Mars Approaching
Day 9 (D-15)
Mars is melting....

Just like the Earth that we live on, Mars has seasons either. It's spring in this time of the year on south pole of Mars. Summer will begin on September 27th, then the ice cap on Mars will almost completely gone at that time. The polar ice cap is basically the part of Martian atmosphere that is consisted mainly with carbon dioxide. During the winter time, most of the Martial atmosphere freezes down to the ground as ice and then melt into atmosphere during the summer season.
Day 7 (D-17)
Another excellent website dealing with Mars. A Boulder based company made this website(
exploreMarsnow.org). We can take a look at the future habitat on Mars on this website. Surprisingly, this habitat is not a dream. A project is going on for the manned-landing on Mars in 2015!!! If this is true and became real, the Mars habitat that we saw from SF movies are becoming true.
Last night's Mars was quite bright despite the bright night sky because of the almost Full Moon. Fortunately, August 27th nearest approach day is the date of New Moon so the sky might be the best for Mars observation.
Day 6 (D-18)

Another space craft going to Mars from European Union was launched on June 2. It is scheduled to arrive at Mars on the night of 25 December 2003, after a journey of about 400 million kilometres. It'll be a great present for human being on Earth on Christmas day!! The space craft was launched by Soyuz/Fregat rocket and its own way to Mars on schedule. We can check the mission status from European Space Agency homepage (
esa).