Volcanoes in the north that are so big that they deformed the planet's spherity. I t also has large spaces going down - the Vallis Marineris canyon system stretches for over 5,000 kilometres and is up to 7km deep. Mars has two natural satellites - Phobos (meaning fear) which orbits at just 5982km and Deimos (meaning terror) which orbits at 23,000km and looks like a bright star from the Martian sky.  Because of their size and irregular shapes, scientists believe they are captured asteroids.

Mars has been looked up to for centuries and as I mentioned earlier, there have been many theories about it. It's only recently however that we've been getting better, more close-up pictures.  The first close-up surface pictures were made in 1964/5 by the Mariner 4.  More high-resolution pictures followed form Mariners 6 and 7 but it wasn't until 1971 and Mariner 9 that detailed photos of Phobos and Deimos were taken.   In the same year the Soviet Mars 2 dropped the first capsule on Mars.  Then in 1975 the Viking landers arrived at the moon taking photographs from the surface.   Then there was a big gap until December 1996, when the NASA Mars pathfinder landed on Mars.  This was basically a robot which was controlled from Earth and which explored Mars and conducted experiments, making many new discoveries.  The Pathfinder was followed by the NASA Mars Polar lander in 1999 and I think it's fair to say that it was a big flop.  It was meant to be a mission to search for water on Mars but in the end radio signals were lost with the MPL.