Publisher Description
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 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.
Download and start listening now!
About the Authors
Jim Bell is a scientist, author, and prolific public communicator of science and space exploration. He is a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, an adjunct professor of Astronomy at Cornell University, and president of the Planetary Society. He has written a number of books that showcase some of the most spectacular stories and images from the space program: Postcards from Mars, Mars 3-D, Moon 3-D, The Space Book, and The Interstellar Age. As a professional scientist, he has published more than thirty first-authored and 140 co-authored research papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He has been an active user of the Hubble Space Telescope and of ground-based telescopes at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii.