On Mars Day, the Red Planet Is Center Stage
27 July 2010
Crowds gathered near Mars Day exhibits in the Milestones of Flight Gallery at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington
VOICE ONE:
I’m Doug Johnson.
VOICE TWO:
And I’m Faith Lapidus with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Mars Day at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington is a celebration of our solar system’s most famous planet. The event, on July sixteenth, was a rare chance for planetary scientists to share with the public the mysteries of Mars.
(MUSIC: "Mars"/Gustav Holst)
VOICE ONE:
Of all the planets, none has captured the world’s imagination like Mars. Its reddish color and changes in brightness over time make the planet an unforgettable sight.
In “Cosmos,” the television science series from the nineteen eighties, scientist Carl Sagan talked about some traditional ideas about Mars. Some of these ideas are from the English science fiction writer H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.” Others are from the mistaken science of Percival Lowell, the American astronomer who believed intelligent beings lived on Mars.
Wells described Martians as threatening. Lowell imagined them as the hopeful engineers of great works. Carl Sagan said that both ideas influenced the public deeply.
VOICE TWO:
Today, Mars continues to excite -- not as the object of science fiction but of scientific study. Space scientists have collected a wealth of information from spacecraft that have orbited, landed on and dug into the Martian surface.
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