In 1997, while on a trip to the Mars Pathfinder operations center in California, Jackson Lee asked if the Pathfinder had succeeded in taking a picture of the flag planted on Mars by Neil Armstrong in 1969. Needless to say, Jackson Lee, then a member of the House Science Committee, had confused Mars with the Moon. (Despite the alliterative names, they are very different astral bodies. Mars is a planet that orbits the Sun and has never been visited by man. In contrast, the Moon, which is a satellite of Earth and orbits our planet, has been visited six different times by astronauts).