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The planet Mars boasts the most dramatic landscapes in our solar system. In a programme first broadcast in March, 2013, Kevin Fong embarks on a grand tour around the planet with scientists, artists and writers who know its special places intimately - through their probes, roving robots and imaginations.
As we roam Mars' beauty spots, Kevin considers why the Red Planet grips so many. Beyond its alien topographic grandeur, Mars inspires the bigger questions: are we alone in the cosmos, and what is the longer term destiny of humanity? Was there more than one life genesis? Will humans ever live on more than one planet?
The itinerary includes the solar system's greatest volcano - Olympus Mons. It is an ancient pile of lavas more than twice the height of Everest, with a summit crater that could contain Luxembourg.
The weight of Mars' gargantuan volcanic outpourings helped to create the planet's extreme version of our Grand Canyon. Vallis Marineris is an almighty gash in the crust 4,000 kilometres long and seven kilometres deep. That is more than three times the depth of Earth's Grand Canyon. In some place the cliffs are sheer from top to bottom.
A little to the east lies an extraordinary region called Iani Chaos, a vast realm of closely spaced and towering rock stacks and mesas, hundreds to thousands of metres high. One researcher describes it as Tolkienesque. This unearthly shattered terrain was created billions of years ago when immense volumes of water burst out from beneath the surface and carved another giant canyon, known as Ares Valles, in a matter of months. Imagine a hundred Amazon rivers cutting loose at once, suggests Professor Steve Squyres.
The catastrophically sculpted landscapes are part of the plentiful evidence that in its early days, Mars was, at times, awash with water and, in theory, provided environments in which life could evolve and survive. That is what the latest robot rover on Mars - Curiosity - is exploring at the dramatic Gale Crater with its central peak, Mount Sharp.
Expert Mars guides in the programme include scientists on the current Curiosity mission, and on the preceding rover explorations by Spirit and Opportunity. Kevin talks to hard sci-fi novelist Kim Stanley Robinson whose rich invocations of Martian landscapes form the narrative bedrock of his Mars Trilogy.
He also meets Bill Hartmann, a planetary scientist since earliest generation of Mars probes in the 1960s and 1970s. Bill has a parallel career as an artist who paints landscapes of the Red Planet.
Planetary scientist Pascal Lee of the Mars Institute begins Kevin's tour with a painting he created - an imagined view of Mars from the surface of its tiny moon, Phobos.
Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker -
Francis Spufford moves through an eerily silent London from Exhibition Road, where Wells had eagerly attended the lectures of biologist Thomas Huxley, onto the outskirts of Primrose Hill: the last staging post of the Martians who meet their microbial end overlooking the ruined city as Victorian's count their biological blessings.
Joining Francis are the science fiction writers Ian McDonald and Stephen Baxter, author of the new sequel to War of the Worlds.
Why does Wells's tale still resonate 120 years after its publication? -
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With Francien Stock and Adam Rutherford.
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Red weed floats down the Thames by Kew Bridge. The Martians are busy aero-forming Earth to make it more like their dying Martian home. The South East lies in ruins and London is abandoned.
Meanwhile in a house in Mortlake, Francis Spufford is joined by Professor Sally Shuttleworth (St Annes, Oxford) and space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock to consider Martian evolution and appearance in a terrifying close encounter. -
The inexorable progress of the Martian War machines meets an attempt at organized military response at Shepperton. It is desperate and doomed yet not without limited success.
Joining Francis along the banks of the Thames to consider a desperate, workable strategy against alien invasion is General Sir Rupert Smith, former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander. Meanwhile in London and along the refugee routes northwards to Chipping Barnet, Professor Darryl Jones (Trinity College), editor of the forthcoming O.U.P. edition of War of the Worlds, considers how things fall apart and what kind of world HG Wells wanted to sweep away.
Producer: Mark Burman. -
For Radio 4's Mars series, Kevin Fong asks: what future do we have on Mars when we finally get there? He talks to scientists and writers about their visions of a human presence and purpose on the Red Planet. This is the third part on this series on our relationship with Mars.
The American space agency NASA aims to get the first human crew to Mars sometime in the 2040's. It is likely to be an international mission and carry a crew of six people. Elon Musk, the founder of private rocket company SpaceX, has unveiled a scheme to get a spacecraft of one hundred colonists to the Red Planet before 2030.
Do we go to Mars for the big science questions and exploration? Or is Project Mars about becoming a multi-planetary species, extending the American western frontier by a hundred million miles? Do we need to prepare Mars as a refuge should civilisation face extinction here on the home planet.
Even the first boot print mission will be the mother of all camping trips, and full of hazard. Mars' tenuous atmosphere contains no oxygen, the average temperature is -60 degrees Celsius, the surface is bathed in cosmic and solar radiation and toxic dust lies all over the planet. So some Mars enthusiasts predict that our presence there will never amount to more than something like extraterrestrial Antarctic style bases, where visiting scientific explorers and back-up technicians live and work for a few years at a time before returning to Earth. But for others, the vision is much grander and more ambitious. Colonies will become city sized and economically productive, trading technological innovations with the home planet. Generations of people will live and die in societies free from oppressive authority on Earth.
Kevin Fong hears from would-be Martian explorers such as Elon Musk and Robert Zubrin. Robert Zubrin is president of the Mars Society and is credited with coming up with the basic technical strategy for mounting a return trip to Mars which both NASA and Space X have adopted. If we do this in our generation, says Zubrin, within two centuries there will be self-sustaining communities on Mars with their own dialects, cultures of technological and artistic invention, and their own history of 'heroic deeds'. This is romanticism to others such as Oliver Morton, author of 'Mapping Mars', and that Mars is no place for civilians. let alone children. With gravity little more than one third of Earth's, a successful human pregnancy may in fact be impossible.
That's one of the many unknowns about the future of humans on Mars revealed, as Kevin talks to the scientific Mars visionaries such as Chris McKay of NASA Ames Research Center and Pascal Lee of the Mars Institute, and to science fiction authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson, Emma Newman and Stephen Baxter who've imagined people on the Red Planet. -
As we dream of sending humans to Mars, the psychological problems of a mission loom large. As part of Radio 4's Mars season. Claudia Hammond investigates the mind-set behind the desire of those of us who want to colonise the red planet. What does it take to survive the confines of a 9 month journey and the enclosed pod-like environments that mission leaders envisage will be the housing needed to occupy this inhospitable planet?
Claudia meets the wannabe Martian explorers who've been sampling similar long term simulations here on earth and the psychologists who've overseen the design, selection and planning for future communities in space.
Producer Adrian Washbourne. -
Francis Spufford wheels his bicycle along Maybury Road and through Woking to consider the delight which HG Wells took in destroying a place he had only just recently arrived at. Woking, the land of the dead, where the Necropolis railway deposited its cargo in Europe's largest cemetery.
Wells would mount his new technological wonder – a tandem with his "wife" in the front – and weave his way through the town and its Surrey environs noting down places and people before destroying them all in print. But who was Wells at this point in his life and who were we? What kind of world was Woking and beyond and what was it he was so intent on destroying?
Joining Francis is science fiction chronicler Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck University) and historian Astrid Svenson (Brunel University).
Producer: Laura Thomas. -
Ken Hollings continues the series that revels in the Mars of imagination, history and science.
Feminists, Christians, peace loving druids, vegetarian fruitarian dwarves, Bolsheviks and big science terraformers have all offered up their versions of Martian utopia.
Both the astronomer Flammarion and the Russian mystic and Cosmist Nikolai Fyodorov dreamed of the dead resurrected on Mars. At the height of the Cold War, mysterious messages from Mars turn out to come from God, as mankind is shocked into a new beginning in the loopy film Red Planet Mars. But the Bolsheviks had got to Mars long before that, before the revolution even in 1908 with Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star. A prophet of the Bolshevik Revolution, Bogdanov gives us a historically advanced socialist state visited by a veteran revolutionary. In fact this socialist utopia will drive him mad! Russia and then the Soviet Union ached for a future among the stars where apple blossom time would come to Mars.
In Unveiling a Parallel, 1893, two Iowan women send a visitor by plane to see how women's lives could be just as equal as men's. Why they could propose marriage and have children out of wedlock!
That great mapper of Mars canals, Percival Lowell, impressed on people the desperate tale of Martian co-operation as they raced to save their species. In America the story of terraforming emerged from science fiction to cast a powerful spell on scientists and writers. Jim lovelock, creator of the Gaia theory impishly suggesting we nuke Mars and cover it in hair spray to begin its rebirth. Then came Kim Stanley Robinson, whose vast Martian trilogy (Red, Green, Blue Mars) gives us a near utopia, won only after decades of political strife, terraforming and a final, irrevocable break with Earth.
Producer: Mark Burman. -
Francis Spufford begins his journey following H.G. Wells' Martian invaders at the Basingstoke Canal that runs through Woking. Here Wells canoed with his lover amidst the wild vegetation and dreamed about Mars, at the time widely believed to be criss-crossed by vast canals created by an ancient and dying race.
Wells wrote his book at the height of Martian Fever when the work of astronomers Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell had created intense speculation about life on Mars. But Wells' Martians are evolution's nightmare. We end on Horsell Common, sight of the first crashed Martian cylinder.
Joining Francis Spufford are the science writer Oliver Morton (Mapping Mars) and the Historical Geographer Maria Lane (Geographies of Mars).
Producer: Mark Burman. -
Sarah Dillon begins a series revelling in the Mars of imagination, science and history.
We are the Martians, perhaps the only consciousness the Red Planet has ever had. The ancients wove their own mythological stories about Mars, its dim redness and uncertain path visible to the naked eye. In the 19th century new, powerful telescopes scrutinized the Red Planet and astronomers considered the possibilities of life on Mars. There was, in fact, a kind of mapping war to name and identify features on the planet.
When the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli produced a series of maps in the 1870s featuring dark channels or "canali", a powerful story began to develop: Mars was a dying planet, older, perhaps inhabited . Then, from the 1890s, American amateur astronomer Percival Lowell, using his state of the art telescope in his brand new observatory high up in Flagstaff, Arizona, convinced millions that this "dying" planet was home to a doomed civilization struggling to maintain life through an elaborate system of canals. Lowell was a supreme popularizer of science, commanding huge audiences despite the severe doubts of many in the scientific community.
Worldwide, Lowell's myth sparked volumes of popular fiction and when failed salesman Edgar Rice Burroughs penned the first of his Barsoom adventures in 1911, Martian fantasy truly took off. Its literary spell remains unbroken. Even after the Mariner probes and Viking Lander finally revealed Mars was red but dead, the Old Mars of our dreams would return.
Sarah Dillon travels to Flagstaff and the analogue Martian landscape of ochre Arizonan desert and talks to a host of Red Planet writers.
Producer: Mark Burman. -
As part of Radio 4's Mars season, planetary scientist Monica Grady explores the search for life on the Red Planet.
As a small rocky planet, Mars is similar in many respects to the Earth and for that reason, many have thought it may harbour some kind of life. A hundred years ago, there was serious talk about the possibility of advanced civilisations there. Even in early 1970s, scientists mused that plant-like aliens might grow in the Martian soil. The best hope now is for something microbial. But the discovery that even simple life survives there or did some time in its history would be a profound one. We would know that life is not something special to Earth.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered that 3.7 billion years ago, there were conditions hospitable to life on Mars – a sustained period of time with lakes and rivers of water. The earlier rover Spirit found deposits of silica from ancient hot springs which some planetary scientists argue bear the hallmarks of being shaped by microbes - possibly.
The next five years may dramatically advance the hunt for life on Mars. In 2020 the European and Russian space agencies will send their ExoMars rover. That will drill two metres into the Red Planet’s surface and sample material shielded from the sterilising radiation. It will analyse for life both extant and extinct. In the future, robotic or possibly human missions may even explore Martian cave systems in Mars' vast volcanoes. Monica talks to Nasa's Penny Boston whose adventures in some of the world's most dangerous caves have convinced her that underground is the best place to look.
Monica Grady is Professor of Planetary and Space Science at the Open University.
Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker
Sound engineer: Victoria Prandle
