Mars is our famous little neighbour, well known for all the rovers and spacecraft that have been sent it's way.
This little red planet is actually mainly red due to the Iron Oxide dust suspended in the atmosphere, Large areas of Mars do actually have red soil to though. Most of Mars is actually more of a butterscotch colour, yet you can also get areas which are more yellow or brown.
Mars is substantially smaller than earth and because of this has much lower gravity and therefore also less atmosphere. The smaller amount of atmosphere makes the surface pressure a lot less than on earth, having such a insubstantial atmosphere also stops the planet from retaining as much heat from the sun which consequently causes Mars to experience very low temperatures.
Mars is home to 2 of our Solar systems Largest features Valles Marineris and Olympus Mons.
Valles Marineris in Latin or Mariner's Valley in English is the Massive canyon system on Mars. Mariner's Valley is over 4000km long, 200km wide and up to 10km deep. The Rim of this Canyon in places is taller than Mt Everest. The Rift valleys on Earth are longer but not as deep or wide, There is also a Rift Valley on Venus that is comparable to Earth's.
Another cool
Feature of Mars also has some spectacular Polar Ice caps that have an awesome spiral shape created by Katabatic winds due to the coriolis effect. The Polar ice caps contain mostly water ice but are also host to dry ice from the freezing Carbon Dioxide. The Southern Polar cap constantly has a layer of dry ice about 8 metres thick, while in the North deposits of dry ice usually only form in winter and get to be about 1 metre thick.
When the dry ice sublimes it creates great winds that gust off the poles up to 400km per hour.
The gravity on Mars is about 38% of the Earth's gravity, basically if you weighed 100kgs on Earth you would only weigh 38kgs on Mars. This could have some really cool effects, first you would have to get use to moving yourself around using less force than you were use to. Once you got use to the lower gravity you would find yourself able to lift massive objects, propel yourself along the ground in longer and faster strides, even jumping a lot higher than you ever had before.
Due to the thin atmosphere on Mars the air pressure at the surface is about 6 or 7 millibars compared to Earths 1000 millibars. Due to the low pressure being on Mars without a pressure suit would be extremely hazardous to say the least.
See Mars For Yourself.
When I first started being interested in space and the planets I thought having my own telescope was way out of my price range. Then I learnt that they aren't. A telescope capable of showing you the rings of Saturn or the galileo moons of Jupiter, even the polar caps of Mars is actually quite affordable.
For more cool photos of Mars have a look at
Amazing Features of Mars.
Sources:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/main/index.html