For myself, the events of last week allowed me to relive my own close approach with Mars. My approach was not as dramatic as the events of last week, but was none-the-less exciting for me.
In the early 1990's I had the opportunity to work with Dr. James R. Underwood, Jr. at Kansas State University on a project to map two areas of the Claritas Fossae region of Mars. The project involved using images taken by the two Viking spacecraft sent to Mars in the 1970's. (This was before the many spacecraft like the Mars Global Surveyor had been sent to map the planet.) Dr. Underwood's goal was to map the geology of the Claritas Fossae region, not a small task considering all we had were several dozen photos of the planets surface and no way to see if our interpretations were right. For my part I spent many hours pouring over Viking images and drawing the many craters, fossae, channels, and other features in the mapping region. I got a first hand feel for the unique nature of the Claritas Fossae region specifically, and for Mars in general.
Mars itself has many unique geological features that have long attracted the interest of astronomers and geologists. Around the turn of the last century Percival Lowell (1855-1916), one of the greatest astronomers of his day, used the Clark Telescope located in Flagstaff, Arizona to make many detailed observations of Mars. Lowell described many features of Mars, including light and dark regions that he interpreted as areas of desert and vegetation as well as the classic 'canals' of Mars, which Lowell felt were constructed by intelligent creatures living on Mars to bring water from the poles to the equator. Today we know that many of Lowell's conclusions were wrong (no flowing water, no vegetation, and no intelligent life), but his detailed maps and the names he gave to the planet's features are still important today.
