MARS is alive. For decades, we thought the Red Planet was dead, littered with extinct volcanoes. But now it is looking likely that they will erupt again sometime in the distant future.
When Martian volcanoes were first seen by NASA’s Viking probes in the 1970s, they caused great excitement among planetary scientists. But it was assumed the volcanoes were long extinct. “Everybody was happy with the idea that Mars was over the hill,” says Lionel Wilson of Lancaster University, UK, who studied the data from these early missions.
Mars is a small planet, a tenth the size of Earth, and…
