The Sirens of Mars
Searching for Life on Another World
Author: Sarah Stewart Johnson
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Date of Publication: July 7, 2020
Pages: 288
The Sirens of Mars is a unique amalgam of history, science, philosophy and memoir. Sarah Stewart Johnson is a planetary scientist and an assistant professor at Georgetown University. In this book she gives us the history of man's interest in and study of the planet Mars. This starts with early attempts to describe and then map the planet's surface. It culminates in today's sophisticated rovers, complete with equipment to analyze soil and rock samples in attempt to find conditions compatible with life.
This book chronicles the many successes and failures of Mars expeditions as well as the surprises which have come from these missions. The author does an amazing job of explaining complex scientific concepts and creates very understandable commentaries on how this research is conducted and, more importantly, why this research is necessary. Exploration of a planet thought to be similar to ours but not contaminated by homo sapiens is essential to our understanding of the beginnings of life on Earth.
The author weaves a parallel narrative of her own burgeoning childhood interest in science, her college and graduate school experiences and her subsequent participation in the male-dominated field of planetary science. She cleverly juxtaposes her own personal milestones (career advancements, meeting and marrying her husband, and her first pregnancy) with landmark events in the history of Mars exploration. The chapter where she describes the birth of her first child while at the same time the Mars rover Curiosity (a project with which she was critically involved) successfully navigated the Gale Crater looking for simple organic compounds, the "building blocks" of potential life, was captivating.
I found this a very readable, entertaining, and educational book. The author does an outstanding job of bringing complex science to a non-science audience. It gave me new insights into the importance of this kind of research. I enjoyed The Sirens of Mars much more than I anticipated and recommend it to anyone curious about scientific investigation, space exploration, and/or planetary science.
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