It’s life but not as we know it

Tim Radford

On 4 July, the US spacecraft Pathfinder, one of three launched last November, will enter the thin atmosphere of Mars. Though the Martian atmosphere is about 1 per cent of the Earth’s, the buffeting will slow the spacecraft down from 7.5 kilometres a second to about 400 metres a second, or 900 miles an hour – which is slow enough for a parachute to open (rockets will help). Pathfinder will literally bounce into touch, bobbing on a cocoon of inflated airbags, before coming to rest on Martian soil. The touchdown will be in a region called the Ares Vallis, chosen because it seems to be a huge wadi or dried-up watercourse. A hatch will open, and out will pop a little wheeled robot rover called Sojourner, which will beetle about the immediate terrain, examining rock chemistry and reporting back to the lander, which will relay data and pictures back to Earth.

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Books referred to in the writing of this piece:

Life on Mars? The Case for a Cosmi Heritage by Fred Hoyle and C. Wickramasinghe (Clinical Press, 222 pp., £17.50, 2 June, 1 85457 041 2).

The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must by Robert Zubrin with Richard Wagner (Simon and Schuster, 320 pp., £16.99, 3 March, 0 684 81930 9).

Evolution of Hydrothermal Ecosystems on Earth (and Mars?): Ciba Symposium 202 (Wiley, 346 pp., £55, 15 November 1996, 0 471 9 6509 X).

The Rivers of Mars: Searching for the Cosmic Origins of Life by Piers Bizony (Aurum, 190 pp., £9.95, 24 April, 1 854 10495 0).

UFO 1947-97: Fifty Years of Flying Saucers, edited by Hilary Evans and Dennis Stacy (Brown, 272 pp., £16.99, 1 May, 1 870 87099 9).

Life’s Grandeur by Stephen Jay Gould (Cape, 272 pp., £16.99, 7 November 1996, 0 224 04132 0).

Sex and the Origins of Death by William Clark (Oxford, 208 pp., £16.99, 30 January, 0 19 510644 X).