explore
It’s hard for this science fiction reader and science fan to say exactly which has been more exciting: the spate of stirring Mars novels published over the last fifteen years or the astonishing achievements in Mars exploration that continue even as you read this. What is interesting is that some of the work I associate with the renaissance of Mars fiction—say, for example, Kim Stanley Robinson’s <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Stanley_Robinson> masterful Mars trilogy—predate the avalanche of data that has most recently poured down on us from the sky. I’m thinking that when the Mars geeks out there digest the research streaming in from all the robots we have swarming the Red Planet, I’ll have to stretch my Mars bookshelf again.
Over the years, followers of the Mars explorations have had their ups and downs. We remember how the Mariner <http://sse.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?Sort=Alpha&Letter=M&Alias=Mariner%2004> mission of 1964 crushed Percival Lowell’s dream <http://www.wanderer.org/references/lowell/Mars> of a fading Martian civilization huddled around its grand canals. But since we who read this magazine believe in the scientific method, we know that we must abandon a theory when it is discredited, even when it is so very pleasing. There was no denying the thrill of the Viking <http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/viking> mission, which, beginning in 1976, showed us a Mars we could almost reach out and touch. I still own a book of 3D panoramic photographs from Viking, and I still have those awkward cardboard glasses. Then came a long season of neglect and frustration. In 1988, the two Russian Phobos <http://www.iki.rssi.ru/IPL/phobos.html> missions failed and in 1992 we lost contact with NASA’s Observer <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Observer> probe three days before orbital insertion. In fact, nearly two-thirds of the spacecraft humans have dispatched to Mars have failed in some way, many before ever reaching their destination. This is not all that surprising considering the challenges involved in flinging robots some seventy million kilometers through space. The instructions that we send out take between ten and twenty minutes to get to them, depending on the positions of Mars and Earth. Talking to Mars means putting up with some excruciatingly long and drawn-out conversations.
lots of bots
As I write this, there is a veritable crowd of probes poking and prodding our sister planet: Five different missions are beaming data back to Earth.
Perhaps the most celebrated is the Mars Exploration Rover Mission <http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html> which is now in its fourth year on Mars. It has been one of our most spectacular successes in space. You will recall that when the twin Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, landed on Mars in January 2004 NASA’s scientists and engineers were hoping their mission would last at least ninety sols, or Martian days. The Martian day <http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/mars24> is 24.66 hours long. The rovers have now exceeded what NASA engineers jokingly refer to as their “warranty” by more than twelve times. Spirit has driven seven kilometers across the Martian surface and Opportunity has logged ten kilometers. Together they have taken more than one hundred and seventy thousand photographs.
Mars Global Surveyor <http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs> is the oldest of the robots studying Mars, arriving in 1997. It circles the planet in a polar orbit every two hours, four hundred kilometers above the surface. Its longevity has led to the discovery of strong evidence that water still flows from time to time on Mars. Comparison of photographs of a gully taken in 2001, and again in 2005, show a new deposit of materials that appears to have been carried downslope by a transient flood.
Mars Odyssey,<http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/index.html> was designed to map the chemical and mineral composition of the Martian surface. It has led to the discovery of vast amounts of water ice just beneath the surface at the polar caps. Odyssey has also mapped the radiation environment on Mars and has served as a relay for Spirit and Opportunity, sending 85 percent of the data from the rovers to Earth.
Mars Express <http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/index.html> is the European Space Agency’s Mars probe. In addition to providing high-resolution imaging and mineralogical mapping of the surface, it is also investigating the atmosphere of Mars and is making the first radar sounding measurements of the ionosphere and subsurface structure of the planet. As planned, the Mars Express mission was also to have included a lander called the Beagle 2. Alas, the Beagle never called home after landing on Mars and was declared lost. Images taken by Mars Global Surveyor suggest that the lander came down hard in a crater on Isidis Planitia.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter <http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/main/index.html> or try <http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/mro> is the newcomer on the Mars block, arriving in March of 2006. Its task is to uncover the history of water on Mars, using an array of instruments: a high-resolution camera, imaging spectrometer, context camera, ground-penetrating radar, atmospheric sounder, global color camera, radio and accelerometers.
We pause here for the briefest of rants. Of course, the NASA websites offer some of the best information about Mars and, indeed, about all of space. We could hardly do without them. And most of the individual sites are well designed. The problem, however, is that sometimes the NASA sites in the aggregate don’t play all that well together. I may be reading too much into this, but from this vantage, it looks like there is some serious turf warfare going on. How come competing “official” sites for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have similar but different content? Come on, Mars heads! The internet is complicated enough!
results
The most important questions about Mars have always been, can it sustain life? And did it ever? Although the data coming to us from our robots on the red planet has expanded our understanding of conditions there, the answer is still: we don’t know. It seems almost certain that if there is life on Mars now, it can’t exist on the surface. A study by L.R. Dartnell, L. Desorgher, J.M. Ward, and A.J. Coates published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters <http://www.agu.org/journals/scripts/highlight.php?pid=2006GL027494> in January 2007 maintains that any living organism within the top few meters of the Martian surface would be killed by lethal doses of cosmic radiation. Life is far too fragile to survive without an atmosphere or a global magnetic field to protect it from cosmic radiation. If life exists, we’ll have to dig for it. For example, it’s possible that there could be life in the frozen sea recently discovered on Elysium Plantia, as long as it is about seven and a half meters below the icy surface. Or else it might be tucked into some of the younger craters or in new gullies recently discovered by the Mars Global Surveyor. Unfortunately, none of the current or planned missions have the ability to root out life on Mars. In 2013 the European Space Agency is planning to launch ExoMars <http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Aurora/SEM1NVZKQAD_0.html>, a rover with the capability of drilling about two meters deep for samples. But that is still in the cosmic radiation kill zone. According to Dartnel and his associates, it would need to drill three meters to have any chance of finding life.
Aaargh!
One place you can begin to sift through the latest research on Mars is The Mars Journal <http://marsjournal.org>, a new, peer-reviewed online open access scholarly journal funded by NASA. The papers are in three general categories: Mars science, Mars technology, and Mars policy.
Not quite as esoteric as The Mars Journal, Google Mars <http://www.google.com/mars> is simply one of the most entertaining Mars sites on the web. While not quite as jaw-droppingly amazing as the Google Earth <http://earth.google.com> client, it is nevertheless a must-click site for homesick Martians. Created in collaboration with researchers at Arizona State University <http://themis.asu.edu/projects> working on the Mars Odyssey mission, it is as close as any of us are likely to get to touring Mars. By linking to features like mountains and craters and plains and canyons, the site lets you make a quick stop at all those exotic places you’ve read about in your favorite science fiction stories about Mars. More important, it gives you the chance to survey their relationship to Martian geography. How long does it take to drive from the eastern slope of Olympus Mons to the northern rim of the Candor Chasma? Depends on your vehicle, but definitely use the bathroom before you start out.
If you believe, as many Mars aficionados do, that it is the destiny of humankind to colonize Mars, then you owe to yourself to stop by the site of The Mars Society <marssociety.org/portal> and maybe pony up the fifty dollars they want for membership. Your money will be put to good use reaching out to instill the public with a vision of pioneering Mars and lobbying governments to fund exploration and conducting private Mars exploration. The tenth annual International Mars Society Convention will be held 30 Aug–2 Sep at the University of California, Los Angeles.
exit
While I grew up on the Mars of Bradbury and Burroughs, the data from Mariner probe and the Viking lander made their red planets seem as quaint as Oz. The fact is, I lost interest in Mars during the long drought in Mars exploration in the eighties. It wasn’t until my friend Kim Stanley Robinson set off on an almost decade-long journey to the Mars of his mind that my own interest in the sister planet was rekindled. Stan’s books were acclaimed by readers and writers alike: Red Mars won the Nebula, while Green Mars and Blue Mars each won Hugos. The original Mars novella was the cover story of the September 1985 Asimov’s. But you know all this. You would have had to have been living on . . . well, Mars to have missed all the hoopla over these great books. There are a couple of interesting fan sites for Stan and his Mars trilogy. The Red, Green & Blue MarsSite <http://www.xs4all.nl/~fwb/rgbmars.html> features a map of Mars as terraformed in the year 2219, a few years after the end of the trilogy. The Kim Stanley Robinson Encyclopedia <http://ksrwiki.philosophicalzombie.net/wiki/The_Kim_Stanley_Robinson_Encyclopedia> is a wiki-based encyclopedia based on Stan’s works. Stop by and put your two cents worth in!
But it would be a disservice to the genre to imagine that Stan’s trilogy is the final word in Mars fiction. Check out Frederick Pohl’s Man Plus, Geoffrey A. Landis’s Mars Crossing, Gregory Benford’s The Martian Race, Greg Bear’s Moving Mars, Alexander Jablokov’s River of Dust or Paul J. McAuley’s Red Dust. Want more Mars? While it has not been updated for a while, Steampunk, the New Speculative Fiction Clearing House <steampunk.com> has decent Mars Bibliography <http://www.steampunk.com/sfch/bibliographies/mars.html>.
Or better yet, write your own. There’s always room on my shelf for another Mars book!
