Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the seventh largest in the Solar System. A cold, dusty desert world with a thin atmosphere (mostly CO₂), the planet features extinct volcanoes, deep canyons, polar ice caps, and seasons. Mars has two small moons (Phobos and Deimos), a day just over 24 hours long, and a year lasting about 687 Earth days. It is a prime focus of robotic exploration and studies about past water and habitability.
Source: science.nasa.gov
APODs including "Mars"
Aurora Iowa
20/05/2005
rly last Sunday morning stars were not the only lights in Iowa skies. The northern lights also shone from the heavens, extending across the midwestern USA and other locations not often graced with auroral displays. The wide-ranging auroral activity was triggered as a coronal mass ejection - an energetic cloud of particles blasted outward from the Sun a few days earlier - collided with planet Earth's magnetosphere. Alerted to conditions ripe for aurora, photographer Stan Richard recorded this aparition over Saylorville Lake, near Des Moines. Bright planet Mars in the constellation Aquarius is above the horizon near the center of the eastward-looking view. While the colorful rays seem to end just above the water, they are actually at altitudes of 100 kilometers or more.