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The NASA Mars Observer was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force base in Florida in late 1992, on a 337-day voyage to Mars. The Mars Observer initially is expected to arrive at Mars by 19 August 1993, and enter a long, elliptical orbit over the poles. By mid­ December 1993 it should be ready to begin its two-year mapping of the sur­ face of Mars. Un'like Viking, the Mars Observer will focus not on biology but on geology and climate. Thanks to the efforts of researchers like Richard Hoagland, the Mars Obse1'Ver will remap certain areas where there are alleged artefacts. Various unmanned missions to Mars in the 1960s and 1970s cleared away all notions that Mars is capable of sustaining life as we know it. The most important of these expeditions was undoubtedly the NASA Viking Mission of 1976. Controlled by NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory back on Earth, two identical Viking spacecraft were launched on a ten-month journey through 440 million miles of space to finally orbit around the red planet. Each of the Vikings was an automated self-powered laboratory capable of splitting up into an orbitor circling the planet, and a lander that could soft-land on the alien world. While the orbitors were able to explore and comprehensively photograph Mars from the sky, the landers conducted soil and other experiments in preselected areas. As the latter experiments were admitted by NASA scientists to be designed to prove the absence of life in any form on Mars, their results may be discounted as being negatively biased from the start and thus probably worthless. Ironically, the first picture taken by a Viking lander was of the vehicle's own footpad! PICTURES OF MARS More than 50,000 pictures were, however, taken of the surface of the pfanet by the Viking orbitors. Now, some 17 years later, many have still to be viewed, let alone analysed. Some may never see the light of day due to time and staffing cost constraints. With its polar ice caps and other features, Mars remains more Earthlike than any of the other planets in our solar system. However, at first glance, it is a freezingly cold, barren, crater-strewn and windswept world, just over half the size of Earth, some 4,230 miles in diameter-Earth is 7,926 miles. Its days are 24 hours 37 minutes long. Like Earth, Mars has seasonal changes. Clouds come and go and moming fog covers the floors of some majof craters, but the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. Fierce dust stonns rage, fanned by 300 miles-per-hour winds. The temperature starts at way below freezing, and sel­ dom goes above it-although the polar ice caps are seen to advantage and retreat seasonally. Some of the more breathtaking images of the surface of Mars include views of such imposing features as the Valles Marineris, the so-called Grand Canyon of Mars, the Ilargest natural feature ,in our solar system, 250 miles across on average, and stretching from end to end some 3,100 miles, the distance from San Francisco to New York. Although Mars is now a dry, hot and dusty hell­ hole of a planet, there is indisputable evidence of vast previous water flow that cut immense canyons, flowed around island features, and left still visible shore­ lines. Possibly the most striking of all the singular natural formations on Mars 12·NEXUS AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1993