THE RED PLANET

Humanity's Search for Life on Mars

There is a particular kind of silence that comes before a great leap. It is not the silence of emptiness but of anticipation—a held breath before a door swings open onto a landscape no human eye has ever directly seen.

That is where we stand today with Mars.

After decades of robotic emissaries, orbiting sentinels, and surface rovers that have crawled across ancient lake beds and windswept plains, we are at last preparing to send the most daring explorer of all: ourselves.

This book is written in the spirit of that threshold moment. Mars is no longer a distant point of light in the night sky, no longer merely the subject of science fiction or cold-war-era imagination.
It is a destination with coordinates, a world with seasons and weather and a geology that records billions of years of planetary history. It is a place where human footprints may one day press into rust-colored soil, and where the question of whether life ever arose beyond Earth may finally receive its answer.

To stand on the edge of discovery is both exhilarating and humbling. The exploration of Mars represents the accumulated effort of thousands of scientists, engineers, mission planners, and dreamers spanning generations and nationalities. From the early flyby missions of the 1960s that returned the first blurry photographs of a cratered world, to the sophisticated science platforms operating on the surface and in orbit today, each mission has built upon the last. Each success—and each failure, of which there have been many—has sharpened our understanding and deepened our resolve.