I was re-savouring "Long After Midnight" the other day and came across this bit in "The Messiah," as Father Lipscomb grapples with the Martian presence:

"Still, it is hard to keep one's curiosity in hand. After all, our Mariner photographs indicated no life whatsoever here."

What in the world? The story was written about '76; Mariner began orbiting, if I remember rightly, in late '71. Why did Bradbury feel the need to include/acknowledge/explain away this relatively new bit of scientific discovery? Especially since this appears to be the same Mars he wrote about in his Chronicles in '55--he, in a sense, "got there first" before the satellite. I know some practice this revision (Clarke, for instance, introduced inconsistencies in his Space Odyssey in order to minimize inconsistencies with the real, ever-changing body of real-world data) but Bradbury? Good grief, the people are still breathing the native air! (There is even enough air, I've noticed, to blow open the church door.) So why this nod to a relatively minor point, when the Mariners probably wouldn't have given the reader a believability hitch compared to the sheer impossibility of the whole premise?

"The Messiah" was actually first published in Spring 1971 (in something called Welcome Aboard, which sounds like an in-flight magazine).

There was a series of Mariner probes; Mariner 9 was the first to land on Mars, in...1971.

So my guess is that Mr B was just trying to be topical. If you consider that, at this point, The Martian Chronicles was over twenty years old, this might have made for a unique selling point for "The Messiah".

Speculation of course, unless anyone can find out from Mr B himself.

I agree that such a connection with reality is completely unnecessary, but things might have looked different back in '71.

I think Mr. Bradbury was writing most of his stories having publication in a magazine in mind and of course under such circumstances one tends to make the story very much more "up to date" as having a book publication in mind. There are several stories of Mr. Bradbury which I therefore would consider a little bit dated and I think he himself acknowledged this by changing/modernizing certain aspects of some of his stories in connection with a TV series. Regarding "The Messiah" however I wouldn't say that this is a (big) problem, because the main idea behind the plot doesn't depend on a certain historical period. (Please excuse my perhaps sometimes a little bit strange English as my mother language is German).

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