This New Ocean, page 96
Happy Birthday from Mars
The Fourth of July 1997. It is the United States of America’s two hundred and twenty-first birthday, and NASA has a present: Mars. For the first time in twenty-one years, a visitor from Earth is returning to the Red Planet. Pathfinder is closing at 16,600 miles an hour, and the dreamers in Pasadena are winding up for another celebration.
“This Independence Day Earth Invades Mars!” small posters taped around the Caltech campus shout in a clever play on the names of two popular films in which Martians invade Earth. The Planetary Society is throwing a three-day “Planetfest ’97” at the Pasadena Convention Center. More than two thousand space buffs from around the world have gathered to meet and get autographs from astronauts Sally Ride, Buzz Aldrin, Story Musgrave, and Franklin Chang-Diaz, science fiction writers Greg Bear, Jerry Pournelle, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others, and see a pilot plant for making rocket fuel on Mars, a full-scale mockup of the Mars ascent vehicle, lively lectures, exhibits, “the best computer graphics of the solar system ever seen on Earth,” and more. All of it will be wrapped around the heart of the happening: a direct, live, continuous hookup through JPL’s monitors to Pathfinder’s eyes, 119 million miles away.
Four miles away, on the other side of Pasadena, the spacecraft’s masters are intently following its long, graceful arc into the thin Martian atmosphere. They are mostly young and new to exploration. Gone are Homer Joe Stewart, Jack James, Bud Schurmeier, Bill Pickering, Brad Smith, Toby Owen, and Bill McLaughlin. They have been replaced by a new generation of mission specialists, most of them in their thirties: Tony Spear, the project manager; Brian Muirhead, a senior citizen of forty-five who is the flight system manager and Spear’s deputy; Matthew Golombek, the chief project scientist; Rob Manning, the chief engineer; and others. Many of the three hundred or so people who designed, tested, and who are now guiding Pathfinder to its distant target were just entering kindergarten or were in grade school when the Viking twins set off to Mars. They are so young in July 1997 that one newspaper cartoonist draws three angry kids saying to a guard barring their way into the mission control room: “What school tour group?! We’re the mission directors!!”
Pathfinder is new, too, and represents the next generation of Earth huggers and explorers. It consists of a three-foot-high spacecraft that weighs a little under a ton and has three solar panels folded over its miniaturized bus like tulip petals that are supposed to open once it is on Mars. Attached to one of the panels is a twenty-three-pound rover named Sojourner whose flat top is itself a solar panel. Sojourner, a six-wheeled surface crawler the size of a microwave oven, carries a pair of its own tiny cameras, solar cells to collect energy from the Sun to run itself and to measure dust accumulation, and an alpha proton X-ray spectrometer. When Sojourner bumps into rocks and mounds of soil, the theory goes, its spectrometer will determine their chemical composition. But while this mission has science objectives, those who run it often take pains to point out, they are very limited. They insist that it is primarily a technology demonstrator, not a science collector.
Yet of all the places Pathfinder could have been told to land—seventy-eight of them are listed in detail in the NASA manual with the marvelously optimistic title Mars Landing Site Catalog—the spot chosen was Ares Vallis, a rocky plain over which a flood of water flowed eons ago. Having been burned by the well-publicized search for life on Viking’s otherwise sumptuous mission, neither headquarters nor JPL wants to play that card again, at least so blatantly. But the reporters in von Karman (most of whom are the new counterparts of the young mission team) know about the water-life connection, so the life angle is just under the surface (politically, if not physically). What many of the newcomers in the press section do not notice, nor could put in context even if they did, is the fact that Pathfinder’s white skin carries an American flag and JPL’s orange logo, not the red, white, and blue NASA “meatball.” And Sojourner also wears a small “license plate” that goes unseen in the diagrams of it that appear in newspapers and magazines. It, too, says “JPL,” not “NASA.” If Keith Glennan’s ghost is here, and if it notices this small but unmistakable sign of lingering egotism, it is almost certainly shaking its head and sighing in exasperation. The current administrator notices and he is fuming.
Pathfinder’s landing is going to be more difficult than Viking’s. Viking dropped out of Martian orbit. Pathfinder, on the other hand, has taken a direct route—a straight shot—from Florida to Ares Vallis, slamming into the thin Martian atmosphere at a 14.2-degree angle. Seventy seconds after it enters the atmosphere, and while it is pulling 20 gs at an altitude of about six miles and its heat shield is braking its speed, its parachute is supposed to pop open. Pathfinder should then be floating almost straight down. When the radar altimeter tells the spacecraft’s computer than it is a mile above Mars, air bags inflate until they look like giant globs of molecules, retro-rockets fire, and the bridle that is connected to the parachute and the back shell that holds the rockets is jettisoned at two hundred feet. If everything goes right up to this point, Pathfinder, snuggling inside its protective shield of air bags, is calculated to hit Mars at twenty-two miles an hour, bounce as high as a ten-story building, then bounce again and keep bouncing until it has rolled to a dead stop. Then the air bags should slowly deflate so Pathfinder can open its petals to collect solar energy and check out the terrain with its camera. If the coast is clear, Sojourner will then roll down a short ramp and into history as the first vehicle from Earth to roam over another planet.
“Every time the Russians have tried this, they’ve failed,” a chronicler of the event reminds Skip McNevin of JPL’s Public Affairs Office two days before the scheduled landing.
“We’re not Russians,” McNevin answers resolutely.
And he is right. That is, the mission goes exactly as planned.
A little before 10 A.M. on Independence Day, within three minutes of rolling to a stop, Pathfinder tells JPL that it is safely down. Less than an hour later, Muirhead, sitting in front of mock-ups of Pathfinder and Sojourner and beside Dan Goldin and Ed Stone, tells the reporters in von Karman what Pathfinder has told him. The news draws applause from the young reporters. While they are clapping and cheering, the older hands take notes. The older hands never applaud anything while they are working. Muirhead thanks the news media for their support. There is more applause. The older hands are still taking notes. “This is a revolution just of the type of revolution that caused our country on the date of our birthday,” Goldin tells the press, adding that “this is going to change the history of the space program.” He congratulates Muirhead and Spear. There is a third round of applause.
A telephone sits on a small table beside each of the three men, who are now basking in the glare of the television lights. A woman from public affairs interrupts a question-and-answer session to tell everyone to stand by.
“The phone is ringing here,” the administrator mumbles.
“We might have a phone call,” says the woman from public affairs. Dan Goldin, squinting in the lights, picks up his phone.
“Hello?” says the administrator, the phone to his ear. A loud metallic shriek and then a short hiss comes out of von Karman’s speakers.
“You guys just stand by?” says the woman from public affairs.
“That mean me, too?” asks the administrator. The young reporters laugh and applaud some more.
“You all stand by for a minute?” says the woman from public affairs. She is getting a little tense. The administrator is getting a little tired of the lights and is still squinting. He is also playing the game, as he has many times before.
“Hang up. He’ll call back,” shouts a reporter. Von Karman breaks into laughter.
Then someone says that the vice president is on the line.
“Hello, Mr. Vice President,” says the administrator.
“Hey, Dan,” says Al Gore. “Congratulations to all of you out there on behalf of President Clinton and all the people of our country.” Wesley T. Huntress, who heads NASA’s space science operations, is in von Karman, too. He tells everyone that Pathfinder’s safe arrival marks the beginning of the second era in the exploration of Mars.
The first pictures, black-and-whites showing Pathfinder and its still-attached rover, with the Mars-scape behind them, start coming in at about 4:30 in the afternoon. They soon turn to color panoramas of a salmon sky and a plain strewn with rocks, most of them rusty and many of them obviously having been tossed around by once-raging water. Late the next night Sojourner, reminding some of its controllers of Neil Armstrong’s slow, immortal descent down Eagle’s ladder almost exactly twenty-eight years earlier, slowly makes its way down the short ramp to start its own historic odyssey.
Three Earth days after Pathfinder has landed and one day after its little prospector has rolled around, studying a rock its controllers name Barnacle Bill, the geologists in Pasadena start to put a picture together. The shapes, colors, and tilt of rocks, long chains of pebbles, surface textures, and wavelike ridges indicate that there was once a tremendous flood of water. It seems to have poured in from the southwest—from the area called Lunae Planum and, even beyond it, from the Grand Canyon–like Valles Marinaris—and formed a sea hundreds of miles across and hundreds of feet deep on what is now bone-dry terrain. “This was huge,” says Michael Malin, one of the geologists, in delighted wonder.71 “But we don’t know where the water went.” Figuring it out, as usual, is the fun of it. Mariner 4’s descendants are relentlessly rolling back the ignorance. They are shining their light into dark corners, turning a once mysterious and fearsome place into the old neighbor.
Exploration was making the neighbor so familiar, in fact, that some inhabitants of Earth were already staking claims there. Two Yemeni men who insisted they owned Mars through an inheritance from ancient ancestors became so angry because Pathfinder had landed there that they filed a lawsuit against NASA for trespassing with Yemen’s prosecutor general. Mohammad al-Bady, the prosecutor general, threatened to have them arrested if they did not withdraw the case. They did. “The two men are abnormal,” al-Bady was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, another of Mariner’s descendants, Mars Global Surveyor, was heading for Mars even as little Sojourner scrutinized more rocks with its spectrometer: an instrument that had evolved from the Russian Phobos mission and was identical to one lying at the bottom of the Pacific in Mars 96. Making it past the Ghoul, Mars Global Surveyor arrived in September, swung into orbit, and got ready to begin high-resolution photomapping of the planet’s surface in March 1998. The purpose of the mission was to get fine details of physical features and mineral composition, more information on where the water was, and data on geological features.
Mars Surveyor 98, a small orbiter-lander, was supposed to follow in the next twenty-six-month window, late in 1998 or early 1999. The lander would be aimed at the south polar region, where the planetary scientists think water ice forms. Meanwhile, the orbiter would be studying Martian weather. The Discovery plan called for Mars 01, an orbiter-lander-rover, to leave during the next window so it could collect samples and send back a detailed picture of the entire basic composition of the Martian surface. Mars 03, another orbiter-lander-rover, was supposed to collect information specifically related to human exploration, study more samples, and set up communication and navigation facilities for later missions. The series’s finale was planned for 2005 and called for two rovers to collect samples and get them on board a return ship that would climb into an orbit around the Red Planet, make a rendezvous with another spacecraft, and transfer the samples to it for the trip back to Earth. Given the size of Mars, the big question was whether they would take the search for life beyond what was found in ALH84001, the Antarctic potato. In 1997, NASA put the probable cost of all the missions at $1.5 billion, or the price of fourteen and a half of the three hundred and thirty-nine $100 million F-22 “Raptor” fighters the Pentagon wanted.
The space agency had become so convinced by 1998 that the search for life out there would ultimately be fruitful that it started an Astrobiology Institute at Ames. It was responsible for encouraging interdisciplinary research on all manner of possible life beyond Earth, as well as studying the effects of living in space on creatures from Earth and how to create stable ecosystems on Mars for human survival there. The plan was to provide access to manned and unmanned space missions and link scientists around the country on the world wide web in a “virtual institute,” as NASA astronomer David Morrison put it. The idea, he said at a symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Philadelphia in February 1998, was to “break down the barriers between life and physical scientists” so they could unify to search the universe—certainly the planetary systems that were starting to show up—for any manner of life-forms, including robust and ubiquitous bacteria. And an integral part of the process would be studying human physiology in orbit, including what were euphemistically called “senior citizens.” The first of them, in fact, was already poised to fly.
The Oldest Astronaut
While the space agency was calculating the cost of sending robots back to Mars, Senator John Glenn was petitioning it to send him back into Earth orbit. For two years the bespectacled, balding former astronaut had been asking NASA to get him a seat on a shuttle mission, and in mid-January 1998, he got a “go” for a shuttle that was scheduled to leave that October, when he would be seventy-seven and out of the Senate. The ostensible reason for the flight was to do experiments relating space to the aging process. But in approving it, NASA scored a brilliant public relations victory, particularly at a time when millions of baby boomers had reached middle age and there were more coherent “senior citizens” than ever. “I’ll give it my very best try,” Mr. Right Stuff assured a packed news conference in Washington. No one doubted that.
Ad Astra
Early in 1986, as Voyager 2 was streaking past Uranus on the last leg of the Grand Tour and Magellan, Galileo, and Ulysses were being readied for their own historic encounters with Venus, Jupiter, and the Sun, Freeman Dyson peered into the future and saw a flock of tiny successors to those ponderous explorers. It was a future, the zany and immensely imaginative theoretical physicist decided, that had no place for robotic wanderers that were too large, too few, and too slow to provide all the knowledge that mankind wants about the worlds beyond Earth.
Dyson’s idea was to combine twenty-first-century genetic engineering, advanced artificial intelligence, and solar electric propulsion—all of which, he predicted, would be in place by the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century—and “grow” hundreds of spacecraft, each weighing just two pounds. These Astrochickens, as he whimsically called them, would be as maneuverable as hummingbirds, would sustain themselves by munching on the ice and hydrocarbons found in planetary rings, and would reproduce with DNA blueprints they themselves carried. Their mission would be to use their own advanced intelligence to dart around the solar system and well beyond it, landing where they pleased, all the while describing to the humans back home how they felt and what they discovered.
“Birds and dinosaurs were cousins, but birds were small and agile while dinosaurs were big and clumsy,” Dyson explained. Mainframe computers and the shuttle are dinosaurs, he continued, while microprocessors and Astrochickens are birds. “The future,” Dyson concluded, “belongs to the birds.”
The last of the dinosaurs, a 12,800-pounder named after the astronomer Giovanni Cassini, left in early October 1997 for a long encounter with Saturn and its moons in 2004. Cassini was the only member of a class of heavyweights originally called Mariner Mark 2. Another, named CRAF (Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby), was dropped in its tracks in January 1992—killed in the development stage—because NASA’s shrinking budget could not handle it. Cassini’s job was to do at Saturn what Galileo was doing at Jupiter: return for a long, close inspection. Like Galileo, it carried a probe, this one named Huygens, after the seventeenth-century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, which is supposed to be sent to Titan.
And like its unlucky but successful predecessor, it was attacked even before launch by anti-nuclear protestors who claimed that the seventy-two pounds of plutonium in its three radioisotope thermoelectric generators would produce hundreds of thousands of casualties if the spacecraft blew up during launch or crashed into Earth when it skimmed five hundred miles over the planet in August 1999 for a gravity boost before heading to its ringed destination. What was on Goldin’s mind at the time of the demonstrations, however, was not the threat from radioactive contamination. It was the threat from Congress that absolutely ended more upscale projects like Cassini, which took eight years to develop and cost almost $3.5 billion.
The first of the new birds, to use Dyson’s analogy, was named Clementine. It was basically a Department of Defense project conceived in 1992 and constructed by the Naval Research Laboratory. Its sensors were designed and built by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in cooperation with industry and were based on the miniature, self-contained hardware that was supposed to have gone into the Star Wars Brilliant Pebbles armada, which had also been a Livermore project. Clementine was a triumph of miniaturization. Its ten scientific instruments together weighed only seventeen and a half pounds. The ultraviolet-visible camera, for example, weighed a little more than a pound and ran on five watts of power (a refrigerator bulb uses eight times as much). The whole spacecraft weighed only five hundred pounds. Loaded with another five hundred pounds of maneuvering fuel, it still had only one-thirteenth the mass of Cassini.
