Michael Malin Quotations

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

Over the course of the season we'll see these spots merge and all of the frost will dissipate,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

The test images show that both cameras will meet or exceed their performance requirements once they're in the low-altitude science orbit.

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.

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.

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.

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.