Martian Mystery: He Said, S/He Said...

The finale of the Great Mars Dust-Up was on stage today at the AGU conference in San Francisco. A panel of MSL scientists were first up (AGU knew better than to keep the TV networks waiting; their collective short-term attention spans were rapidly exceeded. The specialty press- us- hung in there). First came Paul Mahaffy, in charge of the SAM instrument (which is capable of detecting organics):

"SAM has no definitive detection to report of organic compounds,"

Next was John Grotzinger, the mission scientist for JPL/Caltech:

"Even though [Mahaffy's] instrument detected organic compounds, first of all we have to determine whether they're indigenous to Mars,"

So Mahaffy says 'DIdn't find anything' the Grotzinger says 'Even though he found it, we gotta make sure it's indigenous to Mars...'

Huh?

I know it's in the semantics, the details, the parsing of the words... and they both meant the same thing, ie they found some small indication but it is not validated yet- hence the "definitive" jargon. And Grotzinger was certainly clear about his newfound need to be, um, careful when speaking to the press
(we will see if he ever does so again, not that it was really his fault; Joe Palca and the rest of them/us did a bit of overtime with this one).

But...

We are dealing with the beginnings of what could end up being life, or pre-life, or at least simple organics on Mars. Add this to the recent (ca 2008) reinterpretation of the Viking experiments by Chris McKay up at Ames, which built a pretty good case for at least the strong possibility that Viking may have found something organic and living after all (and in 1976!), and it's a red-hot chili-pepper of an issue.

And of course, all this happened almost two weeks after the initial announcement, which created a sensation. The NASA/JPL PR apparatus was slow to respond, then did so haltingly (though Guy Webster and Veronica MacGregor at JPL did their best to address it quickly). The real problem was that "IT" was not really addressed at all. A simple announcement paralleling what was said today could have been made in two sentences, putting out the fire. But of course, it must go from MSL science team--> to JPL PR unit--> NASA HQ (uh-oh) PR --> policy makers --> (possibly) administrator level --> back to JPL. No wonder it took till last Friday to get the beginning of something definitive.

The PR machine at our favorite space agency could use a good oiling, methinks. And stop being gun-shy because of the (now ancient history) Mars meteor debacle! That's was 1996! Time to move on.

The upshot: the public is crazy about Mars right now. It's a golden opportunity to capitalize on this and finally get the funding Mars/JPL deserve. Please NASA, don't squander it.

See the article cited at Space.com- http://www.space.com/18741-mars-rover-curiosity-discovery.html

Mars, Angry Dude

Mars, as seen by people of pre-scientific times, is traditionally represented as the god of war: a thing of fury, blood and death. Entertaining, but not the fellow you want at your Saturday afternoon BBQ. So I thought I'd take a moment here to detail some slightly alternative representations of Mars through the ages.

Ancient East Indian myths surrounding Mars, or Mangal/Angaraka as they referred to him (Mars seemed to be rewritten often by ancient cultures) referred to the planet/god as "auspicious, lke burning coal and the fair one." While warlike, Mars was also organized, energetic, and got things done. He would have made as good a modern office manager in the Bangalore tech-corridor as a godly general in combat. He was also, however, argumentative and temperamental, so perhaps not. In either case, he was said to provide great "administrative capability." Hmmm.

The Mesopotamians equated Mars with the god Nergal, representative of the underworld and all that this implies. While not as overtly warlike, to invoke Nergal did not portend a good day. That said, the Babylonians split the association with Nergal between Mars and the sun. In any case, he was in effect the governor of the dead population living below ground, and as such, did not have so much time for creating mayhem above.

In Egypt, Mars was associated with Horus among others. Saturn and Jupiter were also associated with Horus. When cavorting with Mars, the god became Horus the Red or Har Deshur. His head was that of a bird (either a noble falcon or somewhat comedic flamingo, depending on the source you believe), often seen in hieroglyphs. In another incarnation, Mars was the "good warrior," protecting the common man as the god Anhur (who began life as a war god- things tend to go full cycle in these tales).

While the Romans rocked-out to Mars as they sacked and pillage most of Europe, the Greeks, from whom they took most astrological inspiration, were not so fond of the Red Planet. While anointing him as a god, they often viewed him with some contempt, even revulsion. To them, Mars was more randomly destructive and destabilizing, as opposed to the later Romans who found his martial ferocity more appealing to their own bloody and disturbing sense of progress-through-conquest. The Greek Zeus even referred to Ares (Mars) as the god most hateful and repellent to him. He was regarded as hot-headed, impulsive and a liar, as opposed to Athena, his sister, who was a general's general. Feminist's unite!

Overall, it sucked to be Mars in Greece.

As mentioned, the Romans were more welcoming of Mars' destructive tendencies, emulating them across much of a continent. Alternative representations, however, see Mars as a god of agriculture (something Ares and others would have doubtless be revolted by!).

Later periods became more clinical, if not more objective.

The following is taken from a slim volume about Mars by the esteemed Willy Ley (1906-1969, part of the von Braun faction from Germany), which he wrote in 1966. The hardback version cost... 60 cents. Those were the days.

By the late middle ages (1500's), for instance, observers of the Red Planet had amassed a virtual catalog of Martian mischief. "Mars rules catastrophe and war, it is master of the daylight hours of darkness of Tuesday and the hours of darkness on Friday, its element is fire, its metal is iron, its gems jasper and hematite, and it rules the color red. Its qualities are warm and dry, it rules the color red, the liver, the blood vessels, the kidneys and gallbladder as well as the left ear. Being of choleric temper, it especially rules males between the ages of 42 and 57." Uh-oh...

What is of interest to this middle aged writer of science histories (me) is that a) the unnamed "Middle Ages" author (as opposed to this middle-aged author) got a few things right within the ragged fantasy he spun. For instance, hematite has been found on Mars by the Mars Exploration Rover in copious quantities, part of the wave of proof that water once existed there in great volumes. How the heck did this now-turned-to-dust fellow know that? Coincidence, I am sure. The reference to iron is a bit more straightforward, as the ruddy aspect of Mars in the night sky certainly looks like a spot of rust. But again, iron oxide was what has been found in those distant sands. However, warm and dry it is not, and my gallbladder can malfunction quite well without the intervention of Mars, or Venus, or Peewee Herman for that matter, thank you very much.

Moving on.Later in the same tome (in German, as translated from Latin), the anonymous scribe tried his hand at planetary poetry:

"Third planet am I, named Mars,
Fiercest and angriest of all the stars,
By Nature I am hot and dry,
Choleric my temper, though people sigh,
Of the twelve signs, not all are friendly
But Ares and Scorpio attend me,
While in their realms my fearful rays
Cause murders, death and fear all days.
My highest seat is Capricorn,
In Cancer of my might I am shorn.
Through all twelve Signs I abound
And in two years sweep clear around."

Ley, of course, recreated the rhyming in English from his native German. While lampooning the original writer, he was not such a poet himself it would seem. Overall, the "poem" does not seem to contain much of interest, other than charting Mars' relationships with other members of the zodiac. Nonetheless, his evil, warlike reputation is confirmed once again. This is the more traditional representation of the Red Guy.

After this, by the time Galileo and others began turning telescopes to the sky, Mars became more of a "what" than a "who." The Age of Reason took away a bit of the fun, and drama, of man's relationship with Mars. That is, until people like Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell began to intuit the idea of advanced life forms and massive canal-based engineering projects from swimming telescopic images.

But that's another story!

Brag Board

OK, this is not specifically a Mars post... but I just had to crow. I got a review (short though it may be) in NATURE, the prestigious UK journal. Color me happy!

Destination Mars: New Explorations of the Red Planet
Rod Pyle Prometheus 280 pp. $19 (2012)
The seductive fascination of the red planet never palls, and science writer and documentary maker Rod Pyle stokes our hunger. For the Mars obsessed, the real thrills will be in his detailed descriptions of upcoming missions, the pseudo-Martian research conducted in Earth’s most hostile environments, and interviews with explorers such as Steven Squyres, principal investigator of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover. Pyle’s look at the planet and our perceptions and probings of it also covers Mars’s geography, geology and hydrology, and its cultural history on Earth.

End of an Empire

I remember it well... the day I realized that the Martian empire of Percival Lowell, Edgar Rice Burroughs and so many others vanished into the red sands of Mars. It was late July of 1965, I was a tender nine-years of age, and had spent countless hours devouring any and all books about Mars in our meager elementary school library. The jury was still out... was there life? Were there beings there? Was the "Wave of Darkening" really plant life waxing and waning with the seasons? Did the canals of late 19th Century fame exist?

Then from CalTech and JPL the results were made public. Mariner 4 had flown past the planet, snapping 22 images and revealing the truth. Mars was an arid desert: dry, desolate and cold beyond imagining. Via incredibly ingenious techniques, most unappreciated by this allegedly precocious lad, the scientists had seen Mars for what it really was... a dead world. It would be years before the dynamics of wind and water there would be observed; many more before they would be understood. The important thing was this: science had robbed me of a beloved (and adolescent) vision of our neighboring planet.

But there were holdouts. The popular press still circulated ideas that there might be life- even beings- holed up underground and beyond observation! Hope, though sputtering like a flame in a stiff breeze, remained.

But before long, other probes flew into the Great Darkness and journeyed past, then orbited, Mars; finally landing there in 1976. While the resulting data was intensely exciting to scientists and mature readers, to a young man, the news just got worse. Mars was dead.

Fortunately, this was the golden era of Apollo. Soon the adventures of a few select men who traveled to, then trod upon the lunar surface supplanted the news from the Red Planet. The moon was deader than Mars would ever be, but America had done it, and the laurels of accomplishment could never be taken form us. Humanity had visited another world. And surely, Mars would not be far behind.

As I grew into adolescence, I read the plans of North American Rockwell and others for follow-on missions to my favorite planet with breathless glee. Surely the amazing hardware of the Apollo program would be utilized for the Next Logical Step, to visit the next logical destination. No sane government would throw away such grand accomplishments. Mars was in our future.

Well, it still is. We all know what happened after Apollo wound down with the orbital link-up between an Apollo Command Module and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. That was it. The remaining boosters rusted outside NASA's space-age facilities in Florida, Houston and Huntsville. The Lunar Modules and other hardware remaining from the cancelled flights of Apollos 18, 19 and 20 were relegated to various museums.

So the question remains: who will go, and when. With China on an aggressive course toward a space station of their own, India and Japan angling for crewed spaceflight and other nations dreaming of joining the game, it is an open query.

But for now Mars remains the domain of robots, primarily of US origins, orbiting along silent paths above its arid plains and roving its dusty surface. We may yet find some form of life there; frozen water has been found in copious quantities and where there is water, life may well follow. It will not likely be bipedal or humanoid; if extant, it will likely be mere lowly bacteria. But if it is there, we wil find it, eventually. And if we find it, we will visit in person. Someday.

The dream lives on.

The End of Mars?

It looks as if the nemesis of so many Mars-bound probes, JPL's Great Galactic Ghoul (the mythical entity that is suspected of eating the failed Mars missions) may have the last laugh, courtesy of the White House. In February, the administration zeroed-out most Mars exploration funding.

So under this scenario, the Mars Science Lab would continue (little choice, as it launched some time ago), and MAVEN, an upcoming orbiter, would continue development. But all future endeavors, including NASA's participation in the European Space Agency's planned missions for 2016/2018. Besides a "failure of imagination" (to borrow words from the pain of Apollo 1), this represents a withdrawal from America's lead in space exploration, and especially our almost sole domination of Mars exploration. It is also a betrayal of the ESA and our planned mission cooperation.

At this point, NASA and JPL have a combined suite of spacecraft orbiting Mars which offer unprecedented cross-support of surface missions. Should MSL land and deploy successfully, it will enjoy an incredible network communication and mission support. This is a unique set of circumstances which are available nowhere other than Earth, and the clock is ticking: as the years pass, equipment ages, maneuvering fuel depletes and capabilities diminish. There is quite literally no time like the present to move forward.

Fortunately, there is pushback. In the last few weeks voices have been raised in Congress resisting the proposed cuts, which would amount to a fifth of planetary space exploration funding and associated programs. The new budget and its distribution will not be a slam-dunk. Other voices within governmental space-science circles have called the President's approach a "Going out of business scenario" for outer planets exploration, not to mention the inner solar system.

It is worth remembering that this comes after the cancellation of the Constellation moon/orbital program which, while possibly flawed in its planning, was arguably the only real governmental vision forward for human spaceflight at this time. Given the state of the Russian space program and launchers, some fear that a single launch failure could shut-down the space station, possibly permanently.

What will ultimately transpire remains to be seen. What is certain is that this is the time when our voices are critical. We all have other individual priorities, especially in a "down economy." It can be hard to maintain enthusiasm for planetary exploration when we are trying to keep our collective heads above water. But as I point out in "Destination Mars" again and again, few in modern space exploration have come close to the success that JPL has enjoyed over the decades. Their programs have a high rate of return, almost always many times the lab's expectations. And, even more intensely than NASA, the Lab has learned to do so much more with less. In fact, JPL and its associates receive an annual budget equivalent to about ten days of US Afghanistan war funding. From operating Mars Phoenix out of a university outbuilding to repurposing software and hardware from one mission to another, JPL has truly made lemonade out of lemons, to borrow a hackneyed phrase.

Please take a moment and lend your voice at this critical time. I don't like to ladle guilt onto readers (well, not much anyway)... but will make this exception: you can go here to contact your elected officials and express your support for the continued exploration of space. At a time when the United States finds itself challenged for excellence on every front, this is the one thing (besides building weapons and commercial software) that we continue to do better than anyone else. Let's continue.