Our journey to the fourth rock from the sun.
The small armada of robotic space probes that recently raced across the void to Mars were there because, for a brief moment in celestial clockwork, Mars lay closer to our planet than at any time since Neanderthals walked the Earth. The images they beamed back were incredible, surreal, from the Martian surface and from orbit. Now the evidence is of water, both ancient and modern. With water, perhaps evidence of life will be there too.
No man or woman has ever visited Mars, yet it is a place somehow familiar. A hundred years ago Mars fever first struck, with Percival Lowell's famous ‘discovery' of canals on Mars. Now the fever is back with a vengeance. Public interest is at an all-time high and America plans to send out people there within 30 years. As Michael Hanlon points out, there is a need for caution in the excitement – where Lowell spoke of canals, scientists now project their own vision of a New Mars, a place of strange microbes found in meteorites, of unexplained landforms. We will never fully know the Real Mars until we go there. Yet the recent findings are bringing us ever closer to the truth.
Lavishly illustrated throughout, The Real Mars contains more than 100 spectacular surface and orbital images from Spirit, Opportunity, Mars Express, the Hubble Space Telescope and Earth-based observations – plus historic images depicting Mars in fiction and mythology, movie images, book covers and drawings.
