Mars is back in the news as NASA’s Curiosity rover begins its exploration of the Red Planet. DAVID BARNETT looks at why our nearest space neighbour fascinates so... and why a Bradford-born astronomer and physicist was convinced there might have indeed been life on Mars.

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own...”

Ever since Herbert George Wells opened his classic novel The War of the Worlds with those words in 1898, mankind has been fascinated by Mars and the prospect of life on the Red Planet.

Perhaps it is because Mars is our nearest neighbour – at its closest, a mere 34 million miles, the space-travel equivalent of a brisk walk in the Dales – and even back in Victorian times was considered an achievable target for humanity to eventually reach. Perhaps it is because it glows redly and sometimes sinisterly in the night sky, suggesting the warlike nature which inspired the Romans to name their combative god after it.

Whatever, in the century-and-a-bit since HG Wells visited Martian death-rays on England (their invasion beginning in Woking, of all places) writers and film-makers have repeatedly made Mars the point from which alien invaders are most likely to originate.

Now, of course, we know that no life exists on Mars – at least, not life as we know it, to coin a phrase. But while mankind has not made the giant leap to actually setting foot on the Red Planet, we have managed to put several robotic probes up there, the latest being NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover, which made Marsfall to jubilant scenes at Mission Control this week.

It’s two year mission? To look for signs of life that might once have inhabited the planet. Not the tripod-steering horror-merchants of Wells’s imagination, but microscopic life that might have once existed in the water that we now know could have existed once on Mars, and supported life after a sort.

Had Sir Fred Hoyle not died 11 years ago this month, he would doubtless be keenly watching the images and reports beamed directly to Earth by Mars Curiosity.

Sir Fred was one of the country’s most eminent physicists and astronomers and was born and raised in Gilstead , Bingley – part of the Bingley bypass is named after him.

His major contributions to scientific knowledge are really twofold: he will be remembered by many for his refutation of the idea of the “Big Bang” – a singular, explosive moment which created the entire universe – in favour of his own “Steady State” theory, which posited that the universe was constantly and steadily creating new matter and expanding infinitely.

The scientific community never really took hold of Hoyle’s 1958 theory and the Big Bang Theory – with a finite universe that will one day die – remains dominant. So he was no stranger to controversy among his scientist peers when he dropped another bombshell 15 years ago, one perhaps more in keeping with his secondary career as a science fiction writer, when he co-authored in 1997 a book entitled “Life on Mars?”

Hoyle had been publishing his theories about the origins of life since 1982, but it was this book, co-written with the academic Chandra Wickramasinghe, that brought his ideas to public attention – thanks to the attention-grabbing Mars title – and the ridicule of some of his peers.

Not content with trying to overturn established ideas about the origins of the universe, Hoyle decided to tackle one of the most sacred scientific cows ever – the origins of man.

Charles Darwin, said Hoyle, was wrong. Man did not evolve on earth.Man came from outer space.

The idea of “panspermia” is that planets such as Earth – and, argued Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, Mars – were “seeded” by comets and meteorites carrying bacteria from the distant reaches of space. And if life could and did develop on Earth, why not Mars? Why not other places?

We are not, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe thought, alone.

Fred Hoyle was born in June 1915 in Gilstead, the son of Ben and Mabel Hoyle. His father worked in the wool trade in Bradford and his mother was highly musical – she worked in the wool industry herself to raise enough money to study music at the Royal College of Music in London, winning a scholarship in singing and piano, but after two years was forced to return home for lack of funds.

To make ends meet while Ben was fighting in France in the First World War, she played piano to accompany silent movies in local cinemas.

Fred went to school in Eldwick , walking the six-mile round trip every day. Perhaps it was on these walks that the young Hoyle developed his fascination for what lay beyond our world, and the origins of mankind.

He was evidently a thoughtful child and was the only pupil in his school to gain the 11-plus exam, which allowed him to attend Bingley Grammar School. But he was not necessarily academic, writing: “Between the ages of five and nine, I was almost perpetually at war with the educational system.”

Despite his ability, Fred played truant frequently to teach himself what interested him most. He decided he wanted to be a chemist and his parents allowed him to carry out experiments of his own devising in the kitchen.

But playing out in the clear, bright winter evenings in Gilstead Hoyle, according to the website devoted to his work at fredhoyle.org.uk, “became captivated by the stars he saw in the night sky. He was so fascinated that he determined to find out about them one day.”

From Bingley Grammar School he went on to Cambridge, and his scientific career was assured.

According to information put together by Kathryn McKee for the Hoyle Collection, an archive of material held at St John’s College, Cambridge: “At Bingley Grammar he excelled, skipping his fourth year, and showing such promise that the headmaster, Alan Smailes, encouraged him to sit the entrance examination at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

“Hoyle was unsuccessful on his first attempt, but having passed his higher certificate in 1933 and having won a grant from the local education authority, he eventually gained a place at Emmanuel College, Cambridge to read Natural Sciences.”

By the time of his death aged 86 in August 2001, Professor Sir Fred Hoyle was considered one of the most distinguished scientists in the country. His ideas were controversial, but he stuck to his guns.

His colleague, Prof Wickramasinghe, is currently director of astrobiology at Buckingham University and has been continuing to further the ideas he and Hoyle developed. Just this week he wrote a piece for The Nation, a newspaper in his native Sri Lanka, in which he said: “The landing of NASA’s Curiosity rover on August 6, 2012, could herald a new era of searching for life on Mars, marking a step further towards unraveling our own cosmic ancestry.

“Microorganisms exist almost everywhere on the Earth. They exist in the harshest of environments – in deep sea thermal vents, in sulphurous hot springs, the dead sea, the dry valleys of the Antarctic, the high atmosphere, radioactive dumps – to name but a few. All the evidence now points to life being a cosmic phenomenon, its site of origin transcending the scale of any “primordial soup” on Earth, the scale of the solar system, and perhaps even of the galaxy itself.”

More than a decade after Fred Hoyle’s death, perhaps we might be about to find the answer to one of our most eminent Bradfordians' burning question: Is there life on Mars?