1 . It sounds like something from science fiction — a space journey into the vast expanse of space, heading towards Mars. While we’re not quite ready to put a person on the land, the question we ask today is:     1    

The space race saw the USA and USSR compete to achieve the first in spaceflight. The Soviet Union released Sputnik 1, an artificial satellite (人造卫星), before anyone else.     2     Now it appears that Mars is the heaven body of desire. While the reputation and bragging (吹嘘) rights to be the first nation to touch down is an obvious draw, there are other reasons we want to get there.

    3     You only have to look at the fossilized remains of the dinosaurs to see the benefit of finding another habitable planet. While Mars doesn’t have the right conditions to call it home just yet, there’s always the concept of terraforming (地球化) — changing the environment of a planet to meet our needs.

However, not everyone agrees.     4     He has said the concept of changing habitability of another planet because of the damage we have done to Earth makes no sense when we can simply terraform Earth.

It seems the main reason is the search for extraterrestrial (地球外的) life.     5     But now seemingly dead, the potential fossils could answer questions about our own evolution and that of our planet. One theory is that bacterial life on our planet didn’t start here, but was transferred via asteroid from Mars.