All About Space Bookazine All About Space Book Of Mars Fourth Edition Edizione posteriore

When this bookazine first went to press, NASA had deployed the very first instrument from its InSight mission onto the surface of Mars. InSight, a robotic lander, is tasked with examining the interior geology of the Red Planet, looking back in time to tell us how Mars, and by extension the other rocky planets, including our own, formed. The history of Mars is intrinsically bound up with that of Earth – some scientists even think that the original building blocks of life came from there. Meanwhile, the ESA’s Mars Express probe, undeterred by the failure of its Beagle 2 lander back in 2003, recently beamed back some of the clearest images yet of a crater filled with water ice in the northern lowlands of what was once thought to be an arid world. Despite a chequered history of failed spacecraft and the so-called ‘Mars Curse’, the Red Planet is finally being persuaded to give up some of its secrets. Here, we’ll reveal what scientists know so far about the planet that has captured the human imagination for centuries, examine the theories that may help us to understand it further, and explore how, one day, we could make it into another human home.