My Favourite Martians

Well here we are on the day the latest probe approaches Mars. Just this week, an orbiter from the United Arab Emirates has entered orbit, along with the latest Chinese mission, which will also attempt to land a rover later this year. The memorable events prompted me to look back in my dilapidated space scrapbook, from childhood, to find an old clipping from a newspaper which had been left over in my grandma's house. It shows a full page spread from the first successful Mariner mission in 1965, when I was just 3 and utterly unaware. Five years later, with my Mums help, I scoured the pile of old newspapers for any space related clippings, which found their way into the scrapbook. As the photograph was disappointingly unimpressive to my young eye, I decided to help it a little with some red crayon. 

Today, representations of Mars, both real and artistic, are so much different and with the advent of digital media, its possible to visualize even small details on the surface at my leisure.
 

I wonder how it must be to see the developments in space exploration as a child now, with nothing left to the imagination and maps, charts and videos of the remote world available at the touch of a button. As a boy, I was amazed at how books showed the surface of Mars and proposed the existence of 'canals' on its mysterious surface.

If you compare Bonestell's beautiful vision of the red planet as seen from Phobos,  with the warts and all photograph on the cover of the Haynes Manual, there is very little actual resemblance, aside from colour; even though Bonestell was the de facto space artist of his day.

Other, less well known artists populated the raft of space books available in the sixties with images based on photographs taken with terrestrial telescopes, or used Schiaparelli's 1862 map as a rough guide or presented Percival Lowell's wild theories about canals. 

Lowells three books are available as pdf's here: 

https://archive.org/details/marsasabodeoflif00loweuoft/page/108/mode/2up

In the 1950's, prior to any successful space probe launch, artists were even more extravagant in their visions, such as these lavishly romantic paintings in the Collins 'Timothy's Space Book', a quaint series of books in which the young boy is shown the wonders of air and space travel by his dad, replete with suit, trilby and pipe.

Watch Perseverance landing this evening (19.00 gmt onwards ) on social media, tv and Youtube, and I wonder if the full significance of the amazing achievement will dawn on generations of children today, or might it just be glossed over as the latest in a long line of technological achievements designed to extend mans footprint on the world ? I for one, will be watching in some fashion, but in the back of my mind, I can still retain the wonder and amazement of being able to 'see' the surface of a world which glitters faintly in the light of dawn and wonder if in my own lifetime, humans will actually visit and be able to wipe the dust off their robotic precursors who paved the way to the mysterious red planet.