Discovering Mars: The Amazing Story of the Red Planet

by Melvin Berger, Mary Kay Carson

Overview

Featuring incredible photos and new information about the latest research into Mars, this updated edition of DISCOVERING MARS covers everything about the great red planet, from past to present.

Topics include myths and facts about life on Mars, a history of NASA's Mars research, including the Rover missions, and ideas about our potential future relationship with the planet. With its lively text narrative and beautiful color photos, students and teachers alike will enjoy learning everything there is to know about Mars.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780545839600
Publisher:	Scholastic, Inc.
Publication date:	08/25/2015
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	64
Sales rank:	41,799
Product dimensions:	7.40(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.20(d)
Lexile:	910L (what's this?)
Age Range:	7 - 10 Years

About the Author

Melvin and Gilda Berger are the authors of more than two hundred books for children. Their books have received awards from the National Science Teachers Association, the Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library. The Bergers live in New York.

Editorial Reviews

True or False? There are canals on Mars. For young astronomers trying to answer that question (and many others) about our neighbor in space, this handy sixty-four page survey will be a treasure. Starting with myths about the planet (no, there are no canals), Berger investigates Mars’s history, beginning with its formation, even including the 1938 radio hoax of an invasion by Martians. More seriously, readers will learn about Mars’s potato-shaped moons, Phobos and Deimos; the speed of its motion (54,000 mph); and the length of a year on Mars (687 days). People have always wondered if Mars could support life—with the development of modern telescopes, astronomers discovered that Mars is cold, dry, and airless; many volcanoes, craters and canyons pit its rusty-red surface. Since Mariner 4 was launched in 1964, NASA has been probing Mars with cameras, orbiters, and landers. Especially fascinating is the rover, Sojourner, guided by scientists using remote control to investigate Martian rocks. (Berger explains that they can tell if rocks have been shaped by water—hematite found suggests that a salty sea once existed.) By 2008, the existence of some water and ice had been confirmed. Since 2012, the rover Curiosity has been looking for nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, and oxygen, as well as organic compounds needed for life. Multiple color photos and charts add to the clarity of the text, as does a timeline of American spacecraft trying to ascertain whether Mars is habitable or was ever inhabited. What will happen next? Carson is optimistic, believing that, despite many obstacles (and declining public interest in space), humans will one day reach Mars, though the red planet is 140,000,000 miles distant from Earth. A good glossary and a detailed index are provided. Reviewer: Barbara L. Talcroft; Ages 7 to 12.

Children's Literature - Barbara L. Talcroft

This easy-to-read nonfiction book is stuffed with amazing photographs, entertaining illustrations and a wide range of information about Mars. Any child researching the planet will find this book to be a solid resource. The layout is rather choppy, though, and the book is lacking a table of contents, an index or a glossary. One must leaf through each page in order to locate any specific information. Despite this drawback, the book is loaded with facts a child will need for research purposes, and it is worth the effort to leaf through each page.

Children's Literature - Catherine Campbell Wright