Michael Malin Quotes (13 Quotes)

Actually, we have five or six of these types of craters, ... The number of young craters we've seen is much less than the number we'd predicted.

It is possible they were set in motion by strong wind or by a 'Mars quake,'

Mars was very cold and dry, ... All the features we are seeing reinforce that view, that's it's cold and dry today.

Despite ground fog that obscures part of the surface in these images, we can see much more surface detail than we've ever seen before, which suggests that the 75-degree south latitude landing zone is quite a bit more rugged and geologically diverse than we had previously thought.

We were quite surprised and confused by it. It didn't fit our model of what Mars is like,

By the end of this year, we're going to have three Mars missions active all at the same time, ... That should give us a very good picture of what's going on today.

Why is Mars warmer today that it was in the past, we really have no way of knowing why.

These are new landforms that have never been seen before on Mars. We see features that look like gullies formed by flowing water and the deposits of soil and rocks transported by these flows.

The significance of this is that Mars is experiencing climate change, because the present conditions are not conducive to the formation of all this CO2 to begin with in the polar region. So sometime in the distant past, Mars was colder than it is now to form a permanent CO2 deposit. Subsequent to that, it has warmed and we are seeing that earlier deposit being eroded away.

This set of photos shows the diversity of things we've been seeing on Mars during the last several months,

Mars is an active planet, and over a range of timescales changes occur, even in the surface.

Some of the things observed changed in few weeks or months, and others have changed over years. Most of the discoveries that we've made came during the extended mission.

We see everything from sand dunes covered with frost, water ice clouds hanging over volcanoes and ancient craters being eroded by high winds.