You've been looking around the entries for First Words, maybe found one or two of the longer ones interesting, and maybe you've been thinking, "Hmm, this Mars stuff isn't too bad at all. I'd like to know more." Or maybe not, and I just needed an intro for this article. Either way, in the next few hundred words, I'll be giving you a guided tour of the web's best educational Mars websites so you'll know enough about the red planet to impress the most hardened space advocates.
We'll begin our tour at the Mars Academy. The Mars Academy calls itself the '#1 online Mars Learning Center' and I'd have to agree with them; they provide a great introduction to Mars that's easy to read and organised in a logical fashion. The website covers all the important bases of Mars science, including geology, the search for life on Mars and the history of Martian exploration.
However, the Mars Academy isn't the best place if you want in-depth information or high quality images. For that, you should consult the Solarviews Mars page which has more up to date information and an impressive array of Mars statistics. Solarviews is one of the best organised resources on the Internet for Mars images, and a significant bonus is that the website has been translated into four other languages.
In the same vein, the Nine Planets page on Mars has a great deal of information. It isn't as well organised as the Mars Academy or Solarviews, but it does offer a very good selection of links to other Mars educational resources.
Once you've absorbed all of that information, you might be wanting more current news that isn't contained in the general educational websites. For that, the best places to go to are the NASA Mars website and MarsNews.com. Unsurprisingly, the NASA Mars website holds a wealth of information not only about all of its past, present and future Mars missions, but also interviews and activities for teachers and students. The only problem I have with it is that as with all NASA websites, the design could do with some improvements and due to its vast, sprawling nature it can often be difficult to find a particular page.
MarsNews.com is a constantly updated news website providing links and commentary on all the latest Mars happenings. If you aren't familiar with Mars science, the subject matter can sometimes be a little overwhelming but there really isn't a better place on the web for dedicated Mars news.
Within the Mars and space advocacy community, you'll hear a lot about a proposed manned mission design to Mars called 'Mars Direct'. Mars Direct was conceived by Robert Zubrin, President of the Mars Society, and details a low-cost but realistic way to send humans to Mars for a fraction of the price of constructing the International Space Station. Rather amusingly, the best online articles that I can find about Mars Direct are not on the Mars Society pages - Kuro5hin has a good overview that's worth reading.
The Mars Society is a non-profit organisation that advocates the human exploration and development of Mars; it's the organization that's sponsoring First Words. The Mars Society website doesn't actually have that much educational information about Mars, although it does have some good pages on its research projects including the Flashline Arctic Research Station, the Mars Desert Research Station and the Mars Gravity Biosatellite project.
I'm going to plug my own websites now. I'm the editor of New Mars, the online magazine for the Mars Society, and we offer a good variety of articles, interviews and fiction. I'll admit that you're probably only going to be interested if you are a space or Mars advocate, but even if you don't consider yourself to be one, the fact that you're here and have read this far means quite a lot. Right now, the website has an excellent article by Stuart Atkinson about artist-explorers and interviews with Chris McKay and Greg Benford, NASA terraforming science expert and award winning science fiction author respectively.
I also co-wrote a website called Astrobiology: The Living Universe that, while not specifically about Mars, holds a lot of information about the search for life on Mars and the problems of sending humans to Mars.
I think that all of those websites should keep you busy and entertained for quite a while, and if you read through all of them you'd probably know more about Mars than I do (far less than some might imagine). Here's one last plug: if you're interested about Mars, go and check out the Mars maps that we're selling - you can see a link to them on the sidebar on the right. All of the profits go to funding more projects like this (fun and hopefully educational projects, that is!).
By Adrian Hon