Customer Reviews

Patrick Moore on Mars

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Patrick Moore is a prolific author of many books about space, astronomy and the solar system. In this book he covers the both the telescopic and robotic observation of the planet Mars. I feel that if astronomy is of interest to you, you will like this book, but if you are looking for information on the robotic exploration of Mars, you will only find a brief summary here.

The first half of the book is devoted to the historical telescopic observations of Mars over and presents numerous hand drawn pictures made over the centuries including some of the many Martian "channels" pictures. Patrick Moore also includes one of his own drawings. After this section, the remainder of the book focuses on the Russian and American efforts to explore the red planet and its satellites, and concludes with the possible manned exploration in 20-30 years. Included in the second half of the book are: Mariners 4, 6, 7, 9, the Viking probes, Mars Pathfinder, Mars Global Surveyor and the numerous Russian Mars Series probes.

One thing I found extremely interesting about this book is that Patrick Moore knew the first man to achieve powered flight (Orville Wright), the first man in space (Yuri Gargarin) and the first man on the moon. He may have even met the first person to walk on Mars.