Artistic Rendering Of Mars

It was not until spacecraft visited the planet during NASA's Mariner missions in the 1960s that these myths were dispelled. The results of the Viking life-detection experiments started an intermission in which the hypothesis of a hostile, dead planet was generally accepted.
Some maps of Mars were made using the data from these missions, but it was not until the Mars Global Surveyor mission, launched in 1996 and operated until late 2006, that complete, extremely detailed maps of the martian topography, magnetic field and surface minerals were obtained. These maps are now available online, for example, at Google Mars.