Why Earthlings Are So Obsessed With Mars

It’s been centuries since Earthlings last gave Mars a moment’s peace. From the first time we noticed it hanging in the sky — closer than other worlds, brighter than other worlds, unsettlingly redder than other worlds — we have alternately loved it, feared it and hung our hopes for life in the lonely cosmos on it. That romance is as passionate as ever. There are currently eight active spacecraft orbiting or on the surface of Mars — two of them rovers. On May 5, NASA will launch yet another, the Mars InSight lander, which will be the first ever to drill a probe deep into the Martian subsurface. The big question — whether there was or is life on the Red Planet — is the one that animates all of this work, and it’s a question that gets a close, smart and readable examination in the new book, Life on Mars: What to Know Before We Go, by David A. Weintraub, professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt University. Weintraub explores the history of our Martian passion, the blunders we’ve made in our pursuit of it — think Percival Lowell’s and Giovanni Schiaparelli’s imaginary canals on the Martian surface— and the progress we’ve made in our genuine understanding of the planet. In a conversation with TIME, he discussed all this and more. So, why Mars? There are so many other pretty planets in our solar system alone, to say nothing of the trillions of others we now know are out there. Why is Mars the it planet f...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Interview Source Type: news