Mars: From Myth and Mystery to Recent Discoveries

This book tells the story of Mars since the dawn of mankind's curiosity for celestial wonders and the ancient beliefs through the revolution in our concepts of the cosmos around us in the 1600's to the present day knowledge and beyond, all the way to the futuristic visions of science fiction and terraformed Mars with conditions suitable to Earth life. It also tells the story of Martian “life”: pluralistic view of the 1700's with all the bodies of the Solar System being thought to be inhabited, certainty on the existence of Martian civilization in the end of the 1800's and the beginning of the 1900's based on the observations of canals, the sudden “death” of Mars in the 1960's due to the images sent back by the first space probes, and the resurrection in the 1990's and 2000's due to the controversial findings in Martian meteorite ALH84001 and ever-increasing evidence for the watery and possibly more temperate past of Mars. All this is told in a very readable form with no math nor terminology only the experts in the field are familiar with. The up-to-date text is supported by both informative imagery and a simple, but inspiring layout with some special features like a “flip movie” of the rotation of Mars and a very illustrative comparison of the distances of the Martian satellites versus the distance of our Moon from their respective parent planets.