{"id":10018633,"date":"2025-01-15T16:52:22","date_gmt":"2025-01-15T15:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/close-ups\/"},"modified":"2025-01-15T17:01:02","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T16:01:02","slug":"close-ups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/close-ups\/","title":{"rendered":"Close-ups"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mars, which has always been a projection surface for both utopian and dystopian fantasies, embodies the deeply rooted, sometimes ambivalent human longing for the unknown and the unattainable distance. The latest book \u00bbMars. Photographs from the NASA Archives\u00ab from Taschen shows the latest images from the NASA archives in impressive motifs and thus illustrates the symbolic power of the red planet, which has long since asserted its firm place in pop culture.<\/p>\n

\u00bbIn the past winter, I thought my 10-year-old daughter how to identify Mars in the night sky\u00ab, writes Margaret Weitekamp, Chair of the Department of Space History at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum<\/i> in her foreword to \u00bbMars. Photographs from the NASA Archives\u00ab. With this first sentence, she locates the source of human longing, curiosity, imagination and the spirit of exploration.<\/p>\n

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The identity of the planet Mars is multifaceted and ranges from a distant enigma to a tangible territory, characterized by many tangible and intangible stories in between. Depending on the perspective and imagination with which one looks at the so-called \u00bbRed Planet\u00ab, it radiates something different back. Based on this knowledge and with no claim to completeness at the present time, the planet is viewed through the lenses of planetary research, historical research, science, technology and even poetry.<\/p>\n

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As the subject of numerous Si-Fi novels and films, Mars inspires boundless utopian and dystopian fantasies like no other. (Almost) nothing changed in this respect after science dispelled more and more, sometimes curious, ideas about the Martian landscape and replaced them with concrete evidence in the form of photographic images.<\/p>\n

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The 340-page book brings together the earliest close-up images of Mars, taken in 1964 by the Mariner 4 <\/i>spacecraft\u2014the first ever images of another planet\u2014and hundreds of cutting-edge photos from NASA’s extensive archives. And as impressive as the sharpness of NASA’s images may be, you can’t help but instinctively want to shake off the inherent abstraction of the photographs with a conscious blink. This is not only due to the inscribed emotional image of Mars, but also to the challenge\u2014and to a certain extent the unwillingness\u2014to put something so incomprehensible into perspective. The transfigured romantic idea of an untouched place that holds all possibilities and makes it possible to feel small and big at the same time is similar to the human idea of heaven and hell, although no one has yet been able to identify these fantastic places with a mere point of the finger.<\/p>\n

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Over six decades of pioneering research missions, NASA has gradually unraveled the mysteries of the red planet, revealing a world not so dissimilar to our own, probably once inhabited and with potential habitability in hopeful view. NASA aerial images from later orbiter missions show fascinating ancient river beds, polar ice caps, dust winds, huge canyons and towering volcanoes in an infinitely varied landscape. Over the past 25 years, NASA rovers have served as technical extensions of mankind \u2014, drilling holes, searching for traces of water and leaving us to ponder the mountain ranges and fantastic sunsets with their images.<\/p>\n

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With \u00bbMars. Photographs from the NASA Archives\u00ab, Taschen is publishing a beyond fascinating book that offers different approaches and perspectives on Mars. But whatever the intention of looking up into the sky, one thing is certain: what makes people look up at all is the universal longing for an undefined sense of freedom and the idealized idea of what it would be like to overcome the boundaries of the known and of oneself. [DM]<\/i><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

Mars. Photographs from the NASA Archives
\nHardcover with fold-out pages, 30.0 x 30.0 cm, 340 pages
\ntaschen.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mars, which has always been a projection surface for both utopian and dystopian fantasies, embodies the deeply rooted, sometimes ambivalent human longing for the unknown and the unattainable distance. The latest book \u00bbMars. Photographs from the NASA Archives\u00ab from Taschen shows the latest images from the NASA archives in impressive motifs and thus illustrates the symbolic power of the red planet, which has long since asserted its firm place in pop culture. \u00bbIn the past winter, I thought my 10-year-old […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":10018630,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[336,351,348],"tags":[391,418],"class_list":["post-10018633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-culture","category-latest","tag-bookshelf-en","tag-culture-en-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10018633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10018633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10018633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10018630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10018633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10018633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10018633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}