TOUCHDOWN MARS!

“You are an astronaut! These are your crewmates. You are going to Mars!” So begins an alphabet book of Mars for beginning science enthusiasts. Handsome watercolor drawings show a multiracial crew of eight kids and a pet cat as they suit up, board the spacecraft, and set off for Mars. The journey will take more than three years. The paintings and brief captions describe life aboard the space ship, Mars landing, exploration, experiments, and travel back home. Many pictures show the crew and cat floating inside the spacecraft, astronauts working, sleeping, and exercising in zero gravity. The title concludes with an A-B-Cyclopedia of additional Mars facts. Front end papers show a handsome drawing of the solar system, while back end papers show the orbit of the Mars space voyage. Younger children will read the illustrations and search for the alphabet letters while more able readers will explore the impressive number of facts in the brief captions, for example: “How far will you travel? The orbit of Mars is approximately 49 million miles from Earth, but because the planets are moving, your spacecraft is following an elliptical path of more than 300 million miles.” No sources are given, but Dr. Edgett is a research scientist working with pictures from the Mars Surveyor Project. A beginning science title to spur the imagination. (Nonfiction. 6-8)