Back in St. Louis, our shifts ran for eight hours, twenty-four hours a day. One of my jobs was to check the aerobot data as it was relayed to mission control, and I was among the first to notice when the signals stopped. Initially I thought it was a technical issue, but somewhere between Queensland and New Caledonia, in the early-morning darkness, a thunderstorm had filled the sky. Fossett’s balloon had begun a rapid ascent, and as it rose, it ruptured.
The balloon fell through a sky spangled with lightning—careening almost nine kilometers to the ocean below. Sheets of hail barreled into Fossett as wind tore at the fissure in his balloon. He frantically pushed tanks of fuel overboard, desperate to slow his descent. His capsule still slammed into the sea. It was quickly pulled down under the surface, filling with water. Almost simultaneously, the propane burners burst and caught fire. Fossett fought his way out, but he was left bobbing, all alone in the shark-infested waters of the Coral Sea.
I’d heard his wife’s voice for a split second, wavering, when I’d answered the phone that morning. I quickly passed the receiver to one of the navigators who was advising Fossett from mission control. I stood back, my eyes wide, as he explained what we did, and didn’t, know. Since I’d worked the night shift, I hadn’t slept, and I didn’t sleep all day. I sat in the back of the room as the navigators searched for a locator beacon, as the reporters began to call, as the public began to gather the facts. It was dizzying.
Fossett almost died out in those uncharted reefs. He activated that beacon twice, but then the satellite stopped detecting the signal for a few hours. Cold and terrified, he was finally spotted by a French plane, then ten hours after that, he was pulled onto the deck of a boat by an Australian yachtsman.
Fossett’s entire journey had been more precarious than I’d realized. He’d been relying on oxygen tanks and barely sleeping. At one point, he singed his eyebrows and then ran out of toilet paper. It was a grueling experience for him, and for his family down below. From the safety of a rescue boat, he told a reporter he might just “sit back and smell the roses for a while” before flying again.
* * *
—
FOSSETT WAS ON my mind when I flew for the first time over an ocean, as a sophomore in college. As I stared down at the vast and endless sea, I couldn’t believe how far it stretched—the unbroken expanse, the sheer emptiness of those waters. I felt a deep sense of relief as the Big Island of Hawaii came into view, its cliffs rising like a prehistoric pelican, like something out of Jurassic Park. Finally, a foothold.
I was journeying to a volcano as part of a class trip led by Ray. It was the second geoscience course I’d taken with him, and a tremendously exciting one. Like most of my classmates, I had never been so far from home. After we landed in Hilo, the world turned from sea to rock. We headed in the direction of Kilauea, in rented vans. I pressed my face against the window as we drove the Chain of Craters Road, as we wrapped around pahoehoe lava and ‘A‘ā flows, right down to where the molten rock flowed into the sea. The sky turned to fire as the sun set, then it was the blackest night I’d ever seen. Constellations, which had always seemed implausible to me, suddenly made sense, their missing stars bright against the enormous sky.
We left Kilauea a couple of days later and made our way to the desolate summit of Mauna Kea, a dormant shield volcano on the other side of the island. We stopped two-thirds of the way up to acclimatize for a few hours before continuing to the summit, a disorienting forty-two hundred meters in altitude—fourteen thousand feet—where the air carried 40 percent less oxygen. As the road climbed, we passed the tree line, then the last of the scrub and the last of the lichens, until we were above even the clouds. The landscape was gray and red and black in every direction; in places it even smoldered with a sheen of purple. There were shards and ash and cinder cones. It felt like a bruise, crystallized in the world.
One day, when everyone was having lunch, I wandered over to check out the view from a distant ridge, where the solid lava gave way to pyroclasts and tephra. Without really noticing, I was kicking at the rocks as I stepped. I overturned a surprisingly large one with the toe of my boot, and as my eyes fell to my feet, I startled. Beneath the vaulted side of that adamantine black rock, a tiny fern grew, its defiant green tendrils trembling in the air.
There in the midst of all that shattered silence was a tiny splash of life. I crouched down to see it better. Here was a piece of the world I’d left behind. Here was a piece of my childhood. Every summer on Pine Mountain, about thirty kilometers south of Hazard, my sister and I would race down a side spur onto a footpath and into thickets of mountain laurel and rhododendron. We’d scramble down the living stairway of a century-old tulip poplar that had been felled into a gorge but hadn’t died, holding upside down to its roots, even after hand-hewn steps were carved into its immense trunk. Those beautiful, breathing steps would deliver us into a hemlock ravine, and from there we’d follow the roar of the streams into the riotous fractal heart of the fern garden. We’d find a mossy rock and sit our small bodies down, resting among the fronds until our breathless parents caught up. There were ferns taller than us and ferns tinier than our fingernails, all with intricate patterns, spreading their palms into the greenest symphony I’d ever seen.
That fern on the volcano was even more striking up there by itself, all alone. It was just so impossibly triumphant. I couldn’t pull myself away; I looked at it for so long that the others had to come find me. I showed it to them, but I didn’t have the words to explain its beauty, its significance. I couldn’t tell them that somehow, huddled under a rock, growing against the odds, that fern stood for all of us.
Even though I couldn’t articulate it, I had an inkling then of what I know for certain now: There was something in that moment that made me become a planetary scientist. It was then, on that trip, that the idea of looking for life in the universe began to make sense to me. I suddenly saw something I might haunt the stratosphere for, something for which I’d fall into the sea. Not fame or glory, or a sense of adventure, but a chance to discover the smallest breath in the deepest night and, in so doing, vanquish the void that lurked between human existence and all else in the cosmos. On that trip, I started to realize that, just like with Pathfinder, the process of reaching might tell me the most, might give me the chance to grasp the deepest mystery. In finding that fern, I also found something small, fragile, and worth cultivating deep inside myself.
When I got back to St. Louis from the Big Island, I tossed a hunk of the volcano into the hand of my best friend. It was part of a gathering of rocks on her desk. It was a motley collection—a pumice here, a sandstone there—but it told her that I was finding my direction. As for me, I couldn’t help but think the tableau looked a little like Ares Vallis strewn with bits of the known world. I was beginning to feel, for the first time, like a real explorer.
I WAS A SOPHOMORE in college, one of thousands attending a crowded scientific conference, when I first saw the kaleidoscopic new map of Mars made from data collected by the Mars Global Surveyor mission. I’d taken my seat alongside some other undergraduates in the packed ballroom as an MIT professor named Maria Zuber walked to the front of the room. She seemed impossibly small standing behind the podium. Then her slides blazed to life and she began to speak.
I remember feeling a little distracted at the beginning of her talk, as her voice filled the cavernous hall, and I puzzled over it for a few seconds. Then my back straightened as it became clear what I was responding to: It was the first time I’d ever heard a woman give a planetary science talk.
As I willed myself to focus, I realized that Maria was delivering a spectacular explanation of the mission science—better than any I’d ever heard. Her confidence and enthusiasm radiated, and the audience was locked in. Sitting there, suddenly aware of our shared status as women in a roomful of men, I couldn’t help feeling a swell of pride, as if she was somehow speaking for me and the other aspir
ing female scientists in the room.
Then she clicked to the magnificent map. She paused for a moment, letting it linger on the screen behind her, as if she knew the effect it would have. She gave us all a moment to soak it in, to reckon with how different it was from anything that had come before. The usual cinnamon surface of Mars had been swallowed by a rainbow of color, magnificently delineating topographic contours. The iridescent surface was cut with canyons and chasms and spiral troughs. The northern hemisphere was as smooth as the abyssal plains of Earth’s own seabed—tantalizing evidence of an ancient ocean. There were continuous layers of bright and dark bands alternating right down to the edge of the ice cap, a record not only of changes in the seasons but also of long-term climate patterns. None of us had ever seen Mars like this—a place we could almost touch. Her rendering had thrown the planet into exquisite relief, flinging two dimensions into three. Meridians arced down from the pole, like strips of lead across the colorful sphere. In that darkened room, it shone to me like a church window.
* * *
—
THAT MAP OF Mars was a long time coming, both for NASA and for Maria. The instrument that collected the data was named MOLA. It stood for the “Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter” and also, as was sometimes pointed out, the type genus of a family of “strange, large oceanic fishes.” MOLA was originally proposed in the 1980s as part of a NASA mission called Mars Observer. That spacecraft was meant to be the first in a line of “planetary observers,” orbiters based on commercial communications satellites that NASA could buy on a fixed contract. The plan was to use the space shuttle, which was already ferrying astronauts to low Earth orbit, to launch the orbiter.
The Mars Observer mission was a big break for Maria, fresh off her PhD, her first chance to work on a spacecraft heading to Mars. She had grown up amidst the coalfields of Carbon County, Pennsylvania, a place where prosperity and economic opportunity had dried up with the decline of coal mining. No one in her family had gone to college, and her parents had difficulty understanding why anyone would want to stay in school as long as she did. But she’d been fascinated by space from the time she was small. She’d jump up and down in her playpen, pointing to rocket launches on TV. She even loved the scenes of mission control.
As she got older, she started watching copious amounts of Star Trek—she gravitated to Lieutenant Uhura—and spending as much time as she could alongside one of her grandfathers in his old garage. He’d left school after eighth grade and had suffered from black lung disease and underemployment most of his life. Yet at one point, he’d scrimped and saved his meager earnings to buy a telescope. She didn’t know that at the time, for he no longer had it. But he had learned to make his own, and he taught his granddaughter the craft. By the time she was ten, she’d learned how to grind mirrors; she would set them up in her backyard and stand out there for hours, often shivering in the cold, inspecting the night sky.
There wasn’t much money for college in the family of a state trooper with five children. As Maria neared the end of high school, her guidance counselor encouraged her to apply for a scholarship to Penn State. After selecting her, the scholarship board called her guidance counselor to instead suggest the University of Pennsylvania. Maria matriculated that fall, helping make ends meet by operating telescopes for visitors at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. In 1986, when she graduated with a PhD from Brown, she was the first person from her high school to ever earn a doctorate.
As a graduate student, Maria worked on theoretical models of planetary evolution. The data set she needed to test those models wasn’t available, so she decided to collect it herself. As a newly minted researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, she worked with the team for one of the instruments on Mars Observer, a radar altimeter to measure the physical landscape—the depths and heights of the Martian terrain. But after the Challenger shuttle exploded with seven astronauts aboard, NASA put the mission on hold. Mars Observer’s launch was delayed by a couple of years, and soon instruments were being jettisoned to control the ballooning costs. NASA still wanted an altimeter to fly, but it could no longer afford the one being built. The agency announced it would hold an open competition for a cheaper version.
Maria knew that, as part of Star Wars—Ronald Reagan’s Cold War missile defense system—the United States had been investing billions of dollars in laser technology. She finagled a security clearance, and she and some other young scientists started meeting with engineers. They had already sorted out the power-supply issues, nailed the pointing, and figured out a way to stabilize the jitter. All the planets were still being mapped with radar, but Maria realized that a laser system, if she could get it to work, would blow that method out of the water.
The idea was to measure the distance from an orbiting spacecraft to the surface of Mars and use that to calculate the altitude of the Martian terrain. The instrument would shoot laser bursts, each lasting only eight billionths of a second, and then very accurately time their reflections. Even though the actual power in the laser was just a fiftieth of that in a refrigerator light, the instrument was designed to render arrestingly accurate readings of topography.
When NASA eventually approved the $10-million proposal, it was taking a huge risk: It wasn’t entirely clear that this idea would work. The pointing of the gold-coated beryllium telescope had to be extremely precise, as did the timing, down to nanoseconds. The instrument had to have its own temperature-controlled clock, cooled to avoid drift. Even the slightest error would be difficult to correct. There were other obstacles too. When the engineers wouldn’t let scientists into the cleanroom, Maria had to get certified in laser safety as well as laser engineering. She worked on the mission for years—while she got married and had two children, whom she would sometimes need to strap into carriers and take to meetings. When time came for the launch, she brought along her toddler and infant son, who, upon hearing the rocket rumble, drowsily opened his eyes, looked around, then fell quietly back to sleep.
When Mars Observer at last began snapping its first far-off pictures of Mars, about a month before its arrival, Maria could almost taste how good the data would be. Precision was her strong suit, and she was certain that she and her colleagues had succeeded in building one of the world’s most exact scientific instruments.
* * *
—
THREE DAYS BEFORE Mars Observer was scheduled to enter its orbit, in late August of 1993, Maria was out buying groceries. She and the leader of the MOLA instrument team were about to leave for JPL, but she wanted to stock up on food and drinks so the rest of the team could join the celebration remotely. As she was returning from the store, she got a call saying that the orbiter had gone silent. A short communications outage had been planned right before atmospheric entry, so she wasn’t all that concerned. It seemed the engineers were just having some trouble reestablishing the link.
Boarding her flight to California, Maria was hopeful that rebooting the computers would do the trick—that the problem would be solved by the time she landed in L.A. But when she reached JPL, the situation was unchanged. As the hours passed, she became more worried. New commands were being sent every twenty minutes, with the deep-space tracking antennas in Canberra, Madrid, and California all focused exclusively on trying to reestablish contact. Maria and her colleagues clung to the hope that the automatic controls would still perform, firing the rockets to enter into orbit. If the spacecraft didn’t slip right by the planet, it would buy the engineers more time to work on the problem. Infrared military and science telescopes in Hawaii hastily organized to try to detect the heat of the distant maneuver, but when the moment came, clouds in the Pacific obscured the view. Time continued to tick by, with each hour feeling more and more desperate. A week later, there was still no news. The spacecraft had vanished like a phantom.
Maria finally flew back to Maryland. She ended up with the last seat on the last flight of the day, a middle in
the very back row. She had been three days away from getting an extraordinary stream of data and now she had nothing. When the flight attendant saw the devastated look on her face and asked what was wrong, Maria confided that she’d lost her spacecraft. “I hope you find it,” the flight attendant said when Maria disembarked, slipping her a full bottle of wine.
The next day, when Maria went into her office, she spent a whole afternoon just staring out the window. She realized she had nothing to do. There was no black box to recover, no telemetry data to help understand where the spacecraft had veered off course. An investigative panel assembled by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory couldn’t replicate a single failure mode as they tested piece after piece of the spacecraft design. The following January, long after Maria had resigned herself to the fact that the Mars Observer would never be heard from again, the panel announced that a rupture in the propulsion system as it powered back up after the long cruise was probably to blame, a piece of tubing tucked down under the spacecraft’s thermal blanket. The subsequent roar of fluids had most likely forced the spacecraft into a catastrophic spin.
* * *
—
IN THE MONTHS after the heartbreaking loss, Maria and a Cornell scientist named Steve Squyres teamed up to try to get funding put back in the budget to refly the mission. They started spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill. They would make appointments and show up in suits, pleading with members of Congress. Yes, the government had spent money on hardware, but it had mostly spent money on people and figuring out how to do things no one knew how to do. Now they just needed new hardware. And in a move that would have pleased William Pickering, who from his mountaintop observatory in Jamaica had penned those regular missives about Mars seventy-five years earlier, she’d tell skeptics to go home and ask their kids what they would think of having regular weather reports from Mars. That kind of inspiration, she told them, was the promise of this mission if it could just fly.
The Sirens of Mars Page 12