A Trip around Mars with Kevin Fong

The planet Mars boasts the most dramatic landscapes in our solar
system. Kevin Fong embarks on a grand tour around the planet with
scientists, artists and writers who know its special places
intimately- through their probes, roving robots and imaginations.


As we roam Mars' beauty spots, Kevin explores why the Red planet
grips so many. Beyond its alien topographic grandeur, Mars
inspires the bigger questions: are we alone in the cosmos, and
what is the longer term destiny of humanity? Was there more than
one life genesis? Will humans ever live on more than one planet?


The itinerary includes the solar system's greatest volcano -
Olympus Mons. It is an ancient pile of lavas more than twice the
height of Everest, with a summit crater that could contain
Luxembourg.


The weight of Mars' gargantuan volcanic outpourings helped to
create the planet's extreme version of our Grand Canyon. Vallis
Marineris is an almighty gash in the crust 4,000 kilometres long
and seven kilometres deep. That is more than three times the
depth of Earth's Grand Canyon. In some place the cliffs are sheer
from top to bottom.


A little to the east lies an extraordinary region called Iani
Chaos, a vast realm of closely spaced and towering rock stacks
and mesas, hundreds to thousands of metres high. One researcher
describes it as Tolkienesque. This unearthly shattered terrain
was created billions of years ago when immense volumes of water
burst out from beneath the surface and carved another giant
canyon, known as Ares Valles, in a matter of months. Imagine a
hundred Amazon rivers cutting loose at once, suggests Professor
Steve Squyres.


The catastrophically sculpted landscapes are part of the
plentiful evidence that in its early days, Mars was, at time,s
awash with water and, in theory, provided environments in which
life could evolve and survive. That is what the latest robot
rover on Mars - Curiosity - is exploring at the dramatic Gale
Crater with its central peak, Mount Sharp.


Expert Mars guides in the programme include scientists on the
current Curiosity mission, and on the preceeding rover
explorations by Spirit and Opportunity. Kevin talks to hard
sci-fi novelist Kim Stanley Robinson whose rich invocations of
Martian landscapes form th narrative bedrock of his Mars Trilogy.


He also meets Bill Hartmann, a planetary scientist since earliest
generation of Mars probes in the 1960s and 1970. Bill has a
parallel career as an artist who paints landscapes of the Red
Planet.


Planetary scientist Pascal Lee of the Mars Institute begins
Kevin's tour with a painting he created - an imagined view of
Mars from the surface of its tiny moon, Phobos.


Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker, BBC Radio Science Unit