Mission to Mars review – Rediscovering the cosmic wonders of the Red Planet
Dr. Larry S. Crumpler is a geologist preeminent among those that understand the freezing, hostile landscape of Mars. Yet he also happens to be a brilliant writer and, despite the generic title of his new book, Mission to Mars, one who has managed to make the backstory of humanity’s next great adventure entirely about the men and women involved in the hard science. One might even say this; if you plan on reading one book on Martian geology and our exploration of the red planet this (or next) year, then make sure it this book.
Mars, as Crumpler explains, is a planet that seems determined to deceive us. He calls it “Coyote Mars”, after the Native American trickster god. The red planet has repeatedly defied our attempts to classify it. Its path through the skies was plotted by the ancients, believing that its eccentric retrograde motion was synonymous with the fates. It was also the one stellar body to look red and thereby became associated with War.
Then it was the turn of the early pioneers of the telescope to be tricked when they thought they saw canals. Others imagined it was a planet that displayed seasons as we have on Earth only for Mariner 6 and 7 to reveal the truth of a lifeless barren world, as inhospitable as the Moon.
Mars, however, is much more than that summary of our disappointments. Crumpler’s book is sumptuously presented (assuming you’re not reading the ebook version, which works less well), with enough photographs to make you think it is a complete survey of the planet. He succeeds in expressing the adventure in terms of individual achievements too. His excitement is palatable as we get to meet the big figures, largely forgotten by history, who guided the exploration. We also get the figures who are well remembered, including Carl Sagan, who inspired generations at a time when the achievements were scant and often fleeting.
Crumpler, meanwhile, is the sympathetic narrator, biographising the story as well as observing one of the greatest periods of scientific explorer. His interest, of course, lies in the rocks and formations of the red planet and there’s more here than you probably ever wanted or needed to know about mons, fossa, collis, planum, and planitia, or indeed, how Mars’ unique geology was shaped by nature. The author balances the geology with the personal, from the part he played in choosing the landing site of the Viking 2 Lander, up to his work on the Mars Perseverance rover mission.
For all the weight of science, as well as the Martian landscape, the real insight here, then, is the nature of the work and the odd clashes that it sets up. “The landers were the media stars,” he explains at one point about the early days of the Mars program, “but the real meat of exploration was taking place on a global scale with the orbiters. We of course felt sorry somewhat sorry for the poor slobs stuck on the ground rooted to one place with very little in the way of new things to look at and analyze.”
Where the book finds its real impetus, however, is with the two NASA rovers, Spirit and Opportunity that landed on Mars in 2004. This is where the book gets more granular and explains the kind of features that excite scientists. At times, it’s a crawl as slow as that of Opportunity descending into Endurance crater but Crumpler makes the territory relatively easy to navigate.
The reward is equally evident in that it helps to contextualise the success of the Spirit and Opportunity missions, and how they were the beginning of the modern push to explore Mars. That success cannot be understated. The original goal had been for each rover to last 90 sols (or Martian days, 39 minutes longer than an Earth day) and travel 600 meters. They would eventually manage considerably more with Spirit travelling 7.7 kilometres and over its six-year lifespan. Opportunity, meanwhile, drove 45.2 kilometres and operated for fourteen and a half years.
The two rovers produced copious science, leading the book into a series of smaller vignettes based around geology but also the reading of the science. It’s perhaps the book’s most rewarding section, being part anecdote and part hard science, investigating the place of water, lava flows, and the reading of the landscape. It explains why Mars looks how it looks but also does a lot of work of explaining features on this planet. Remarkably, observation of geology here on Earth applies to Mars.
As Crumpler says: “Coming from a field geology background, it seemed to me that earth-style field mapping was the national thing to do with our direct examination of rocks and outcrops, and that is what I did. This type of mapping achieves an unparalleled technical advantage and context information in unravelling Martian geologic structures.”
The demise of the rovers was as inevitable as the legacy they left behind. The success of the missions wasn’t just a scientific achievement. It was in making Mars a place where humans had a future – “one thing that we learned from roving the surface of Mars was the fact that it is a ‘real place’.” They paved the way for the bigger, more able explorers, in the form of the Curiosity and Perseverance Rovers, and then the story of Ingenuity, which successfully made the first powered flight on Mars. They also paved the way, obviously, for this book, which explains thirty years of science in an accessible and rewarding way.
Crumpler’s expertise doesn’t extend to having that profound an insight into what comes next – he noticeably doesn’t mention either Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos in his conclusions about future missions to Mars. Yet, his re-telling of past explorations of Mars is enough to make the reader feel excited about the future; no mean feat when writing about such an inhospitable place.