Laurence Bergreen: The Quest for Mars: NASA scientists and Their Search for Life Beyond Earth

The Quest for Mars

The NASA Scientists and Their

Search for Life Beyond Earth

LAURENCE BERGREEN

To Betsy, Nick and Sara

“Ever since I was a small child, I’ve believed there was life out there. When I look at the magnitude of the universe, with its billions of stars, I believe that if life developed here on Earth, it must have developed elsewhere. We simply can’t be unique. I really don’t think we’re the most intelligent life form in the universe, but that’s just my gut feeling.”

Dr. Claire Parkinson, NASA Scientist

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

PART ONE: THE MISSION

1. Mars on Earth

2. Message in a Bottle

3. Ground Truth

4. From Outer Space to Cyber Space

PART TWO: CODE S

5. Shoot Out at Cal Tech

6. The Honor of the Team

7. Goddard

8. The Genesis Question

PART THREE: DISCOVERING MARS

9. Rocket Science

10. Ghosts and Ghouls

11. Human Error

12. Mars or Bust

Epilogue: Stargazing

Keep Reading

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Subject: ICELAND

Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 00:48

From: Laurence Bergreen

To: Jim Garvin

Hi Jim,

It’s late Wednesday night, and I am back home from Houston. With time growing short, what can you tell me about Iceland? Last I heard, there was a strong chance of postponement till October. Looking forward to hearing from you as soon as possible. Thanks.

Larry

Subject: Re: ICELAND

Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 09:25:53

From: Jim Garvin

To: Laurence Bergreen

Larry,

We’re GO for Iceland. As of now, we are booked to arrive in Iceland early on the 20th, and quickly pick up a helicopter ride to Surtsey for a 6-hour working visit.

I am trying to be sure we can catch the Iceland Coast Guard helicopter, as we land between 6 and 6:30 AM and must get thru customs and get the rental Jeep.

Get set for Mars on Earth.

Jim

It’s 6:15 in the morning when Jim Garvin, a planetary geologist who works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, meets me at Iceland’s Keflavik Airport. As arranged, he’s flown in from Baltimore, and I’ve come from New York. Jim is forty-one, talks in torrents, and is plainly Type A, endowed with the passion and restlessness of an old-fashioned genius. Although he has two small children, he puts in eighty-hour work weeks. He is intense. There is no such thing as a short conversation with Garvin. His replies to simple questions have a way of digressing into hour-long ruminations on the nature and origins of the universe, but he gets away with it mostly because he is unfailingly polite. Once he launches into a monologue, he gestures emphatically, as if visualizing and touching everything he describes. He is fit and compact, with black hair, handsome Irish features, and a perpetually worried voice. He looks clean-cut, at least compared to other scientists, and his skin is slightly irritated in patches, as though he’s been vigorously applying after-shave lotion. A friend once told me it is often hard to get Jim Garvin’s attention, but once you do, it can be overwhelming. Now I have his attention.

After we retrieve our bags, Jim sets out to find Oscar, the pilot of the plane we’ve hired to take us from Keflavik to the island of Heimaey, off the southern coast of Iceland, where we are to rendezvous with the Iceland Coast Guard, weather permitting. Oscar, when we catch up with him, looks too young to drive a car, let alone pilot a plane. We cram ourselves into his single-engine Aerospatiale, a lightweight aircraft of French design. The co-pilot’s seat I occupy is so cramped that my knees interfere with the controls. We are battling fatigue, Jim and I. We have been up all night, and the inside of my mouth tastes like kerosene from the Aerospatiale’s tank.

We have come all this way because geologists studying Mars have designated Iceland a Mars analogue. In 1976, when the Viking Lander returned color images of the Red Planet, scientists realized that Mars bears a striking resemblance to the landscape sliding below Oscar’s little airplane. Iceland is, in many places, an arctic desert devoid of vegetation and untouched by humanity. These days, NASA-supported scientists regularly visit to study this volcano-ridden island to compare it to its distant relative, Mars. The theory is that by studying Iceland, scientists can better understand the workings of the Red Planet. Iceland is only twenty million years old, a geological babe, and thus relatively unweathered, a primeval landscape. The absence of trees on the Icelandic landscape is a blessing, revealing the island’s geological makeup. Mars is similarly bare. Iceland festers with active and dormant volcanoes – just as Mars does. The resemblance makes it possible to work out significant aspects of the geologic history of both places by comparing the two.

Mars is so reminiscent of Earth that it is considered “semi-habitable.” The atmosphere is only one percent as dense as ours, but breathable air could be extracted from it. The Martian day, or “sol,” lasts about as long as a day on Earth; a Martian year consists of 687 Earth days. Like Earth, Mars has its seasons, but they last twice as long. And Martian weather conditions are anything but monotonous or predictable. In 1997, when Pathfinder landed on Mars, its tiny weather station gathered data on the local Martian weather, which NASA posted on the Internet. The reports showed that temperatures range from 60° F at noon to –100° F at night. Travelers’ advisory: because of the much lower atmospheric pressure on Mars, surface temperatures differ drastically from air temperatures. If you were standing on the surface in midday, your feet would be warm and snug, but the fluids in your head would freeze. Mars’ atmosphere has fog, wind, and red dust, lending pink tints to a sky accented by two small, misshapen moons, Phobos (“fear”) and Deimos (“terror”).

Mars resembles Earth in other ways. Its polar ice caps wax and wane seasonally. There are clouds. There is ample geologic evidence that rivers once flowed freely on its surface. The stage has long been set for life to appear there. Yet the Earth teems with life, while Mars appears barren, at least on the surface. Why? No one really knows, yet the answers may lurk in the perplexing differences between the two planets.

The Earth’s surface consists of overlapping, often ill-fitting plates covering its molten interior. They form a crust like an eggshell, thin and brittle. They bump and grind against each other; occasionally they pull apart, as they are doing now in Iceland, giving rise to earthquakes and volcanoes and mountain ridges lurking beneath the oceans. Iceland sits right on the spine of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a segment of the Mid-Ocean Ridge, which is the longest mountain range on Earth, extending 40,000 miles, or one-and-a-half times around the planet. Iceland’s unique placement means that half of it belongs, in a geological sense, to the European continent, and half to the American. And the two halves are pulling apart at the rate of one centimeter a year. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when this movement occurs over the course of ten or twelve million years, it eventually becomes a very big deal. Iceland could break apart and be absorbed by other, larger land masses. Or if it surges in volcanic activity, it could enlarge itself, adding enough real estate to accommodate many more hardy souls. For now, a seam runs right through Iceland, clearly marked in some places by a narrow chasm and in others by small streams and little cracks. If you jump across one of the cracks, you jump from one continent to another.