Our First Martians
Mike Malin and Ken Edgett are right at home on the red planet
Like pole-obsessed explorers, Malin and Edgett don't plan to stop going back to Mars. After the Mars Global Surveyor mission ends in the next several years, one of their cameras will fly aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to be launched in 2005, and they don't expect that to be the last. Their photos are as close as this generation is likely to get to the surface of Mars. When separately asked their biggest fear, Malin and Edgett had the same gloomy surmise. As Edgett put it, "We'll be dead before somebody actually goes there and really figures that place out."
The Mars archives
The more than 100,000 images from the Mars Orbiter Camera portray a turbulent planet, with rock layers apparently deposited by ancient floods and gullies perhaps cut by recent bursts of groundwater. The selection at right--keyed to the full planet (left)--also includes intimate details such as dust-devil tracks.
1. LAYERS Erosion reveals ancient rock layers in a view about 2 miles across.
2. VOLCANO A 15-mile-wide crater is a relic of an eruption early in Martian history.
3. DUST DEVILS Half-mile-long gullies end near curlicue tracks of whirlwinds.
4. VALLEYS The walls of these mile-wide troughs probably follow ancient fractures.
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