Planet Profile
星球简介
Mars
火星
The Red Planet has a host of new robots investigating it
这颗红星球有很多新的机器人正在研究它
Across the gulf of space, no other planet has fired humanity’s imagination so much as the Red Planet, and it has frequently been associated with violence, war and death. To the ancient Sumerians it was Nergal, a god of war and plague who presided over the netherworld. In Mesopotamia it was the ‘star of judgement of the fate of the dead’. The Chinese associated it with the element fire, while for the people of the Tiwi Islands off the coast of Australia the planet was one of the four wives of the Moon Man, who followed the pa
th of the Sun Woman through the sky – the other wives were Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. The planet was a familiar sight to the astronomers of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Rome – where Mars was the god of war – and Greece, where Aristotle noticed that the planet vanished behind the Moon during an occultation, proving it was farther away.
profile中文穿过太空湾，没有任何一颗星球能像红星球那样激发人类的想象力，而且它经常与暴力、战争和死亡联系在一起。对古代苏美尔人来说，它是内格尔，掌管阴间的战神和瘟神。在美索不达米亚，它是“决定死者命运之星”。中国人把它与火元素联系在一起，而对于远离澳大利亚海岸的迪维岛人民来说这颗星球是月球男人的四个妻子之一，他们都跟着太阳女人的路径穿过天空，而其他妻子是水星、木星和金星。这颗星球是古埃、古巴比伦以及古罗马天文学家所熟悉的景象，他们认为火星是战神的地方，而在希腊，亚里士多德注意到这颗星球在一次掩星期间消息在了月球后面，证明它离我们很远。
Following the invention of the telescope in the 17th century, Mars could be observed in greater detail, and Christiaan Huygens was able to observe Syrtis Major – which he thought was a plain, but we now know to be a volcano – the first surface feature seen on a
nother planet, in 1659. He was also able to measure Mars’ day length as 24 hours and 30 minutes – only seven minutes short of the true value.
随着17世纪望远镜的发明，火星能够被更加详细地观察，惠更斯克里斯蒂安能够观察到蒂斯大平原，并且他认为这是一个平原，但是我们现在知道这是一个火山，这是1659年在另一颗星球上看到的第一个表面特征。他当时也能测量出一个火星日的长度是24小时30分钟，比真实值短了仅7分钟。
It would be another 312 years before a human-made spacecraft would touch down on Martian soil, with the Soviet Union’s Mars 3 lasting 110 seconds on the surface and managing to transmit only part of a single image that showed no detail. There would be several more failures until NASA’s Viking 1 touched down in 1976 and operated for over six years.
随着苏联的火星3号停留在火星表面持续110秒且仅能够传输单个没有细节的图像的一部分，在一个人造航天器着陆到火星土壤之前将是另一个312年。此后还有更多次失败直到美国宇航局的海盗1号在1976年着陆并且工作超过6年的时间。
Exploration of the planet has continued, and right now there are three operational rovers on its surface. Curiosity and Perseverance are from the US, while Zhurong hails from China. These missions are the lucky ones. There have been a spate of failed missions from the USSR, US, UK and Japan – from rocket failures and solar panels failing to open to a mix-up between the units of measurement used in America and the metric system used by most of the rest of the world, which caused NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter to either burn up or skip off the Martian atmosphere and into deep space in 1999.
对这颗星球的探索仍在继续，目前在它的表面上有三辆正在运行的漫游车。好奇号和毅力号来自美国，而祝融号则来自中国。这些任务是幸运儿。此前来自苏联、美国、英国和日本的任务相继失败，从火箭故障和太阳能电池板无法打开，到美国使用的计量单位与世界上其他大多数国家使用的公制系统之间的不兼容，这导致美国宇航局的火星气候轨道器在1999年不是烧毁，就是从火星大气层跳出进入深空。
Human missions to Mars have been a dream since the earliest days of space exploration. In 2004 the Vision for Space Exploration announced by US president George W. Bush calle
d for a crewed mission to the Moon in 2020 as a stepping stone to Mars. In 2007 NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin said the agency aimed to put a person on Mars by 2037. The Journey to Mars plan, formulated by NASA in
2015, uses the ISS and an asteroid captured in 2020 to test deep-space habitation facilities. That phase is behind schedule, but the ISS phase is underway and set to last until 2024. Humans on Mars in the 2030s is still NASA’s goal.
从太空探索的早期开始人类的火星任务就一直是一个梦想。2004年由美国总统乔治布什宣布的太空探索愿景计划要求在2020年执行作为前往火星踏脚石的载人登月任务。在2007年美国宇航局局长迈克尔格里芬说该机构的目标是在2037年前将一个人送上火星。
由美国宇航局在2015年制定的火星之旅计划，利用国际空间站和2020年捕获的小行星去测试深空居住设施。该阶段落后于计划，但国际空间站阶段正在进行中，预计将持续到2024年。人类在21世纪30年代登陆火星仍然是美国宇航局的目标。
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左图：火星探路者探索这颗红星球的岩石表面
Left: Mars Pathfinder explores the rocky surface of the Red Planet