The human imagination conceives of Mars in many different ways. One can see the
bright red dot of light in the night sky; if you watched the lunar eclipse last
week you probably also noticed Mars, near the Moon. Then there is the planet of
our science fiction stories, whose surface features were once thought to be
covered with canals and fantasized Martians. Finally, there is the planet
itself that is slowly being revealed to us by a fleet of spacecraft and
landers. Sometimes it is hard to recall that all three conceptions are
referring to the same place.
Roughly every two years (778 days, to be precise)