The story of Mars in glorious colour (Mars: Uncovering the Secrets of the Red Planet - Paul Raeburn)

Member Name: markos9

Product:	Mars: Uncovering the Secrets of the Red Planet - Paul Raeburn
Date:	09/11/09 (66 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fantastic, two page photographs. Fascinating story. Well written.

Disadvantages: Slightly out of date now.

Mars is the most similar of all the planets in the Solar System to our home, the Earth. Mars has seasons, a 24 hour day, polar caps, and evidence of ancient seas. There are clouds on Mars, and it snows occasionally, too. Although the atmosphere is too cold and thin for liquid water to remain on the surface, the river valleys which are so evident across the planet means that water must have flowed here millions of years ago when Mars was warmer.

There is then, a chance that life arose during the billion years or so that Mars was more hospitable than today; perhaps life still clings on, deep underground, as algae or bacteria, or perhaps something even more complex.

Mars has fascinated humans for thousands of years; first as a glaring red dot moving across the heavens, then as an alien world potentially home to H.G. Wells' Martian invaders, to the more familiar but not yet fully understood world we know today.

In 1996, a small robot explored the surface of the Red Planet. Pathfinder, as it was known, kick-started a revolution in Mars exploration that has seen probes visiting the planet every couple of years since.

Mars: Uncovering the Secrets of the Red Planet is both a celebration of that exploration and a forward look at what will happen next in exploring this strange, alien world.

This is a large format book containing 232 pages. The book's size allows plenty of room for photographs and the author has made excellent use of the space. The photos in this book are simply stunning. Plenty of images cover double page spreads and show the surface of Mars from landers, the whole planet from a distance, and high resolution pictures of mountains, craters, and huge extinct volcanoes.

Looking at the pictures reminds the reader that they are gazing at an alien world. No one has ever set foot here, and our only information about conditions there have been patiently gleaned from telescopic observations and robotic space missions.

The book tells the story of human interest in Mars. The ancients worshipped Mars as the god of war (due to its blood red colour). Later there was a gradually developing belief that aliens walked on the dry surface culminating in the frenzy caused by Orson Wells' radio transmission of War of the Worlds. Today the search for extraterrestrial life focuses on our near neighbour in space.

The early missions to Mars are chronicled and the author explains the disappointment caused by the photographs that dispelled any hope of an ancient civilisation clinging on to life on a parched planet: Mars seemed cold, dry and lifeless.

Later missions searched explicitly for life; NASA's Viking spacecraft generated results that were almost universally proclaimed as negative. The lows and highs of the Viking missions are recounted in the book. Viking was such a high profile 'failure' to find life that the planet was not visited for another 20 years.

With Pathfinder, however, a new generation of scientists were involved, and a renewed interest in the Red Planet unfolded. The book gives eyewitness accounts of this remarkably successful mission, conducted on a shoestring, as well as interviews with the scientists involved. The images of the plucky little rover, alone on the surface of Mars are quite striking.

Along with Pathfinder, a small lump of rock has stimulated interest in Mars. ALH-84001 was found in Antarctica and revealed to be from Mars. Possible evidence of fossilised microbial life was discovered during analysis of the rock. This has not been proven, but the number of Martian missions increased dramatically since it was discovered.

Sadly, the book, written in 1998 is now out of date where missions are concerned. The book describes sample-return missions and even human landings by 2015. Neither of these will happen in this timescale and I suspect we are thirty years off seeing an astronaut on Mars.

Despite the age of the book, this is an excellent read for anyone interested in astronomy in general or Mars in particular. The photographs are worth the price of the book on their own, allowing the reader to directly see the surface of an alien world. Reading this book is to lose oneself in exploration of the frontiers of human knowledge, a fascinating book, indeed.

The book is available from Amazon from £2.76.

Summary: Learn all about the planet Mars.