Mars

The planet Mars boasts the most dramatic landscapes in our solar system. In a programme first broadcast in March, 2013, Kevin Fong embarks on a grand tour around the planet with scientists, artists and writers who know its special places intimately - through their probes, roving robots and imaginations. As we roam Mars' beauty spots, Kevin considers why the Red Planet grips so many. Beyond its alien topographic grandeur, Mars inspires the bigger questions: are we alone in the cosmos, and what is the longer term destiny of humanity? Was there more than one life genesis? Will humans ever live on more than one planet? The itinerary includes the solar system's greatest volcano - Olympus Mons. It is an ancient pile of lavas more than twice the height of Everest, with a summit crater that could contain Luxembourg. The weight of Mars' gargantuan volcanic outpourings helped to create the planet's extreme version of our Grand Canyon. Vallis Marineris is an almighty gash in the crust 4,000 kilometres long and sev

Francis Spufford moves through an eerily silent London from Exhibition Road, where Wells had eagerly attended the lectures of biologist Thomas Huxley, onto the outskirts of Primrose Hill: the last staging post of the Martians who meet their microbial end overlooking the ruined city as Victorian's count their biological blessings. Joining Francis are the science fiction writers Ian McDonald and Stephen Baxter, author of the new sequel to War of the Worlds. Why does Wells's tale still resonate 120 years after its publication?

With Francien Stock and Adam Rutherford.

Red weed floats down the Thames by Kew Bridge. The Martians are busy aero-forming Earth to make it more like their dying Martian home. The South East lies in ruins and London is abandoned. Meanwhile in a house in Mortlake, Francis Spufford is joined by Professor Sally Shuttleworth (St Annes, Oxford) and space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock to consider Martian evolution and appearance in a terrifying close encounter.

The inexorable progress of the Martian War machines meets an attempt at organized military response at Shepperton. It is desperate and doomed yet not without limited success. Joining Francis along the banks of the Thames to consider a desperate, workable strategy against alien invasion is General Sir Rupert Smith, former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander. Meanwhile in London and along the refugee routes northwards to Chipping Barnet, Professor Darryl Jones (Trinity College), editor of the forthcoming O.U.P. edition of War of the Worlds, considers how things fall apart and what kind of world HG Wells wanted to sweep away. Producer: Mark Burman.

For Radio 4's Mars series, Kevin Fong asks: what future do we have on Mars when we finally get there? He talks to scientists and writers about their visions of a human presence and purpose on the Red Planet. This is the third part on this series on our relationship with Mars. The American space agency NASA aims to get the first human crew to Mars sometime in the 2040's. It is likely to be an international mission and carry a crew of six people. Elon Musk, the founder of private rocket company SpaceX, has unveiled a scheme to get a spacecraft of one hundred colonists to the Red Planet before 2030. Do we go to Mars for the big science questions and exploration? Or is Project Mars about becoming a multi-planetary species, extending the American western frontier by a hundred million miles? Do we need to prepare Mars as a refuge should civilisation face extinction here on the home planet. Even the first boot print mission will be the mother of all camping trips, and full of hazard. Mars' tenuous atmosphere cont

As we dream of sending humans to Mars, the psychological problems of a mission loom large. As part of Radio 4's Mars season. Claudia Hammond investigates the mind-set behind the desire of those of us who want to colonise the red planet. What does it take to survive the confines of a 9 month journey and the enclosed pod-like environments that mission leaders envisage will be the housing needed to occupy this inhospitable planet? Claudia meets the wannabe Martian explorers who've been sampling similar long term simulations here on earth and the psychologists who've overseen the design, selection and planning for future communities in space. Producer Adrian Washbourne.

Francis Spufford wheels his bicycle along Maybury Road and through Woking to consider the delight which HG Wells took in destroying a place he had only just recently arrived at. Woking, the land of the dead, where the Necropolis railway deposited its cargo in Europe's largest cemetery. Wells would mount his new technological wonder – a tandem with his "wife" in the front – and weave his way through the town and its Surrey environs noting down places and people before destroying them all in print. But who was Wells at this point in his life and who were we? What kind of world was Woking and beyond and what was it he was so intent on destroying? Joining Francis is science fiction chronicler Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck University) and historian Astrid Svenson (Brunel University). Producer: Laura Thomas.

Ken Hollings continues the series that revels in the Mars of imagination, history and science. Feminists, Christians, peace loving druids, vegetarian fruitarian dwarves, Bolsheviks and big science terraformers have all offered up their versions of Martian utopia. Both the astronomer Flammarion and the Russian mystic and Cosmist Nikolai Fyodorov dreamed of the dead resurrected on Mars. At the height of the Cold War, mysterious messages from Mars turn out to come from God, as mankind is shocked into a new beginning in the loopy film Red Planet Mars. But the Bolsheviks had got to Mars long before that, before the revolution even in 1908 with Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star. A prophet of the Bolshevik Revolution, Bogdanov gives us a historically advanced socialist state visited by a veteran revolutionary. In fact this socialist utopia will drive him mad! Russia and then the Soviet Union ached for a future among the stars where apple blossom time would come to Mars. In Unveiling a Parallel, 1893, two Iowan women

Francis Spufford begins his journey following H.G. Wells' Martian invaders at the Basingstoke Canal that runs through Woking. Here Wells canoed with his lover amidst the wild vegetation and dreamed about Mars, at the time widely believed to be criss-crossed by vast canals created by an ancient and dying race. Wells wrote his book at the height of Martian Fever when the work of astronomers Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell had created intense speculation about life on Mars. But Wells' Martians are evolution's nightmare. We end on Horsell Common, sight of the first crashed Martian cylinder. Joining Francis Spufford are the science writer Oliver Morton (Mapping Mars) and the Historical Geographer Maria Lane (Geographies of Mars). Producer: Mark Burman.

Sarah Dillon begins a series revelling in the Mars of imagination, science and history. We are the Martians, perhaps the only consciousness the Red Planet has ever had. The ancients wove their own mythological stories about Mars, its dim redness and uncertain path visible to the naked eye. In the 19th century new, powerful telescopes scrutinized the Red Planet and astronomers considered the possibilities of life on Mars. There was, in fact, a kind of mapping war to name and identify features on the planet. When the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli produced a series of maps in the 1870s featuring dark channels or "canali", a powerful story began to develop: Mars was a dying planet, older, perhaps inhabited . Then, from the 1890s, American amateur astronomer Percival Lowell, using his state of the art telescope in his brand new observatory high up in Flagstaff, Arizona, convinced millions that this "dying" planet was home to a doomed civilization struggling to maintain life through an elaborate system

As part of Radio 4's Mars season, planetary scientist Monica Grady explores the search for life on the Red Planet. As a small rocky planet, Mars is similar in many respects to the Earth and for that reason, many have thought it may harbour some kind of life. A hundred years ago, there was serious talk about the possibility of advanced civilisations there. Even in early 1970s, scientists mused that plant-like aliens might grow in the Martian soil. The best hope now is for something microbial. But the discovery that even simple life survives there or did some time in its history would be a profound one. We would know that life is not something special to Earth. NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered that 3.7 billion years ago, there were conditions hospitable to life on Mars – a sustained period of time with lakes and rivers of water. The earlier rover Spirit found deposits of silica from ancient hot springs which some planetary scientists argue bear the hallmarks of being shaped by microbes - possibly. The