This is CBS. I on the world. I'm John Batchelor. Mars! The planet that we all gaze at when we see it turn red, sometimes bright red, depending upon the Martian dust storms.

The fact that we gaze upon it is a way of connecting us to our ancients, our progenitors, the people who first gazed on Mars without our

instruments and robots and success. Someone who tells this story wonderfully, I welcome Matthew

Chandel, is a space history curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and his new book is For the Love of Mars,

a human history of the red planet.

The ancients did not shy away from interpreting Mars,

so Matt, congratulations and good evening.

Thank you.

Thank you.

To the Mayans who looked upon Mars as a Zumaur, a Mars beast. What did they make of that red planet in the sky? Good evening to you. Thank you, John. Yeah, so, you know, the story of the Mayans is very interesting. I was attracted to that story, partly because, you know,

the Mayans have this incredibly, you know, robust understanding of cosmology, of, you know,

the role that the planets played in their world. And, you know, I really wanted to learn a little bit more

while I was writing this book about how they saw Mars and what it meant to them. And in reading a lot of

the anthropological literature about that relationship between the Mayans and the sky, I did find

archaeologists who are making this argument that

in this one particular codex, the Dresden Codex, there was a table related to the motions of Mars.

And in that table, they found depictions of what they ended up calling the Mars Beast.

So I want to be clear, it's not the

Mayans that called it the Mars Beast. It's these particular archaeologists who, you know,

their argument is that what you see in that codex in those pages where the Mars Beast appears

is the beast coming down from the sky, making itself more visible, and then going back up.

And what they argued is that what you're seeing there is Mars during an opposition.

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