Mars is named after the Roman god of war

Once spacecraft visited the planet during NASA's Mariner missions in the 1960s and 70s these concepts were radically broken. In addition, the results of the Viking life-detection experiments aided an intermission in which the hypothesis of a hostile, dead planet was generally accepted.[200]
Mariner 9 and Viking allowed better maps of Mars to be made using the data from these missions, and another major leap forward was the Mars Global Surveyor mission, launched in 1996 and operated until late 2006, that allowed complete, extremely detailed maps of the Martian topography, magnetic field and surface minerals to be obtained.[201] These maps are now available online, for example, at Google Mars. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Express continued exploring with new instruments, and supporting lander missions.
In culture

Main articles: Mars in culture and Mars in fiction
Mars symbol.svg
Mars is named after the Roman god of war. In different cultures, Mars represents masculinity and youth. Its symbol, a circle with an arrow pointing out to the upper right, is also used as a symbol for the male gender.
The many failures in Mars exploration probes resulted in a satirical counter-culture blaming the failures on an Earth-Mars "Bermuda Triangle", a "Mars Curse", or a "Great Galactic Ghoul" that feeds on Martian spacecraft