On March 14, 2016, as planned, the next Trace Gas Orbiter will be launched to Mars according to the ExoMars Orbiter program, developed by specialists from the Russian and European space agencies.
Martian colonization begins
The Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft will have to reach the Red Planet and send a lander to its surface, which will study a global dust storm in a few days of work in order to find the source of methane on Mars.
The module will also test the new European landing system for the Schiaparelli rovers. This is necessary in order to eliminate possible errors in it and in the future more clearly plant a more valuable module - the Exomars Rover, scheduled to launch to the Red Planet in 2018.
With the help of the Exomars program, scientists from Russia and Europe plan to find out the nature of the appearance in the atmosphere of the Red Planet not only of methane, but also of water vapor and other gases, which is necessary for the gradual development of Mars. Astrophysicists are confident that this planet can become an excellent place for colonization, since it most likely contains both water and microorganisms under the surface shell, which perfectly protects all living things from radiation.
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But virtual archaeologists are sure that under this protection are not only primitive organisms, but also a highly developed civilization that has survived from the times when biological life on Mars was possible on its surface.
Is Mars the planet of convicts?
For example, one of these Martian archaeologists Joseph P. Skipper (Joseph Skipper) in one of the images sent from Mars (in this case, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter umbrella), found the real quarries of convicts.
The high-sensitivity camera of the HiRISR probe has captured structures of a fairly regular geometric shape on the plain of Hellas, located in the southern hemisphere of the Red Planet, just in a huge crater, almost two thousand kilometers in diameter and eight thousand meters deep. Coordinate point - 42.7º S and 70.0º E.
Joseph Skipper considered these to be ancient Martian man-made quarries. The researcher spent some time to find the same structures on Earth, because he remembered that he had seen something similar somewhere. And I found that on our planet there are such ledges of the correct geometric shape in many places where limestone, marble and so on are mined. That is, it is quite possible that stone slabs were mined in a similar way on Mars some million years ago.
The most recent martian find
Well, the most recent Martian find from the restless virtual archaeologists was the so-called "robotic arm". Moreover, earlier there was already a leg, a weapon, so, as noted by the famous ufologist Scott Waring, there is nothing unusual in today's find, it only adds to speculation that a highly developed civilization once existed on Mars that used robots.
Scott explains the similarity of such a find to the most common stone. The fact is, he says, that all the artifacts that we find, including this robotic arm, have lain on the surface of the Red Planet for millions of years. Naturally, during this time they have petrified, but they still retained their man-made forms, which nature is not capable of creating.
MRO 10th Anniversary Video
NASA employees, who have not paid attention to the finds of virtual archaeologists for a long time, nevertheless, themselves constantly stir up the interest of earthlings in this planet. And today the American Aerospace Agency has released a video in honor of the ten-year stay in orbit of Mars of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter probe.
Note that the MRO, created by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was designed for a seven-year full-scale operation in the orbit of the Red Planet, but ten years have passed, and the probe continues to function normally. During this time, he wound more than forty-five thousand orbits around Mars and transmitted almost three hundred terabytes of data to Earth.
The video is interesting in that it shows almost real "life" of the Red Planet with all its beauties - avalanches, moving dunes, fresh meteorite craters, streams of salt water, and so on. All this was provided by the camera of the HiRISE probe, which allows taking pictures with the highest resolution - 30 cm / pixel.
Many Mars explorers believe that NASA released this video for one more purpose: to divert the attention of earthlings from the launch to the Red Planet of the Russian-European spacecraft Trace Gas Orbiter, to which the Americans have nothing to do.