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xiii Foreword Despite its common nickname, it’s not red so much as orange. Even then, someone has to carefully show the stargazing newcomer that the planet Mars really has a special color. It’s close and bright; it has always been a special place for us. As you make your way through the history recorded in Dr. Hubbard’s book, please notice the names. So many Earthlings were involved in learning about our mysterious neighbor. It has that red or reddish hue, for one thing. And so perhaps the slightly pink planet was named for the God of War. Why else would it be red, if it were not for the blood of warriors’ spilt in battle? This ancient theme carried to the last century in which dozens of science fiction writers imagined a planet controlled by beautiful, thoughtful, often hostile Martians, most of whom came to a bad end—or came here to ensure a bad end for Earthlings. These imagined interplanetary conflicts were fueled by water—not real so much as imagined or inferred water. In 1877, when orbital motions conspired to bring Mars slightly closer to Earth than it is most of the time, the professional Italian astronomer Schiaparelli observed what he thought might be channels on the Martian surface. With the Italian word for such geological features being canali, the gentleman astronomer Percival Lowell in the early twentieth century went to great lengths to popularize the notion that there might be water-filled canals running in a network all over Mars. Science fiction stories often featured sailboats, Martian agriculture , and cool evenings by the water’s edge. There’s nothing like a worldwide drought to drive a fictitious Martian to drink. I mean to drink water from another planet—usually ours. And, there’s nothing like the promise of water to drive a modern spacecraft-mission manager to develop instru- xiv · Foreword ments that can sniff for moisture or scrape for ice in an extremely cold, remote, and desolate world. Based on my own experience with optical eyepieces of microscopes and telescopes, I’ve often wondered if people viewing Mars had overlain a reflection from the back of their own eyes onto the image in their telescopes. In a cosmic irony, they might have been interpreting the tiny pattern of blood vessels in their retinas as enormous patterns of canals on a world more than 50,000,000 kilometers away. Perhaps laughable to some of us, it is just one more problem for a scientist. How do you know when you’ve really discovered something new? My old professor Carl Sagan often pointed out that you have to get really close to know for sure what you’re seeing. That’s why for Hubbard et al. (me inclusive), Earthbound planet gazing is not enough; you need to send spacecraft to see the Martian world up close. With modern views of Mars provided by the designers and builders of modern telescopes, we just don’t see any canals or evidence of great civilengineering works out there. But strange as it might seem at first, the scientists and engineers of the twenty-first century are driven by the same deep quest that drove the characters of science fiction in the last century. We all sought and seek water there. This became Dr. Scott Hubbard’s job, to harness the resources of a modern space agency to conceive, design, build, and launch spacecraft to look for signs of water and life, to be the Czar of Mars. Tasks difficult enough here on Earth become astonishingly difficult on a bitterly cold world hurtling through the icy blackness of space tens of millions of kilometers away. If you think about it, it is almost incredible that we can see Mars at all, let alone aim for it and hit it with spacecraft. An object like Mars takes up a portion of sky about the same width as a thin thread held at arm’s length. Don’t take my word for this—try it. As bright as celestial objects may seem to us on a clear, dark night, they would be absolutely invisible if space itself were not so fantastically empty. Light goes beaming right through almost all of the volume of the universe. There is nothing to stop it. There is a lot of space out in space. When light, spherically moving out from the Sun, hits Mars, a tiny fraction of it, only about 0.02 percent, bounces...

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