mars1

It would be strange to stand on the surface of Mars. I imagine it
would be as difficult to align your eyes to the Martian landscape as it
was for the Apollo astronauts to align their eyes to the Moon. Like
Buzz Aldrin, poking around among unfamiliar rocks and uncertainly
distant hills, you would probably have a paradoxical sense of
magnificent desolation. In the face of monstrous extinct volcanoes
and broken chasms, you would fully expect a sort of eternal deadness.
But you would also perceive a tremendous, apparently empty beauty.
Setting out to explore, say, the old Viking 1 lander site in the Chryse
Planitia region, you would clamber down a ladder from a spindly
descent vehicle onto a more or less rolling plain of red rubbly rock and
dirt. For all intents and purposes it would look as dead as any
moonscape. Well, here I am in the Martian desert, you might think.
The air, seen from behind the visor of your helmet, is an orange-red
color caused by the scattering of sunlight and reflection from rusty
sediment suspended in the lower atmosphere. It is unlike an Earth
sunset, it's something different.
Since the air is only about a tenth as thick as the Earth's, a weird
clarity magnifies everything around you, similar to the stark clarity
that disoriented the Apollo astronauts because no atmosphere at all
exists on the Moon. Hills of rocks and dirt unfold outward like ocean
rollers suspended in time. The Viking lander-robot, with bulbous
tanks and dish antenna and insect-like supports half buried in blown
sand, sticks up out of the desert a few yards away. A little farther on is
a boulder about six feet wide which the planetary geologists long ago
nicknamed Big Joe. It's hard to get a fix on exactly how close Big Joe
is to the lander. Being the only really familiar object insight, the lander
marks the boundary of your visual balance. Everything beyond it is
uncertain.
You would walk toward the boulder and the robot with tremendous
excitement. The Viking lander has been there for decades, since it
touched down on July 20, 1976. Your steps are light because Mars'
gravity is about a third that of the Earth's. By the time you come to a
halt between the boulder and the spacecraft, you have an idea of what
ten feet means on Mars. Something peculiar about ten Martian feet,
you don't know what, but your heart is pounding and your eyes are
eating up everything.
At some uncertain distance a hill topped with blocky rocks cuts a
skyline low on the horizon. You imagine it's the ruins of an ancient
fort. You think it's within walking distance, but you're not sure
because the unfamiliar clarity disturbs your depth perception. The
pictures of the famous "face" photographed by the Viking orbiter in
the Cydonia region come to mind. Like deteriorated stone wreckage
on the tops of Northumbrian hills, these red rocks protrude shallowly
into the sky and look to be arranged roughly in a circle. Maybe there
are holes bored in them, into which someone poured oil and then lit
wicks, and crouched vigilantly watching the expansive desert.
This is crazy. They are obviously just rocks that have rested there for
millions of years, visited only by wind and sand, ultraviolet sunlight
and freezing cold. You would like to hike across the rock-strewn
undulant dirt to that hilltop and look at those stones, which by now
seem so much like archaeological artifacts. But Mission Control has
dozens of tasks for you to carry out today, the first day on the surface
of Mars, to prepare living quarters, work areas, geological experiments,
biological tests.
No one believes, any longer, in mile-wide carved faces on Mars, or
antique stone pyramids, or even the existence of the tiniest microbe
here. At least, no one associated with the mission admits to believing
in them.
Your boots are leaving latticed tracks in the sand. You look back and
down, and see them there. They're stark and amazing. Your own
descent vehicle is half a football field away, you see it there with its
sloping sides covered with red dust kicked up in the landing. Its
supports shine in the sunlight. Your tracks file away from it to Viking.
The rest of the crew is still inside. Amid the elation and the boiling
desire to see some sign of life beyond the dead Viking probe, the
desolation overawes you and you say to yourself, as you said dozens
and dozens of times to yourself during the training simulations: My job
is to enliven this dead place.

* * *

At least, the Mariner, Viking, Pathfinder and Global Surveyor photos
of Mars indicate a dead place. You would feel fortunate to be there,
not only because we live in an age that produces the material
technology to send astronauts 50 million miles to another planet, but
also because you made it at all. Many previous missions to Mars failed
completely.
The American Mariner 3 spacecraft in 1964 failed to shed a plastic
shroud early in its flight and went into meaningless orbit around the
Sun. In 1971, while Mariner 9 waited patiently in Martian orbit for a
planetwide dust storm to blow itself out, the Soviet Mars 2 and 3
probes took pictures of, essentially, nothing. Their computers were
preprogrammed and could not be adjusted to wait for the storm to
end. Mars 3 launched a lander that transmitted for twenty seconds
after touchdown and then, for unknown reasons, ceased. In 1973 Mars
4's retrorocket failed to fire and the spacecraft simply missed the
planet. Its companion Mars 5 made 20 orbits and transmitted data
during 10 of them. In the same year Mars 7 missed the planet, and in
1974 Mars 6 descended to the Argyre Basin only to lose contact with
the orbiting vehicle three-tenths of a second before touchdown. Later
the Russian Phobos 2 spacecraft in 1988 and the Mars Observer in
1993 both winked out without a trace. A Russian and European Space
Agency probe never got out of Earth orbit in 1996. In 1999 the Mars
Polar Lander crashed on the Martian surface, probably after it
somehow misread a computer signal and shut down its descent
engines too soon. The same year, the Mars Climate Orbiter
incinerated in the atmosphere because of mismatched units of
measure. Human space technology is orders of magnitude larger than
any single person can comprehend, but it is small and tottering, like a
newborn fawn, in comparison to the frontiers it is probing. An
astronaut standing alive and well and humbled on the surface of Mars
will be extremely fortunate.
It is not even clear to millions of people what purpose a Mars mission
would serve. There is a widespread belief that space exploration has
no practical value. It is expensive and shows only huge expenditures
without profit or even the hope of profit. It does not promise to feed
the hungry or house the homeless. Since the American victory in the
race to the Moon in 1969, space exploration has had only the feeblest
impact on international politics, and most of that has been through
military satellite systems rather than scientific cooperation.
What could possibly be the use of sending live human beings to Mars,
a dead, meaningless ball of rock, dirt, carbon dioxide, and maybe some
permafrost? Even the Moon, since it's closer, might in the wildest
dreams of the wildest technologists and entrepreneurs be put to
practical use. If you put enough capital into the transportation system,
it would be possible to mine the Moon for profit. Moon rock is for
example full of helium-3 gas, which could be used to generate cleaner,
safer energy than anything now in use, and as a by-product would
create water and other gases necessary for survival. And it's perfectly
plausible that enormous arrays of solar panels could be constructed on
the Moon to gather sunlight unimpeded by an atmosphere, convert the
sunlight into microwaves, and eventually beam back all the electricity
anyone could ever want. Telescopes on the far side of the Moon could
see things people never imagined existed.
But even if Mars turned out to have possibilities like these, it is half
again as far from the Sun as the Earth, simply too far away to make
their development feasible. To make Mars technologically fruitful, we
would have to make it permanently habitable, and so there is an
ongoing debate about whether Mars can be "terraformed." In
scenarios (which have been computer-detailed) for making Mars into a
second Earth, two things would have to happen, and they would take
a while. First, Mars would have to be warmed up, and second, its
chemical state would have to be altered.
Since its atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide, Mars would be a
good place to grow plants if you could only get the surface
temperatures up to Earth temperatures. A typical daytime temperature
on Mars can be about -27 F, the same as a very cold night in the dead
of a Maine winter. One way to warm up the air is to build giant
mirrors at the poles to reflect heat from sunlight back into the
atmosphere. Or the amount of naturally reflected heat can be reduced
by spreading black soot all over the polar caps. Significant amounts of
greenhouse gases might also be introduced into the atmosphere. Any