We Earthlings have been to Mars before, of course. Dozens of times we've visited it in our imaginations, giving it special status as a far-off symbol of our own lust for war and the focus of all our fears and fantasies of extraterrestrial invasion -- Mars as the original red menace.

In the 1960s, we flew by it a few times. In the '70s we dropped in, literally, on several occasions, our mechanical emissaries decked out like eager tourists with cameras and other gadgets. In 1997, after a long break, we repeated the visit and took more photos. Now, here we are again, with bigger cameras and even better gadgets, intent on checking out a much wider swath of bleak Martian real estate.

Mars, it seems, never grows boring. But perhaps you're thinking, Wait a minute! What is this talk of Earthlings? "We" didn't succeed in getting all the way to Mars. The Americans did -- for the fourth time last week, if you don't count flybys. The Russians have put spacecraft into orbit around the planet, and so have the Europeans. Japan also came agonizingly close with its Nozomi probe, which was redirected away from a Mars orbit just last month after attempts to fix damaged electrical circuits failed.