MISSIONS TO MARS:

The Mars Explorer and NASA mission scientist Larry S. Crumpler presents a cosmically challenging and fascinating tome on the new era of Rover and spacecraft discovery on the Red Planet. Up until the last few decades we knew Mars only as a morning and evening 'star'. Initial photographs by satellites showed us a hunk of dry, red dust with no signs of past or present life. Thanks to NASA's Rover missions and scientists like Dr Crumpler we now know that Mars is far from dead. What we didn't see was that the planet had a wet, possibly living history, and conditions were indeed present for the evolution of complex organic life. Dr Crumpler uses his expertise as a leading planetary geologist to provide a definitive record from the Age of Enlightenment to the Space Age of the 1960s to NASA's Perseverance Rover's successful landing in February 2021. He uses never-before-seen photographs, stunning panoramas, full colour maps, Rover 'selfies' showing craters and outcrops of the Meridiani Planum sulphate-cemented sandstone with bounce marks from the landing airbags visible or a microscopic Imager view of the 'blueberries' or 'Hematite' concretions which became the rage all over again in Earth's geological circles. From the comprehensive exercise of mapping the surface geology of Mars the results were a significant accomplishment in deciphering the Red Planet with exciting big surface features, an alien geological time emerging and this tour of the Martian landscape takes us roving into a new world. There are gypsum veins, evidence of water everywhere, soft hard rocks, desert varnish at Mazatzal and Route 66, the miracle of Sol 419 and the panel-cleaning events and the visual devices were showing trends in the amount of dust on the panels, these are truly epic expeditionary moments recounted by an expert. Big glossy heavyweight hardback packed with colour photos, 336pp.