Standing there in the cold night air with my father, the telescope at my eye, I felt connected not only to Mars but to Galileo, to Huygens, to Newton, to Herschel. You can’t see something like that and not yearn to see it better. As I squinted, making adjustment after adjustment to the dials of the telescope, all I wanted was to fly up to it. Or at least keep the image still. I cursed the atmosphere that wouldn’t allow it—the same sky that keeps us alive, brings us rains, and softens our shadows. Even the rarefied air of Arizona tremored and swirled and maddeningly made heavens flicker away. Caught in the grasp of longing and frustration, I could understand why, by the twentieth century, we had to leave our own planet behind.
* * *
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TWO HUNDRED AND thirty-one days after Mariner 4 had launched, on the night of July 15, 1965, the tiny levers of the telex machine at JPL began ferociously clicking. Leighton must have felt a surge of emotion: The Mariner 4 pictures would be the first ever close-up images of anything beyond the moon, as the mission to Venus hadn’t taken any pictures. Leighton poignantly recognized the difference between knowing something about a place and actually seeing it, and so did his imaging team. As Bruce Murray, then only a postdoc, realized, “Looking at a planet for the first time…that’s not an experience people are likely to have very often in the history of the human race.”
The data packets were being flung from Mars to Earth, captured in the huge bowl of the tracking station at Goldstone Space Communications Complex in the Mojave Desert and transmitted across California via teletype to JPL’s Voyager Telecommunications section. To Leighton, it seemed that the bits of the picture were like pearls, strung kilometers apart on a string from Earth to Mars. The data rate was only eight and a third bits per second, so it would take eight hours for the first image to be fully transferred. Eight hours of nail-biting, eight hours of pure suspense.
The day before, as Mariner 4 was approaching Mars, the operations team had decided to relay a command, DC-25, with an updated stretch of code to initiate a platform-scanning action, which would identify the planet, followed by a second command, DC-26, which would ensure the camera stopped and didn’t record over the images. The data received before the code was sent suggested that the tape recorder had started and stopped, but there had been some anomalous errors. The tape recorder was also a flight spare, swapped in at the last minute because of a technical problem with the original. It would still be hours, possibly days, before the computers could assemble a real photograph, and now some were second-guessing whether the commands should have been sent, whether they might somehow confuse the computer.
Dick Grumm couldn’t stand the wait. He was in charge of the tape recorder, and he and a few other engineers began brainstorming ways they might check the data. It became a contest of sorts, and the winning idea was to print the single-stream data—groups of digits, indicating the brightness of each pixel—onto a reel of ticker tape. As the engineers began snipping the tape into strips and pinning them to the walls, Grumm popped over to a local Pasadena art store in search of six shades of gray chalk, one for each bit of the six-bit image. He ended up with a pack of Rembrandt pastels. “Chalk” was for schools, not artists, he discovered, and anyway, chalk wasn’t made in six shades of gray.
Upon his return, a massive paint-by-numbers artwork had been assembled and was now ready to be filled in. The Mariner 4 image that would eventually be shared with the public was black and white, but Dick’s ticker-tape interpretation with colors corresponding to the brightness scale came to life with pastels ranging from light-yellow ochre to burnt umber to Indian red. He had tried a purple color scheme, then a green one. But the red one seemed to best mimic the gray scale. It just happened to mimic the colors of Mars too.
When a jumpy public-relations team got word of what was happening, they went to find Grumm immediately. They didn’t want the restless press to seize upon some messy makeshift picture instead of an actual image of the Martian surface. Grumm refused to stop, arguing that this was engineering work, that he simply needed to verify that his tape recorder was working. They let him continue behind a movable partition, guarded by a security officer. But the press did find out, and they began to push into the room: the pencil-and-paper reporters, the television broadcasters, the radio men. With the gaps in the strips, the 200-by-200-pixel square frame was elongated into a rectangle, but soon, the edge of the planet was clear. Mariner 4 had taken the first close-up picture of Mars.
Even though the image was half planet, half blackness of space, it was still hailed around the world. The largest-circulation French daily printed the first of the final images, once it was rendered by the computer, across five columns of its front page. IT’S MARVELOUS, read the huge banner of The Evening News of London. As soon as the picture was placed into the hands of Pope Paul VI, he wrote across it, vidimus et admirati sumus—“we saw and we gazed in wonder.”
The camera had fog in it and some of the scan lines failed, causing streaks across the frame. “The resolution was awful,” recalls JPL engineer John Casani. “You really couldn’t see much.” But the images would presumably get better as Mariner 4 came closer and closer to the planet, imaging it as the sun struck the landscape more obliquely, picking up more contrast.
Among the streaks in the first two images, one dark area appeared to be real. It was twenty kilometers wide, shaped somewhat like a W. With the arrival of the third image, other possible features were identified, including a smaller smudge, just three kilometers across. Low hills perhaps? The first three images were released to the press for a quick look. As for interpreting the images, the center director urged patience. He reminded the public that the team’s collective human strength was reaching its limits.
Leighton began utilizing some electronic tricks to improve the quality, like erasing the clearly aberrant lines that arose from faulty scanning. But when he got to frame seven, he stopped in his tracks, struggling to believe what he saw. He called Jack James, the mission director, and the then project manager, Dan Schneiderman, into a small, secure room and showed them the tiny Polaroid of the video scope. It wasn’t at all what they had expected. They stared at the image in quiet disappointment. Eventually, Schneiderman uttered what they all knew to be true: “Jack, you and I have a twenty-minute jump on the rest of the lab to go out and look for new jobs.”
* * *
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SCARCELY ANYONE HAD been prepared for what frame seven revealed, much less what they saw in the next dozen images. “My God, it’s the moon,” thought Norm Haynes, one of the systems engineers. There were craters in the image, all perfectly preserved, which meant the planet was in bleak stasis. The crust hadn’t been swallowed by the churn of plate tectonics, but, more important, the surface hadn’t been worn down by the ebb and flow of water. Preserved craters meant there had been no resurfacing, no aqueous weathering of any kind resembling that of the Earth. As with the moon, it appeared there had never been any significant quantity of liquid water on the surface—no rainfall, no oceans, no streams, no ponds.
Stunned, the Mariner 4 team didn’t publicly release the images for days as they tried to understand the implications of what they were seeing. Finally, they scheduled a press conference. Lyndon Johnson, who had been following the spacecraft closely, hosted it at the White House. Just a few months earlier, he’d made the mission a centerpiece of his inaugural speech, addressing a country still reeling from John F. Kennedy’s assassination. He’d asked the crowd to think of their world as it looked from the rocket hurtling into space, how it was like “a child’s globe, hanging in space, the continents stuck to its side like colored maps.” He asked them to imagine their fellow passengers on a dot of Earth, to realize that we all have but a moment among our companions. Now, with the results of Mariner 4 in hand, that dot of Earth felt more isolated than ever before.
When Leighton took the podium in the East Room on July 29, two weeks after th
e flyby, he explained how man’s first close-up look at Mars had revealed the fact that large craters covered at least part of the surface. “A profound fact…” he said somberly, as his head swayed slightly to the left. He read from his notes about the nearly seventy craters in the images, ranging from five to 125 kilometers in diameter. Leaning into the microphone, he described how the density of their occurrence was “comparable to the densely cratered uplands of the moon.” It was “a scientifically startling fact.”
Upon seeing the pictures, Lyndon Johnson sighed, “It may be—it may just be—that life as we know it…is more unique than many have thought.” The mission’s instruments also revealed that the air on Mars was terribly thin. The pressure was minuscule—only a few thousandths of the pressure on Earth—which helped explain why the incoming meteors hadn’t burned up. The tiny whiff of carbon dioxide that had been detected with a spectrograph from Earth, and had been assumed a trace constituent, turned out to be essentially the entire atmosphere on Mars. The ground temperature was a frigid minus 100 degrees Celsius, and there was no evidence of any kind of protective magnetic field. The images were pockmarked all the way until they fell off the face of the planet.
The reality of the cold, hard, desolate world was beyond anything that scientists had imagined, beyond even the imaginations of the great science-fiction writers. “Craters? Why didn’t we think of craters?” Isaac Asimov, upon seeing the Mariner 4 images, reportedly asked a friend. The possibilities for the planet had disintegrated, our wild imaginings abraded to nothing. Humanity had spent centuries envisioning Mars as similar to the Earth, but Mars was bombarded, blighted, empty. On July 30, The New York Times declared, dispiritedly, what those at the press conference had struggled to say for themselves: Mars was probably “a dead planet.”
THERE’S A TINY print of one of the Mariner 4 images on the wall of my office. I have it upside down and tilted, ever so slightly, to reflect true north. The picture is black and white, bordered with hatches. In the image, the sun shines down at an angle over the ragged Martian surface. It lights half the rim of each crater, then shadows the opposite side. I affixed it to the wall next to my desk because it speaks volumes about the challenge of doing science on other planets. The ground is visible in that grainy image, but it’s blanched of color, distant and barren. I know that it’s Mars, the vast terrain south of Amazonis Planitia, but at the same time, it’s nothing like the Mars I know.
I have it hanging next to a copy of the 1962 Mars map used to design the Mariner 4 mission. It was drawn up at the behest of the U.S. Air Force, and it’s the same map that hung throughout the corridors of JPL a half century ago. The contrast couldn’t be more striking. Mars is smooth, awash in creamy pastels of peach and gray. Tracts of bright and dark areas are graced with names that curve and slant to fit the landscape: Thaumasia arcs over Solis Lacus; Mare Hadriaticum is horseshoed around the bowl of Hellas. Above and below the rectangular Mercator projection of the planet are smaller views of the curved Martian globe, six in all, floating against the blackness of space like a collection of holiday ornaments. Whereas the Mariner image is a set of static pixels, lingering alone, the planning map is a representation of a world. It’s hypnotic, suffused with meaning. Every position, every orientation, every shape, every shading—each indelibly captures a human interpretation of an observation.
I know what it’s like to make a map. I learned to survey in the eastern Sierra as part of a winter field camp out in the no-man’s-land between Death Valley and the Mojave Desert, where the roads cut like scratches into the bleached and bending landscape. It was a swath of the Earth that no one really needed to know anything about, almost by definition. But that was the point: We were there for the challenge. The goal was to reduce the million-year-old pushing and pulling across a wild expanse of Earth’s crust into a set of neat lines, etched on flapping pieces of map paper.
Out in the death-dry mountains, I slept in a small yellow tent, rising with the sun each morning. I’d throw on a thick old sweatshirt, eat breakfast from a bent metal cup, grab my Brunton compass, and meet the other graduate students by the trucks. The air was clear and cold and still, making things that were far seem close. We’d drive into the distance and spend the day tramping around the desert washes and ancient riverbeds, ascending the rock slopes.
I was learning from one of the greats—a tectonicist named Clark Burchfiel, who had a gap-toothed smile and learned to play football back in the time of leather helmets. He’d recognized the pull-apart origin of Death Valley some forty years earlier. He trained us to stick closely to outcrops, places we could measure a strike and dip in the folded and faulted rock. I used my rock hammer to break off small chunks of the outcrop to inspect the minerals, swinging it over my head to get enough torque, then recoiling as it made a sound like the smashing of teeth. I marked the GPS coordinates where molten quartz had once squirted through sills. I traced where the brittle, jagged rocks ceded to pebbled pavement, then to alluvium.
One evening, Clark tossed me a rock. The minerals seemed to have ripped, lacerated in the darkness of our planet’s twisting and sheering. “This rock has seen the face of God,” Clark whispered, seemingly to himself. As I stared at it, I realized I’d spent my life walking on top of the thinnest of eggshells, oblivious to the heat and the pressure beneath me, oblivious to the magnitude of forces and depths of the physical world. Yet as hard as I searched for fault lines and intrusions on my own, I passed my days in the field wandering around feeling lost. The desert was unyielding and silent. There were great boulders perched upon ledges, and sometimes, with no one around, I’d push one with all my might until it would trundle off the peak, just to hear it crash down hundreds of meters below me, to watch it break open.
I’d work from dawn until dusk, struggling to make sense of my measurements, thinking that these mountains were no place for a beginner. Then the sun would set. I would turn in as soon as the fire died, as darkness settled over the Mojave. I’d switch on my headlamp, illuminating my little yellow dome against the cold playa. I’d lugged a dozen books with me. They were stacked in piles around the inside of the threadbare tent, which held next to nothing else. I read West with the Night by the pilot Beryl Markham, who flew passengers around Kenya in the 1930s for a shilling a mile. Ernest Hemingway called the book “bloody wonderful” in a letter to a friend: “This girl…can write rings around all of us.” I read Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, and like the protagonist Ladislaus de Almásy, who brought Herodotus’s Histories into the desert, I began taping maps and sketches into the pages of my books. Cather, Dostoyevsky, Dillard, Blake, Coetzee, Stendhal. I searched them like a nautical almanac. All I wanted was to find some solid points, some method to triangulate, some way to pattern a sense of human understanding onto the vast physical world around me, a world marked by human absence.
Soon, though, I began to realize the Granite Mountains weren’t as intensely empty as they seemed. When I’d first gazed into the Mojave, everything seemed muted. All the color had been drained, sipped away by the parched air. The plants were a whitish khaki green, like fistfuls of dried herbs. I had the urge to spit on them, thinking it was the least I could do, a small act of kindness. But after a while, my senses started to adjust. The sagebrush began to look like splashes, almost like raindrops hitting a lake. I started to see the life all around me—in the spine-waisted ants and blister beetles, even in the dark varnish of the desert rocks, a sheen potentially linked to microscopic ecosystems.
One day, I traced where a fossil layer had vanished, the erasure of creatures that had dominated the world for a twinkling of history. Then another afternoon I noticed similar shapes several kilometers away, in similar rock. I followed how the belts of rock plunged into the earth, then scanned the horizon, trying to envision where they might reappear. I was connecting the dots through the depths below, the bending masses, hundreds of meters beneath my boots.
The eff
ect this had on me called to mind another of the books in my tent. I’d read about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and how his plane was forced down in the Sahara one night. Helpless until day dawned, he fell asleep on a hillock of sand, then awoke suddenly on his back, “face to face with a hatchery of stars.” He was “seized with vertigo,” flung forth as if he were falling, as if the sky were a sea and he was diving headlong into it. The day on the ridge felt like that, the convex suddenly concave. I had a visceral sense of the world popping from two dimensions into three, of seeing a landscape in a way I’d never viewed it before.
With a little data and a little imagination, I was beginning to grasp how disparate observable strands could be woven into a system. And once the terrain began to make sense, all I wanted was to get to the next ridge, to fit it into my map. It was as if I could peer into the unseen ground. I didn’t want mere pieces of that mighty system, some surficial understanding. I wanted the coherent whole.
* * *
—
THE MARS PLANNING map that hangs in my office is full of cartographic detail—a panoply of features and names. But if you step back a bit, what first catches the eye is the light and the shadow. All across the map are hubs and spokes: an extensive interconnected system of perfectly straight lines. The crisscrossing patterns are the color of smoke. They’re not black, not unambiguous, but they are impossible to miss. They decorate the surface like a Victorian lace collar.
The Sirens of Mars Page 3