title: “Another World” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-29” author: “Michael Marks”
Apart from the difficulty of getting there and the relief that comes with success, what makes this desert so exciting? What makes it so exciting that scientists see it through tears of joy, so exciting that NASA’s Web servers strain to send the pictures to eager viewers around the world? What makes it so exciting that U.S. President George W. Bush thinks sending humans to walk in Spirit’s tire tracks, at a cost in the hundred-billion dollar range, will turn the public on in an election year?
The answer is partly that Mars, a mere planet, has many attributes that make a star–a movie star, that is. For a start, it has a famous face. It’s a face we’ve had a long time to get to know, because its features are discernible from earth with just a modest telescope. That unique attribute–no other planet’s surface is so open to inspection–means that for centuries idle thoughts about life elsewhere have settled on Mars just a bit more easily than on the other planets. It’s why “the man from Mars” became and remains the archetypal extraterrestrial, and why this planet was the one chosen by the great writers of science fiction and planetary romance, like H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury. The space-age revelation that Mars’s features–its mountains and craters and polar ice caps–look pretty good up close, too, hasn’t hurt.
Mars also has an easily identifiable character: redness. This may seem trivial (and it borders on the untrue–to instruments up close Mars is more a yellowish brown). Redness, though, is something simple that everyone can know about Mars, and people like to think they know something about celebrities. With the exception of ring-girdled Saturn, the other planets are lacking in simple, easily identifiable attributes. And unlike Saturn–which NASA’s Cassini mission will arrive at later this year, having set out in 1997–Mars is relatively approachable.
It may not be as easy to get to as the moon, of course, which is only a few days away. You can imagine getting to the moon using a family of modular spacecraft, some to lift you to orbit round the earth, others to take you from earth orbit to the moon and back. This is the approach Bush looks set to advocate when he reveals his new space policy this week, paid for in part by retiring the shuttle fleet.
Mars’s appeal endures, though, because it has a story. Mars is a planet with a past. The reason Spirit landed in Gusev crater is that many geologists believe the crater was once a vast lake. Mars used to be wetter and in all likelihood warmer, though probably not as warm as all that. The hows and whens and whys of this great Martian metamorphosis will occupy scientists for decades, and the story of a world transformed they piece together promises to be an evocative one–all the more so, perhaps, on a home planet which is undergoing global change itself. The power of that story may explain why, while many experts see building a moon base and sending expeditions to Mars as an either/or proposition, Bush seems set on both. The moon is old, lifeless and unchanging–a great place for infrastructure, but not for new stories. And stories are what excite us.
Especially when we don’t yet know how they end. Just hours after Spirit’s first pictures reached Earth, NASA had produced three-dimensional versions of them. Our imaginations had already gone one better. We added the fourth dimension of time, a future that stretches through the screen and over the horizon, a future that Spirit will soon be rolling into. Mars is a real, solid, kick-a-rock-and-you’ll-stub-your-toe place and, at the same time, a dream of things to come. That’s what’s truly exciting.
