* MARS is the fourth largest planet and the seventh largest in the solar system. It is also known as the red planet because of oxidised minerals in its surface rocks – rust.
Mars is also the Roman god of war.

* ALTHOUGH Mars is much smaller than Earth, its surface area is about the same as the land surface area of Earth.

* WHILE the average temperature on Mars is about -55C, Martian surface temperatures range from as little as -133C at the winter pole to almost 27C on the dayside during summer.

* A day on Mars is just 37 minutes and 23 seconds longer than one on Earth and a Martian year is 687 Earth days.

* IN the Seventies, during the time of the Viking missions to the red planet, David Bowie wrote a song called Life on Mars.

* BRITNEY Spears features the Martian terrain in her video for her single Oops I Did It Again.

* ROCKET Man Elton John is right to claim that: “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise the kids/In fact it’s cold as hell.”

* THE kitsch film Mars Attacks runs riot with the Martian stereotype: little green men with enormously swollen brains, vivid crimson eyeballs, ray guns and space suits.

* COMPOSER Gustav Holst starts his orchestral investigation into the solar system with Mars: Bringer of War. Probably the most famous of the movements the music conjures up the violent dust storms that sometimes envelope the planet.

* ASTROLOGERS view Mars as the action planet, with a hand in activities that involve creation and destruction.

* MARS rules several parts of the body, including the muscular system, the adrenal glands, red blood cells, motor nerves, head and face, and the external sexual organs.

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