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Discovering Mars: A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

Discovering Mars: A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet

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For millenia humans have considered Mars the most fascinating planet in our solar system. We’ve watched this Earth-like world first with the naked eye, then using telescopes, and, most recently, through robotic orbiters and landers and rovers on the surface.

Historian William Sheehan and astronomer and planetary scientist Jim Bell combine their talents to tell a unique story of what we’ve learned by studying Mars through evolving technologies. What the eye sees as a mysterious red dot wandering through the sky becomes a blurry mirage of apparent seas, continents, and canals as viewed through Earth-based telescopes. Beginning with the Mariner and Viking missions of the 1960s and 1970s, space-based instruments and monitoring systems have flooded scientists with data on Mars’s meteorology and geology, and have even sought evidence of possible existence of life-forms on or beneath the surface. This knowledge has transformed our perception of the Red Planet and has provided clues for better understanding our own blue world.

Discovering Mars vividly conveys the way our understanding of this other planet has grown from earliest times to the present. The story is epic in scope—an Iliad or Odyssey for our time, at least so far largely without the folly, greed, lust, and tragedy of those ancient stories. Instead, the narrative of our quest for the Red Planet has showcased some of our species’ most hopeful attributes: curiosity, cooperation, exploration, and the restless drive to understand our place in the larger universe. Sheehan and Bell have written an ambitious first draft of that narrative even as the latest chapters continue to be added both by researchers on Earth and our robotic emissaries on and around Mars, including the latest: the Perseverance rover and its Ingenuity helicopter drone, which set down in Mars’s Jezero Crater in February 2021.

ISBN-13: 9780816532100

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Publication Date: 11-09-2021

Pages: 744

Product Dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

William Sheehan retired from psychiatry in 2018 after a professional career spanning three decades. He is a leading historian of astronomy, with twenty-books to his name. Jim Bell is a professor of astronomy and planetary science in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. His research focuses on the geology and composition of planets, moons, asteroids, and comets, and he has authored seven popular science books.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Preface xiii

1 Wanderers and Wonderers 3

2 The Warfare with Mars 23

3 The First Telescopic Reconnaissance 46

4 Mappers of Strange Lands and Seas 61

5 Mars Above the Dreaming Spires 82

6 The Moons of Mars 98

7 A Tale of Two Observers 111

8 Mars in the Gilded Age 135

9 The Rise and Fall of the Canals 159

10 The Martian Sublime 195

11 Marsniks and Flyby Mariners: The 1960s 231

12 A Martian Epic: Mariner 9 260

13 Vikings Invade the Red Planet: 1976-1980 294

14 A Sedimentary Planet 332

15 Baby Steps: Back to the Surface with Pathfinder 365

16 Mineral Mappers 393

17 Living on Mars with Spirit, Opportunity, and Phoenix 428

18 Mountain Climbing with Curiosity 457

19 Atmospheric Explorers 483

20 Shooting the Moon(s): Spacecraft Exploration of Phobos and Deimos 497

21 Ongoing and Upcoming Missions: The 2020s 516

22 Our Future Mars 532

Acknowledgments 551

Appendix A Chronology of Mars Mission Launches 553

Appendix B Mission and Instrument Acronyms 559

Appendix C Physical and Orbital Characteristics of Mars, Phobos, and Deimos 565

Appendix D Oppositions of Mars, 1901-2099 567

Appendix E Mars Nomenclature 571

Appendix F A Seasonal and Historical Almanac for Mars 581

Appendix G Timekeeping on Mars 593

Appendix H NASA's Historical Investment in Mars Exploration 599

Notes 605

Index 687