Peter Cattermole

This highly attractively-packaged book is a little misleading. It is actually a highly detailed scientific treatise summarising the state of our knowledge about the planet Mars as in 2001. We must therefore understand that a) it is not suitable for casual readers, and b) it is almost certainly incomplete (though I would suggest that there is little in it that has yet been demonstrated to be actually wrong). The text is illustrated with many maps, diagrams, plans and photographs, though most of those are orbital views from Viking and Mars Global Surveyor. Some shots from the Mars Pathfinder lander made the cut quite late on, but more recent (and more spectacular) images from later Mars rovers, together with their insights, are absent.

Nonetheless, this is a comprehensive summary of what we knew up to 2001, and as such will be a good basis for future study. (Some later impressions do have an additional page added summarising then-recent findings about recent surface water.) But as the bulk of the content derives from remote sensing studies, the time will come when this book will be considered a foundation text only but lacking in more up-to-date discoveries. That time will only come about once teams of experts have spent considerable time with boots on the ground (or regolith) and their findings have been reviewed, published, argued over and thoroughly absorbed. Come back in a hundred years or so.… (mer)