Mars will be the closest to earth it's been in 15 years tonight


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It is, as a travel brochure would say, a land of dramatic contrasts, with the solar system’s biggest volcano, Olympus Mons, 24 kilometres high, and the longest canyon, Valles Marineris, 4023 kilometres long and 6 kilometres deep.


As far as we know, it is inhabited mostly by our own robots, like the rovers and the Vikings we have sent there, and the wreckage of lost landers.


Some 45 space missions — not all of which made it — have been launched toward Mars by humans. There are five on the docket, including efforts by China and the United Arab Emirates, planned for the summer of 2020.


If anybody else has been interested, if there is anything like an alien iPhone or one of those monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey, sitting on a rock somewhere, we wouldn’t necessarily have found it yet.


Out of all this exploration a new story has emerged, equally haunting. It is of a planet once splashed by oceans and carved by swiftly flowing rivers, a world warmed long ago by an atmosphere.

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