Michael Malin Mars Quotations

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,

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,

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.