This is Mars

After a few meetings with french publisher Xavier Barral, we discovered our mutual interest for martians. Xavier Barral had had an idea about a book on Mars but the content was not clear. He was blocked, and so asked me to work on the publication for him. Instead of doing a retrospective book about different martian missions as the publisher had first imagined, we agreed to focus on  Mars reconnaissance orbiter mission and its Hirise instrument : one of the most powerful camera ever sent into space.

The publisher didn’t want the scientists involved in the editing process so i had carte blanche for editing. It took me nearly 8 months of daily work to examine every detail of this planet and its huge photo database. The Book was released in november 2013.

This Is Mars offers a previously unseen vision of the red planet. Located somewhere between art and science, the book brings together for the first time a series of panoramic images recently sent back by the U.S. observation satellite MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter). Since its arrival in orbit in 2006, MRO and its HiRISE telescope have been mapping Mars’s surface in a series of exceptionally detailed images that reveal all the beauty of this legendary planet. Conceived as a visual atlas, the book takes the reader on a fantastic voyage—plummeting into the breathtaking depths of the Velles Marineris canyons; floating over the black dunes of Noachis Terra; and soaring to the highest peak in our solar system, the Olympus Mons volcano. The search for traces of water also uncovers vast stretches of carbonic ice at the planet’s poles.