Has NASA ever sent a Mars surface probe to explore the polar regions. If not. Why?
931141
Yes, it was the Mars Polar Lander. It crashed on landing and was lost.
541536
Wasn't that the Mars landing?  Looking for life out there.
533109
In the 60s bij de Apollo mission control Of NASA. In the 60s they also had a kinda Mars-Pathfinder.
262822
No, they'd be extremely too cold.  Unless Mars had a microwave...
902322
Yes there is water on Mars, underneath the ice caps. And they have found traces of water from over 200 million years ago, which means that at one point there was life on Mars, and scientists have proven it that wherever they have found water on Earth there has been one life form or another.
9640
Technology now exists that can send probes (very expensive probes) anywhere in the solar system, including Jupiter.  However, it is doubtful that man will ever go there because the planet is a giant gas planet without land to land on, air to breath or temperatures high enough to sustain life.  Also the planet has a powerful gravitational pull and anyone who goes there will stay there.  Mars is a much more hospitable goal for space travel by men (and women too).  Bring your own air!
283632
There is no evidence to show conclusively that life ever existed on Mars, and the lack of evidence strongly suggests there never was life there.  If even bacteria lived there some trace would show up in the fossil record, and so far the probes have found no evidence of this.\n\nIt doesn't mean that there isn't life somewhere on the planet, or that life existed there once upon a time, but it's highly likely that there never all that much life on the planet.  Life tends to spread -- for example, no matter where we look on the Earth, we find some evidence of life, even if only bacteria, even in the frozen arctic or the middle of the sahara desert.\n\nAt the present time humans cannot live on Mars without an artificial environment.  The air pressure is far too low and the atmosphere has far too little oxygen.  The temperature extremes are far worse than even in the Antarctic.  \n\nWhile it is possible to build a "Marsbase" of some kind the difficulty lies in getting all that material over to Mars from Earth and then down from Mars orbit.  It's one thing to drop a probe through the atmosphere and bounce it hopefully somewhere within a 100-mile radius of its intended landing site; it's quite another to have a steady drop of material that all has to land in the same place.\n\nNaturally the builders could make use of local materials.  The main problem is the lack of water, which only seems to exist on the surface at the poles.  Therefore the base would probably have to be located at or near the polar areas of Mars, so that ice could be harvested and used to produce oxygen.
73165
The first Mars Rover made the trip in eight months.\nIt's about fifty million miles away.\nI don't know how cold it is.
782130
Yes.\n\nUnder the North Pole is just water- the americans and Russians have been sending submarines under there for years.\n\nAntartica was first recorded as being mapped centuries ago- some guy called Peri Reis (something like that) got credited for it but the map was around too long ago for them to have had the technology to see under the ice. The suggestion being that Antartica used to be warmer. Then Antartica disappeared from maps for several hundred years and only started reappearing fairly recently.\nEven then it has only been in the last 50 years or so that we've managed to be able to establish the shape of the rock below the ice and yes, it matches the Peri Reece (or whatever his name was lol) guys map!
127118
Thus far, Mariner 10 has been the only probe to visit Mercury.  It flew past Mercury three time, twice in 1974 and once in 1975.  It's orbit was around the sun so the encounters with Mercury were fly-bys with the probe never entering orbit around the planet.  Six days after the last fly-by, NASA ceased radio contact with the probe and it is believed to still be in orbit around the sun.\n\nThe Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) probe was launched by NASA on August 3, 2004 and will be the second probe to visit and first to enter orbit around Mercury.  It will have two fly-bys, in 2008 and 2009, before entering orbit in 2011 for a mission of at least one year.\n\nThe European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have a joint mission to Mercury called BepiColombo planned for launch in August 2013.  This mission will include two orbiters, the ESA Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the JAXA Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) with a planned arrival date of 2019.  The BepiColombo mission originally had a lander included but it was canceled due to budgetary constraints.  There is a possibility that the Russian Federal Space Agency (RKA) could contribute a lander to replace the canceled one.
351260
The discovery of dry riverbeds on Mars means that there was once flowing water on Mars, which is VERY interesting. Not only for knowledge of the past conditions on Mars but because that water may till be there. Recent measurements say there is a lot of frozen water just below the surface.
1109029
sending a probe to mars\n\nadvanced techniques in heart surgery
524151
The idea that life could, or even does, exist on Mars has a long history. In 1877 the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli claimed to have seen a planet-wide system of channels (Italian canali). The American astronomer Percival Lowell then popularized these faint lines as canals and held them out as proof of a vast attempt by intelligent beings to irrigate an arid planet. Subsequent spacecraft observations have shown that there are no canals on Mars, and various other alleged proofs of life on the planet have turned out to be equally illusory. The dark areas once thought to be oases are not green, as contrast effects had made them seem to terrestrial observers, and their spectra contain no evidence of organic materials. The seasonal changes in the appearance of these areas are not due to any vegetative cycle, but to seasonal Martian winds blowing sterile sand and dust. Water probably occurs only as ice on and below the surface and as trace amounts of vapour or ice crystals in the Martian atmosphere. The strongest evidence against the presence of life, however, is the thinness of the atmosphere and the fact that the surface of the planet is exposed not only to lethal doses of solar ultraviolet radiation but also to the chemical effects of highly oxidizing substances (such as hydrogen peroxide) produced by photochemistry.\n\nPerhaps the most fundamental and far-reaching result obtained by the Viking landers is that the Martian soil contains no organic material (there is no reason to assume that the two landing sites are not representative of the planet as a whole). Although small amounts of organic molecules are continually being supplied to the surface of Mars by carbonaceous meteoroids, this material is apparently destroyed before it has a chance to accumulate. The results of the soil analysis for organic molecules carried out by the Viking landers provide no evidence for the existence of life.\n\n Answering the question of life on Mars will probably involve...returning [samples] to Earth  \n\nA more difficult question is whether life has ever existed on Mars, given the strong evidence of climatic change and the indications of a previously warmer, thicker atmosphere. Suggestions that structures found in a meteorite discovered in Antarctica, which may have been blasted off the Martian surface, were fossil traces of bacteria-like organisms have since been discounted. However, answering the question of life on Mars will probably involve collecting carefully selected subsurface samples and returning them to Earth for detailed analysis. NASA has proposed a manned expedition to Mars early in the 21st century.
1097610
There is no longer life on mars so to answer your question, No.
646534
because they never went.\n\nthey have satellite images of mars rovers (tracks in the sand an all!), but not of the lunar landing artifacts.\n\nactualy i'd like to challenge any astronomers out there with the biggest telescopes to zoom in on the landing site during an eclipse or whenever there is no sunlight shinning on it. let's see what comes up.
969053
More than a decade after the first planets beyond our solar system were found, astronomers have discovered about 200 of these "extrasolar planets," as they're called. Using a common-sense definition of potentially habitable planets, coupled with extensive computer simulations, scientists have calculated how many potentially habitable planets might be detected around other stars by the SIM PlanetQuest mission. ("SIM" stands for Space Interferometry Mission.) \n\nThe mission, scheduled for a launch in the next decade, will target planets with specific traits in common with Earth: a similar mass and an orbit in the "habitable zone," not too close and not too far from its parent star. With this mass and location, it's believed a planet could have liquid water on its surface and an atmosphere -- conditions considered necessary for life to gain a foothold. \n\nThe science team has shown that, in a survey of the best 120 candidate stars for hosting such planets, SIM PlanetQuest would have the sensitivity to find: \n\n-- Planets smaller than Earth around six stars \n\n-- Planets smaller than twice Earth's mass around 24 stars
417943
An increase of ozone around Mars would increase the temperature.\n\nHowever, there's two problems: \n\na) Mars does not have a large enough amount of mass to hold onto the amount of atmosphere required to raise the planet's temperature, and;\n\nb) Because Mars is smaller, it lost its heat much more quickly than the earth. Mars eventually cooled off to the point where its inner molten iron core hardened, destroying the magnetic field surrounding the planet. Because the earth is bigger, the core is still molten here, and we have a magnetic field which points our compasses in the right direction. Back to Mars - without the magnetic field, the atmosphere was exposed to the solar wind, which stripped it away. On Earth, the solar wind is stopped by the magnetic field, and it can only touch the atmosphere at the poles, where the air molecules ionize, creating aurora borealis and australis (The Northern and Southern Lights).\n\nMuchas your idea is a good one, it would require heating Mars' core and adding mass to the planet, which is currently impossible.