Mars and me

My on-again, off-again relationship with the red planet

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

03/03/02

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/mars.htm

One of my earliest memories comes from when I was five, going on six. My dad took me out into a chill November night, and we scanned the southern skies looking for the new "artificial moon" that the Russians called "sputnik." When it appeared, right on schedule as my dad noted with an approving nod, I was a little disappointed. It was just a little white dot, like all the other stars, except that it was moving. What I expected to see was a tiny version of the moon, dangling down from a big boom that extended back to the north pole, which rotated once every ninety minutes, twirling the little moon on its trip around the earth.

People had been talking about sputnik for a couple of weeks, and I had time to work all this out, you see. Looking back on it, I’m actually a little impressed. For a five year old, it represented some pretty good abstract thought and engineering acumen. I remember asking if we could go to the moon for Christmas, and being disappointed when dad told me that there weren’t any such tours available, that nobody had been to the moon.

The launching of sputnik probably led to my interest in science, and science fiction. By age eight, I was reading Tom Swift stories with uncritical bliss, and by ten, I had discovered Heinlein and Clarke.

I was back in Canada when Yuri Gagarin made his first orbital flight, That was interesting, but it came at a time when nobody ever saw any pictures out of the Soviet Union except what the government allowed, and so it was weeks after the flight before we even got to see the grainy motion pictures in which the only movement was Gagarin’s eyes as he looked around the inside of his tin can. So the first man in space didn’t have much impact.

But a few months later, America got into space, and it was all broadcast live, on television. I would get up at insanely early hours and sit in the dark living room and watch the people in the mission control area talk into microphones and walk around and smoke cigarettes while Walter Cronkite assured me that with four hours and twenty-seven minutes left, the countdown was experiencing a hold, but was expected to resume within a half hour. It was all very exciting.

We learned about the solar system in school. Nine planets, 31 moons, and nobody knew how big Pluto actually was, or if Mercury rotated. The rings around Saturn might be gas, or they might be solid. Venus was perpetually overcast, and it was believed that the surface experienced a hot, wet climate, with perpetual steamy rains.

Mars had water, of course. We could see the icecaps growing and getting smaller as Mars orbited the sun, moving from one season to another, and some astronomers thought they could see patches of something else, vegetation, maybe. We knew the canals were pure hokum, but the icecaps and the vegetation showed that there might be life on Mars, even if it wasn’t Barsoom. Certainly humans could live there. We kids made plans to move to Mars after graduating from college, and work on exploring the Martian artifacts from long-dead civilizations. Sure, Venus would probably be easier, what with a thicker atmosphere and warmer temperatures, but Mars was what fired our imaginations. Perhaps, deep down, we never really believed that Venus was an extraterrestrial New Delhi.

Then came the flight of Mariner 4, and our dreams were dashed. The 22 pictures sent back by the space craft in 1965 (encoded into dots and dashes, sent at the amazing rate of eight such units per second) showed Mars to be a vast desert, drier and colder than any place on earth, even Antarctica. There were no signs of life.

There were no signs of water.

Mars was a dead, bleak place. Barsoom never existed, and Podkayne would have to grow up in some more hospitable world outside of our solar system.

Mars got put on the back shelf in our imaginations. It seemed the logical place to go after we set up a colony on the moon, but like the moon, it would be only a place for scientific observation and there would be no settlements. Science fiction wrote off the solar system as a place where humans could live unprotected, and so did we. Dreamers faced the stars while pragmatists faced the world, and space exploration became limited to bottle washers 500 miles up and occasional unmanned probes to the planets.

Everyone was heaving a sigh of relief that all the bicentennial crap was over with and starting with distaste at the ridiculous bicentennial dollars, which showed an eagle flapping wildly in the vacuum of the moon on one side while Charlie Brown or someone who looked a lot like him resided on the other side. At that point, Mars suddenly grew a landscape, captured by the Viking landers.

It was all salmons and pale oranges and dark brown rocks on grey sand, and looked a bit like the Mojave. It was very alien and very beautiful. It had a pale pink sky and thin winds that whispered to the Viking, and we all fell in love with the place all over again. It LOOKED like an alien world.

Mars and Earth moved out of their positions for an optimum flight between the two, and we waited for the late 90s, when flights to Mars could be done in the least amount of time.

A rock believed to be from Mars was found in Antarctica that had what might have been the outline of a very primitive nematode, or worm. It caused a considerable stir, with everyone, up to and including President Clinton expressing excitement, but since nobody was really quite sure what they had, the furor died down fairly quickly.

The Global Surveyor arrived at Mars in 1997, and it rapidly became apparent from the detailed areographic maps of the Martian surface that if Mars didn’t have water now, it most certainly did at some time in the past. Many of the features showed the unmistakable signs of water erosion and runoff. By 1999, we knew the Martian surface better than we did earth’s, and the top question on every Mars enthusiast’s mind was "Where did the water go?" Various theories were formulated, including asteroid strikes that stripped away the atmosphere, allowing the water to sublimate away. Wits suggested that perhaps Ronald Reagan had been president on Mars in a previous incarnation, and his environmental policies had ruined the place.

Pathfinder bounced to a halt on the Martian surface, the most startling basketball Mars had ever seen, and spit out Sojourner, which spent several weeks rolling around the immediate surface while cameras aboard Pathfinder watched. Scientists ignored overheated rhetoric from people who saw "ET" too many times about that brave, lonely little toy exploring the Martian surface, and increased their conviction that Mars had been different, with lots of water, and not all that long ago.

Two probes meant to answer that question were sent. The Climate Orbiter pancaked into Mars at some 3,000 miles an hour when someone at JPL forgot to convert furloughs per fortnight into metric units, and the Polar Lander simply vanished, became to NASA what George W. Bush was to the Alabama Air National Guard.

Our best and last hope for this particular orbital conjunction was the Odyssey, which was going to scan for hydrogen in the soil, a reliable method used by earth satellites to find buried water in earth’s deserts.

To the relief of everyone at JPL, Odyssey found Mars without doing an imitation of Sonny Bono, and if the orbit was a little wonky, that wasn’t something that couldn’t be fixed.

Six months later, it was ready to start measuring and monitoring. Scientists expected it to take a couple of years to have enough data to create a meaningful report.

It took six hours, instead.

The Odyssey immediately found a vast area of ice, roughly the size of the Great Lakes, at the Martian south pole. The Odyssey measures to about three feet below the surface, and the results were so unequivocal that the scientists called a press conference, and triumphantly announced that this vast field of frozen water had been found.

Its shape even looked a bit like Antarctica.

It’s still far drier and colder than Antarctica has ever been, and remains a very inhospitable place.

But with water for fuel and living needs, the idea of a base on Mars has been resurrected.

In the mid 1960s, it was assumed that either Russia or America would reach Mars first and set up a lab. Both countries have been eclipsed by events, with Russia a failed libertarian scheme and America a frightened and paranoid corporate fascism with religion used to quell the masses. So perhaps it will be China, or Japan, or the EU. But someone will go. Someone will hear the thin winds of Mars, and watch Phobos and Deimos skitter by overhead, cosmic cockroaches, and perhaps even find a fossil, or even an artifact.

And kids, once again, will dream of Mars.

I hope I get to see that.