'Mars' by Luke Jerram

22 July 2025

On Sunday we were at the Open University in Milton Keynes to see 'Mars', an artwork by Luke Jerram which is part of the Milton Keynes International Festival 2025. This seven metre sphere, looking like a tethered balloon in a courtyard outside the main Open University building, is covered with high definition NASA photographs of the surface of Mars, giving you the opportunity to walk around it and look directly at the surface of the red planet. Each centimetre on the internally illuminated surface corresponds to 10 kilometres on Mars. We also went inside to the main lecture theatre for a talk by Dr Elliot Sefton-Nash, a planetary scientist working at the European Space Agency. He is currently working on the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Rover, which is scheduled to be launched in 2028 and should arrive on Mars two years later, as part of a series of missions to study the potential for life on Mars. He explained how the conditions on Mars mean that the surface of the planet provides a clear, detailed record of its long history in a way that the ever-changing surface of the Earth doesn't. Exploring the surface of Mars is therefore an opportunity to understand its past in detail and to look for evidence of whether Mars has ever supported life. Although his talk treated us as scientists, and was quite hard to follow in parts, he was still a very engaging, clear speaker, and answered audience questions at the end very effectively. It was a fascinating afternoon, and after the talk we went back outside to look again at Luke Jerram's miniature version of Mars.