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be Mars' north pole that would face us - depending on positions in respective orbits - my assumption; I'm not expert!

So this brings me to another point: Why must we claim that Mars, or the Earth, for that matter, must always have north up and south down? That's how our maps are made, what's in our atlases. But why could it not be the other way - south at top, and north at bottom. When you're in space and look at the Earth, you have to adjust the spaceship to see the Earth the way we see it on maps and from the Moon, depending where you are on the Moon, and where it is in relation to Earth, the Earth in relation to the Moon; the Earth will not look like the way we show it on maps. Man did this, because most of civilization lived and still lives, in the northern hemisphere, and where society was most advanced - Galileo, for instance - Christopher Columbus! We never even knew what the world looked like, only finding out 500 + years ago that it's round! But maps were made as we progressed toward the unknowns of the world, except people who already were living there - people living on the American continents thousands of years before Columbus! It was the European culture that devised maps as we now know them, not to say that peoples elsewhere on Earth had not had their own versions, what they knew of the land they'd lived on.

It was in England that we devised longitude and longitude, zero longitude being over London. It could have been over New York, Paris, Moscow - anywhere, depicting a vertical line that went around half the world from pole to pole, the opposite side of earth being 180 degrees? I don't think we go to 360, do we? It's to 180, then back down again to meet at 0. 180 degrees is the International Date Line, where one day meets the next. So we have East and West longitudes counting from 0 to 180, 180 down to 0. We established the equator as 0 degrees latitude, progressing upward and downward to 90, which represents each of the poles - North and South Pole - 90 degrees north latitude for the North Pole, and 90 degrees south latitude for the South Pole. So these latitudes ring around the world from west to east, east to west, the greater the numerical latitude, the smaller the distance of the ring, but equi-distant vertically from one another - about 69 miles? That means, White Plains, New York being at 41 degrees north latitude, you'd travel about 69-70 miles in a straight line to reach 42 degrees north latitude. The City of Kingston, NY is just under

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