Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World - Hardcover

Morton, Oliver

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 184115668X ISBN 13: 9781841156682

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2002

Synopsis

A narrative history of the men and women who have explored Mars and mapped its surface from afar, and in so doing conditioned our understanding of our nearest planetary neighbour.

When Columbus first reached his new found land he had no idea what he might find: doubters still believed that he might discover nothing more than the edge of the world just before falling off it. The situation that greets the first man or woman to walk on Mars could not be more different. Mars is the most intensely observed and imagined place that humans have never been. Human names glitter on its surface, commemorating astronomers and physicists. Classical mythological identities have been stamped on its most prominent geographical features.

Oliver Morton has written a stellar narrative of Mars exploration not merely to laud the bravery and technical daring of the cosmologists and rocket scientists, but to examine how the process of exploration in space, of mapping, conditions what we discover there. Hence our understanding of the surface features of Mars is in part a product of the fact that a specialist in water movement and its erosion comes from Malham and sees on Mars a version of the limestone Yorkshire cliffs.

Our appreciation of Mars, made possible by ever more powerful telescopes and digitised signals, has increased far ahead of our ability to fulfil the benefits of all the Mars-gazing. But in our imaginations we have all but colonised the red planet: the work of Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Kim Stanley Robinson has filled the landscape with human potential and gloried in the grandeur of the scale of Mars's natural palaces. Olympus Mons, its biggest volcano is more than three times the height of Everest and contains enough rock to cover the whole of Texas in a layer five miles deep. It's that sense of awe that has gripped the troupe of researchers and astronomers who have held their sights firmly on Mars. Oliver Morton describes their glorious fixation, as they have come gradually to know and to understand and to colour the maps of Mars.

About this title

About the Author

Oliver Morton is a science writer and journalist. He has written extensively for New Scientist, Nature and a range of National broadsheets.

From the Back Cover

Most great maps are records of great explorations. Mars, the second most mapped planet in the universe, is place as yet untrodden by human foot. As such, its maps reflect not human experience but human aspiration. They are a projection of what is likely to be found as much as a calibration of what is known. And they chart the progress of our knowledge as it has moved from observation to imaginative fantasy and back to ever-nearing scientific reality. Mars is the place where human dreams of life outside the earth have been orbiting for years.

Oliver Morton's history of how Mars has been mapped is at the same time a history of the growth of human understanding and a chronicle of space travel that has taken us to the threshold of another world. We can touch it indirectly through our spacecraft, a vital first contact and prelude to that first footstep. Like any exploration the journey has included moments of triumph and of despair, but with every renewed attempt comes better images, more enticing vistas. Mars has a geography that is breathtaking.

It is a dramatically exaggerated version of our world. Where we have Everest, Mars has Olympus Mons, a volcano the size of Missouri. The earth has a scattering of meteor craters, Mars has millions, the largest of which represents an impact of almost unimaginable magnitude, big enough to drop Western Europe into. It is a planet on which humankind has begun to pin memorials of our own mythologies: Argyre and Hellas, Alba and Pavonis. Names from one world projected onto maps of another: only on Mars can we say with certainty where Utopia is to be found. This is the story of how it was identified and the men and women who sought to reach it.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 184115668X
• ISBN 13: 9781841156682
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368