The Sirens Of Mars

Sarah Stewart Johnson

A llen Lane £20

This summer, Earth and Mars are in their best positions for travel between the two and there are missions planned by the US, China and the United Arab Emirates. It’s an apt time, then, for planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson to explore our fascination with the red planet, which, thanks to similarities with Earth, has long been a focal point in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Johnson charts the Mars missions that have taken place and the extraordinary characters behind them. Take adventurer Steve Fossett. While testing space equipment in his hot-air balloon in 1998 he was blasted out of the sky by a thunderstorm and plunged 29,000ft into sharkinfested waters off the Australian coast. (He was eventually rescued.) Alongside tales of derring-do are existential concerns. Johnson is preoccupied with ‘how we live out our small, shining moments as human beings on this planet, hurtling through our enormous universe’.

She pinpoints the mind-bending difference in scale between the lives of space scientists and the vastness of the realm they are exploring. While she watches the Nasa rover Curiosity touchdown on Mars just hours after giving birth to her first child – improbably, both events take place on the same day – she reflects that ‘the whole landing was only seven minutes, about the same time it took the obstetrician to tug my son from the womb’.

Johnson’s enthusiasm is infectious and she writes with bewitching lyricism, particularly on what space exploration means to her: the ‘shimmering hope that life might not be an ephemeral thing, even if we are’.