Next to Venus, Mars is our second immediate neighbour. Its mass amounts to 6.419*10E23 kg, that's circa 1/9 of Earth's mass. The equatorial radius is 3397km and the polar radius comes up to 3375km. Mars is only half as big as Earth. The gravity of Earth is 2.65 times greater than Mars' gravity. One year on Mars takes 686.98 days and one day on Mars takes 24.66 hours. Mars' distance from Earth is at a minimum 54,500,000km and at a maximum 401,300,000km.

Living on Mars is impossible because the atmosphere is very thin- less than 1% of our sea level barometric pressure. It consists of 95.32% carbon dioxide, 2.7% nitrogen, 1.6% argon and 0.3% oxygen. Even if the atmosphere had enough oxygen it would be impossible to live on Mars because of the very low temperature, between 81F (27°C) during the day in summer and -225F (-143°C) in winter. There are often heavy storms with high wind speeds. One storm in 1971 raged for months so that you couldn't see the surface of Mars. Scientists are sure that there was water in the past but the gravity was not strong enough to keep the water and it evaporated into space. Because of that there is no rain and no snow but it is so cold that the carbon dioxide freezes and turns into dry ice.

There are also volcanoes, one of them, Mont Olympicus, is the biggest volcano of our solar system. The surface and the sky of Mars are reddish. It has its colour because Mars mainly consists of iron and it's rusting. During the years lots of meteors crashed onto Mars' surface and they are still lying there. The surface consists of rocks and canyons. In one place rocks and canyons are positioned like a face.
Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos. They are rocks which where attracted by Mars out of the asteroid belt and now they orbit around it.
Phobos’ diameter amounts to 11km and Deimos’ diameter is 6km. Phobos is nearer to Mars than Deimos.

They are named by the sons of the Greek gods Ares (Mars) and Aphrodite (Venus).
Mars is named by the Roman god of war, Mars, because of its colour- red like blood.
In 1976 the Americans sent two unmanned Viking Landers to Mars to make a chemical analysis of the soil but could not find any microbes or other living creatures. In 1997 they sent another unmanned spacecraft which carried a little robot- car, "Pathfinder", to take photos of the surface.

At present it's not possible to send astronauts to Mars because the travel takes too much time and you have to wait until Mars and Earth are in special alignments in their orbits. On the travel back to Earth you have the same procedure. The whole travel takes three years.