Two books about Mars

2008-11-02 20:51 UTC

Recently I read two interesting books about Mars.

A Traveler’s Guide to Mars is written by William Hartmann who currently works on the Mars Global Surveyor program. The book discusses how Mars became the dry, cold planet it is today, describing 4 billion years of dramatic climate changes and continuously changing geology. It is illustrated with tons of beautiful photos and maps. Writing style: scientific style but with enough humor to make it very readable.

Many of the photos in the book were taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera. This camera is designed and operated by Malin Space Science Systems. I include a link to their site because it offers a better collection of recent Mars photos than the NASA site.

The other book is The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must_, by Robert ZubrinZubrin.

Zubrin makes a fascinating case for a $20-30 billion plan to land humans on Mars. He describes a well-thought out plan that includes: getting there cheaply and safely, how to build a base, and how to colonize and terraform Mars.

I just looked up the following figure: $845 billion is the amount of money the US has spent on the war in Iraq as of today. Just imagine what the world would look like if 5% of this sum would have been spent on an international mission to Mars. A 10 year Apollo-like program could have been devised bringing engineers and scientist from all over the world together to design, build and carry out the greatest mission mankind has ever undertaken. But alas, there’s no oil on Mars.

1 comment