International Atlas of Mars Exploration, ... and a Moon announcement Options

[Phil Stooke]

I have a couple of things to announce before we lose UMSF.

First, my books 'The International Atlas of Mars Exploration' vols. 1 and 2, were released in 2012 and 2016, and since I ended work on vol. 2 I have been compiling, sol by sol, material for vol. 3. Many things from it have appeared on UMSF over the years. I intended to finish collecting material for it in December 2019 and spend a year finishing it, submitting it to the publisher in Dec. 2020 for publication a year later. The reviewers suggested that I add 2 more years to it so it could include the first part of Perseverance's mission. So data collection finished in Dec. 2021, but I found I needed two years to pull it into shape and that process ended in January 2024 with the final submission. It was during that time that I ran out of energy for updating the Curiosity and Perseverance maps here on UMSF.

So here we are in October 2024. I have been through the copy-editing with a wonderful editor - it's embarrassing how many things had to be fixed, but the scale of the project rather got away from me. I have done the indexing - who knew your own book could put you to sleep? And right now I have the page proofs, so it really is taking shape. It should be out in about January, I expect.

I have a couple of thanks to give. Emily wrote me a very nice Foreword, and Jan van Driel gave me the cover art. All three volumes had UMSF cover art - by Olivier for vol. 1 and James Sorenson for vol. 2. I also want to thank everybody here for their support and interest over the years.

I won't do any more books for Mars - that is for someone else to do. I will turn to the Moon now. Before the Mars books there was the International Atlas of Lunar Exploration in 2007. It preceded LRO, so it was soon out of date, and some of my guesses about locations etc. were wrong, so it didn't age very well. As soon as I finished compiling it, new things started cropping up, and I put them all into a Word file and built an update in parallel with the Mars work. In the last 5 years or so I have been preparing a lot of new material, far beyond what went into the old atlas, such as new maps of the Apollo traverses which have been seen here and are now being put out step by step on my Mastodon account (link in sig.)

However, there is no plan to publish this in a conventional way. My publisher did not want to do a revised Moon atlas (they might have gone for a vol. 2 but I couldn't leave vol. 1 as it was). So I am going to do things differently. I am working on preparing a set of PDF files called Moon Chronicle (it's like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, only with fewer beheadings). Each is about 120 pages in size and there will be at least 12 of them, giving all the new material like Apollo mapping and coming right up to date with new missions. And these are going to be available for free download with no restrictions on use. Sadly, I won't have UMSF to announce availability when this begins next year some time. But look out for news on my Mastodon account or on Discord.

Never stop exploring!

Phil