From Mars with Love: Postcards from 50 Years of Exploring The Red Planet

During the fifty years since the launch of the Viking spacecraft to Mars, our view of the red planet has changed from hostile desert to a world which was once covered in water, and which may just possibly sustain life. Lavishly illustrated with the latest images from the fleet of spacecraft that have explored our neighbour, this lecture considered how Mars’ fate, like that of Earth, was set in the Solar System’s first billion years, and the chaotic environment the process of planet formation produced.

Click to access R_2025_12_02_0813_Lintott_T.pdf

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1904814/episodes/18455594-from-mars-with-love-postcards-from-50-years-of-exploring-the-red-planet-chris-lintott.mp3?client_source=small_player&download=true

Extra Reading

General books:
• Mapping Mars, Oliver Morton, 2002, Picador

Viking:
• Nasa’s archive: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/viking/

Phoenix:
• NASA: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-phoenix/
• Perchlorate: Hecht et al, 2009, Science, 325, 5936 //ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009Sci…325…64H/abstract
• Ice: Mellon et al., 2009, JGR, 114, 53, E00E07 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009JGRE..114.0E07M/abstract

Spirit and Opportunity:
• The Planetary Society have an excellent bibliography here: https://www.planetary.org/space-missions/mars-exploration-rovers
• NASA: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-exploration-rovers-spirit-and-opportunity/science-highlights/
• Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet, 2006, Squyres, Hachette
• Spirit: Nice Scientific American article here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-mars-carbonate/
• Spirit at Comanche: Morris et al., 2010, 329, 5990, 421 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1189667
• The film ‘Good Night Oppy’ tells the story of the two Mars rovers. It is currently available on Amazon Prime in the UK.

Pathfinder
• Golombek, M. et al. 1997. “Overview of the Mars Pathfinder Mission and Assessment of Landing Site Predictions”. Science. Science: 278. pp. 1743–1748
• There’s an overview of the results in a special edition of the Journal of Geophysical Research: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1002/(ISSN)2169-9100.RESPATH1

Insight
• There’s an overview of the mission here, https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/a-year-of-surprising-science-from-nasas-insight-mars-mission/, with links to the main papers from the first year.

Curiosity:
There are two excellent books about the rover itself:
• Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity’s Chief Engineer, Manning and Simon, 2014, Bravo
• The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job, Lakdawalla, 2018, Praxis

MRO:
• Professor Lintott strongly recommens losing yourself in the images at the HiRISE website: https://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu

TGO:
• ESA website: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Exploration/ExoMars
• Methane results are Korablev et al., Nature, 2019: https://oro.open.ac.uk/60547/2/2019%20Korablev%20TGO%20methane%20Nature_accepted.pdf
• Mille-feuille atmospheric structure is reported in Thomas et al, Science Advances, 2025, 11, 38, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu0859

Perseverance:
• Possible detections of signs of life: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-perseverance-rover-scientists-find-intriguing-mars-rock

Lecture is part of:
The State of Our Universe
This event was on Wed, 03 Dec 2025
Astronomy
Science
Physics

Professor Chris Lintott
• Gresham Professor of Astronomy (2023-)
Professor Chris Lintott is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at New College.

Having been educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and University College London, his research now ranges from understanding how galaxies form and evolve, to using machine learning to find the most unusual things in the Universe, to predicting the properties of visiting interstellar asteroids. He was the founder of the Zooniverse citizen science platform, which provides opportunities for more than two million online volunteers to contribute to scientific research, and which was the topic of his first book, ‘The Crowd and the Cosmos’. His latest book is ‘Our Accidental Universe’.

Professor Lintott is best known for presenting the BBC’s long-running Sky at Night program, and as an accomplished lecturer. Away from work, he cooks, suffers through being a fan of Torquay United and Somerset cricket, and spends time with a rescued lurcher, Mr Max. He can often be found at the helm of Oxford’s science comedy night, ‘Huh, That’s Funny’.