Valles Marineris, Arcadia Planitia, Elysium Mons, Planum Boreum, Icaria Fossae, this publication invites us to discover these astonishing Martian regions shaped by the wind for over three billion years. Among the tens of thousands of shots made by NASA’s observation probe, MRO, witha resolution of unprecedented quality, Xavier Barral has extracted a series of 150 photographs for this book. These stunning images, evoking sometimes abstract paintings, will appeal to both art and science lovers.

Conceived like a visual atlas, this book brings us into a fantastic journey along familiar geological forms: craters, lava plains, sand dunes, canyons and polar regions. But these landscapes disrupt our

usual points of reference: the dunes are made of black sand, the volcanoes sometimes reach an altitude of 22 000 metres, the canyons are 10 000 metres deep and the ice is sublimated. In order to best capture the geological and mineralogical contours of this mythical planet, the editorial choice was to maintain a consistent point of view, with each photograph covering a 6-km wide strip.

To help guide us on this photographic exploration sketched out by Xavier Barral and Sébastien Girard, texts by astrophysician Francis Rocard, professor of planetary science and the director of HiRISE, Alfred McEwen, detailed captions by planetologist and geophysician Nicolas Mangold, as well as a planisphere of Mars all provide keys for interpretation and place these enigmatic images back in their context.