The Sirens of Mars

by Sarah Stewart Johnson

  BIOLOGY’S FIVE KINGDOMS…DISSOLVED Of course this had happened before—for centuries, living things had been classified simply as plants or animals.

  REPLACED BY A SYSTEM Carl R. Woese, Otto Kandler, and Mark L. Wheelis, “Towards a Natural System of Organisms: Proposal for the Domains Archaea, Bacteria, and Eucarya,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 87, no. 12 (1990), pp. 4,576–4,579.

  SIMPLE, SINGLE-CELLED ORGANISMS These microbes dominated life on Earth for most of our history. Multicellular organisms are thought to have evolved from unicellular ancestors at least twenty-five times, with a major burst of diversification 600–700 million years ago. Richard K. Grosberg and Richard R. Strathmann, “The Evolution of Multicellularity: A Minor Major Transition?” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 38 (2007), pp. 621–654.

  DOLLY THE SHEEP Keith H. S. Campbell, Jim McWhir, William A. Ritchie, and Ian Wilmut, “Sheep Cloned by Nuclear Transfer from a Cultured Cell Line,” Nature, 380, no. 6569 (1996), p. 64.

  COUNTLESS TONS OF ROCKS During the Late Heavy Bombardment, planetary bodies in our solar system were impacted with a higher amount of material; see: William F. Bottke and Marc D. Norman, “The Late Heavy Bombardment,” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 45 (2017), pp. 619–647.

  WHAT DAVID MCKAY HOPED Kaufman, First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth, p. 107.

  Chapter 6: Traversing

  SIZE OF A SUITCASE “Press Kit: Mars Pathfinder Landing,” NASA (July 7, 1997).

  “FASTER, BETTER, CHEAPER” Howard E. McCurdy, Faster, Better, Cheaper: Low-Cost Innovation in the U.S. Space Program (Baltimore: JHU Press, 2001).

  THE SOUTH BRONX William J. Broad, “Scientist at Work: Daniel S. Goldin, Bold Remodeler of a Drifting Agency,” The New York Times (Dec. 21, 1993).

  A FIFTEENTH THE COST McCurdy, Faster, Better, Cheaper.

  BARREL STRAIGHT INTO A PLANET John Noble Wilford, “More Than 20 Years After Viking, Craft Is to Land, and Bounce, on Mars,” The New York Times (July 1, 1997).

  TWENTY-METER KEVLAR TETHER David R. Williams, “Mars Pathfinder Atmospheric Entry Strategy,” NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (Dec. 30, 2004).

  SURFACE OF A NEW WORLD “Mars Pathfinder Transmits Dramatic Color Images,” CNN (July 5, 1997).

  FEW HUNDRED METERS Mars Pathfinder Frequently Asked Questions, NASA (April 10, 1997).

  WHERE ABOUT 80 PERCENT “Rover ‘Holds Hands’ with Barnacle Bill,” CNN (July 7, 1997).

  ON ROCKER-BOGIES “Mars Curiosity Rover: Wheels and Legs,” NASA.

  FROM FAR-OFF PLACES D. M. Nelson and R. Greeley, “Xanthe Terra Outflow Channel Geology at the Mars Pathfinder Landing Site,” Journal of Geophysical Research Planets, 104, no. 4 (1999), pp. 8,653–8,669.

  “BARNACLE BILL” R. Rieder, T. Economou, H. Wänke, A. Turkevich, J. Crisp, J. Brückner, G. Dreibus, and H. Y. McSween, “The Chemical Composition of Martian Soil and Rocks Returned by the Mobile Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer: Preliminary Results from the X-Ray Mode,” Science, 278, no. 5344 (1997), pp. 1,771–1,774.

  SOLIDIFYING, AND REMELTING John Noble Wilford, “Mars History: Heat and Cold Leave Marks,” The New York Times (July 9, 1997).

  AFTER CARTOON CHARACTERS While these cartoon character names didn’t raise eyebrows in the late 1990s, a decade later, when a fairy-tale naming scheme was chosen during the Mars Phoenix mission, NASA’s legal office realized that NASA could be sued for using copyrighted material. Only names in the public domain were thenceforth allowed. Rod Pyle, Destination Mars: New Explorations of the Red Planet (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2012), p. 238.

  CRESTING INTO DUNES Ronald Greeley, Michael Kraft, Robert Sullivan, Gregory Wilson, Nathan Bridges, Ken Herkenhoff, Ruslan O. Kuzmin, Michael Malin, and Wes Ward, “Aeolian Features and Processes at the Mars Pathfinder Landing Site,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 104, no. E4 (1999), pp. 8,573–8,584.

  “BACK ON MARS” Matt Crenson, “Back on Mars,” The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky., July 5, 1997).

  CLOSED WITH A QUOTE John Noble Wilford, “Scientists Await Craft’s Plunge to Mars Today,” The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky., July 4, 1997).

  “MOST IMPORTANT NUMBER” Mars Pathfinder Science Results: Rotational and Orbital Dynamics, NASA; see also: W. M. Folkner, et al., “Interior Structure and Seasonal Mass Redistribution of Mars from Radio Tracking of Mars Pathfinder,” Science, 278, no. 5,344 (1997), pp. 1,749–1,752.

  THICKER ATMOSPHERE A magnetic field also deflects charged particles in the solar wind, reducing atmospheric loss to space. Even though Venus lacks a dynamo—it’s rotating too slowly—gravity has helped it to hold on to its dense atmosphere. Mars, with its weaker gravity, never had as tight a grip.

  “LAST GREAT CHALLENGE” Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones, Around the World in 20 Days: The Story of Our History-Making Balloon Flight (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 1999).

  CHINA, IRAQ, AND LIBYA Malcolm W. Browne, “Balloon Soars Over Atlantic, Setting Record in Solo Flight,” The New York Times (Aug. 12, 1998).

  FOSSETT WAS Steve Fossett biography, National Aviation Hall of Fame.

  ANNOUNCED TO THE NEW YORK TIMES “Signals from Mars from a Balloon,” The New York Times (May 2, 1909).

  TESLA, CAPTIVATED Out on the plains of the Colorado Plateau, Tesla had constructed a laboratory in a barn-like building with a twenty-four-meter tower, with a sign on the door saying, GREAT DANGER, KEEP OUT. He spent night after night there watching storms in the darkness, detecting lightning strikes with his new equipment. Once he even began picking up what he assumed to be faint extraplanetary signals—disturbances he concluded were coming from Mars—which happened to disappear as Mars set over the horizon. It may have been a Jovian storm, or perhaps even his rival Marconi, who was simultaneously attempting to send pulses across the Atlantic from Cornwall to Canada using an early spark gap transmitter. See: W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton, N.J.; Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 277; Marc Seifer, Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla: Biography of a Genius (New York: Citadel Press, 1998), p. 217.

  ONLY FIVE MINUTES AWAY “That Prospective Communication with Another Planet,” Current Opinion, March 1919, p. 170; Michael Brown, “Radio Mars: The Transformation of Marconi’s Popular Image, 1919–1922,” in Transmitting the Past: Historical and Cultural Perspectives on Broadcasting, ed. J. Emmett Winn and Susan Lorene Brinson (University of Alabama Press, 2005), p. 23.

  “ALUMINUM FOR LIGHTNESS” “Signals from Mars from a Balloon,” The New York Times.

  THE MASSACHUSETTS “Offer Balloon to Todd,” The New York Times (May 7, 1909).

  “THE BIG LISTEN” Todd had lobbied for no less than a worldwide radio silence to try to detect signals from Mars. This, he believed, would be the only way to address the fact that radio traffic had begun to swamp the airwaves, complicating his listening attempts. During “the Big Listen,” Todd even enlisted the help of Francis Jenkins, the man who would go on to open the first television broadcasting station in America. Jenkins had invented a radio telescope of sorts, which he called a “radio photo message continuous transmission machine.” The apparatus’s nine-meter-long swath of chemical-treated film was designed for the picturization of radio signals and would be the perfect way to create the first human record of Martian communication. That August, the film Jenkins’s machine produced at 1515 Connecticut Avenue showed, in “black on white, everything that was ‘picked up’ out of the air in about twenty-nine hours with a receiving apparatus adjusted to a wave length of six thousand meters.” Three and a half meters of footage—a strange series of dots and dashes—was turned over to the chief of the code section in the office of the chief signal officer of the Army, and the rest to the chief of the radio division of the Bureau of Standards. Todd, surely recognizing th
at he had failed to demonstrate the existence of an alien civilization capable of communicating with Earth by radio, nevertheless reserved judgment on the results and hailed the experiment as a breakthrough for the scientific process. “We now have a permanent record which can be studied,” he said, “and who knows, until we have studied it, just what these signals may have been? But the important thing is to have a record.” He continued: “Three years ago Marconi was reported as saying he had heard signals from Mars. A few days ago he was quoted as saying he was too busy to listen to possible messages from Mars and that it was a ridiculous idea to do so. He changed his mind, and no one knows what he heard the first time. With our photograph, however, it is not a question of what one man heard. It is a permanent record, which all can study.” He went on, “The Jenkins machine is perhaps the hypothetical Martians’ best chance of making themselves known to Earth. If they have, as well they may, a machine that now is transmitting earthward their ‘close-up’ of faces, scenes, buildings, landscapes, and whatnot, their sunlight values having been converted into electric values before projection earthward, all these would surely register on the weirdly unique little mechanism.” See: “Weird ‘Radio Signal’ Film Deepens Mystery of Mars,” The Washington Post (Aug. 27, 1924); Craig P. Bauer, Unsolved!: The History and Mystery of the World’s Greatest Ciphers from Ancient Egypt to Online Secret Societies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 500–503.

  AUDOUIN DOLLFUS He worked at the Meudon Observatory in Paris and nearly convinced Carl Sagan to accept a postdoctoral fellowship with him in lieu of going to Berkeley. Sheehan and O’Meara, Mars: The Lure of the Red Planet, p. 233; Ray Spangenburg, Kit Moser, and Diane Moser, Carl Sagan: A Biography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Company, 2004), p. 42.

  WEATHER BALLOONS, CLUSTERED Pierre de Latil and Tom Margerison, “Planetary Observations by the Multi-Balloon Technique,” The New Scientist (May 7, 1959); Louis de Gouyon Matignon, “Audouin Dollfus, The French Aeronaut,” Space Legal Issues (May 25, 2019).

  SLUNG BENEATH De Latil and Margerison, “Planetary Observations by the Multi-Balloon Technique,” The New Scientist.

  STRANGE HAZARD Ibid.

  STRING OF SPANISH ONIONS Ibid.

  WROTE IN HIS LOGBOOK Mark Karpel, “The Drifters,” Air & Space (Aug. 2010).

  FOURTEEN THOUSAND METERS Matignon, “Audouin Dollfus, The French Aeronaut,” Space Legal Issues; Sheehan and O’Meara, Mars: The Lure of the Red Planet, p. 233.

  FAILED TO GET HIS MEASUREMENT Dollfus was able to make other measurements of Venus and the moon on that flight. A couple of years later, at a spot high in the Swiss Alps, Dollfus tried again for Mars, setting up a special spectroscope that allowed him to separate the signal from Mars by its Doppler shift, and with it he finally was able to secure a positive detection. He calculated that if all the water in the Martian atmosphere condensed to the surface, it would form a layer less than eight one-thousandths of an inch thick. As happy as he was that he’d finally succeeded in making the observation, he also knew what it meant: that Mars was many times drier than the most parched places on Earth, and that it would be challenging, perhaps very challenging, for life-forms to inhabit its surface. Sheehan and O’Meara, Mars: The Lure of the Red Planet, p. 233; Matignon, “Audouin Dollfus, The French Aeronaut,” Space Legal Issues.

  OUR AEROBOT PAYLOAD Raymond E. Arvidson, et al., “Aerobot Measurements Successfully Obtained During Solo Spirit Balloon Mission,” EOS, 80, no. 14 (1999), pp. 153, 158–159.

  AEROBOT HAD SENSORS Tony Fitzpatrick, “NASA Payload Part of Cargo on Solo Spirit,” Record, 22, no. 15 (Dec. 11, 1997).

  STADIUM IN MENDOZA Tribune News Services, “Fossett Lifts Off on 4th Balloon Attempt to Circle the World,” Chicago Tribune (Aug. 8, 1998).

  THE LATEST TECHNOLOGIES Steve Mills, “Balloonist Charting a High-Tech Course,” Chicago Tribune (Jan. 19, 1997).

  SPECIAL ROZIÈRE DESIGN Michelle Knott, “Technology: Up, up and Around the World,” New Scientist (Dec. 21, 1996).

  EVERY TEN SECONDS Arvidson, et al., “Aerobot Measurements Successfully Obtained During Solo Spirit Balloon Mission,” EOS, pp. 153–159.

  WAS LEFT BOBBING Malcolm W. Browne, “Balloonist to Take It Easy After Stormy Crash at Sea,” The New York Times (Aug. 18, 1998).

  HE ACTIVATED THAT BEACON TWICE Jon Jeter, “Storm Ends Balloonist’s Quest in Coral Sea,” The Washington Post (Aug. 17, 1998).

  AUSTRALIAN YACHTSMAN Rohan Sullivan, “Balloonist Fossett Rescued from Sea,” AP News (August 17, 1998); “Balloonist Rescued Off Australia,” CNN (August 17, 1998).

  RELYING ON OXYGEN TANKS AND BARELY SLEEPING Steve Fossett interview, Public Broadcasting Corporation, NOVA.

  SINGED HIS EYEBROWS Jeter, “Storm Ends Balloonist’s Quest in Coral Sea,” The Washington Post.

  “SMELL THE ROSES” Browne, “Balloonist to Take It Easy After Stormy Crash at Sea,” The New York Times.

  Chapter 7: Periapsis

  KALEIDOSCOPIC NEW MAP The new map was presented at the American Geophysical Union Conference in December 1998; see: M. T. Zuber, D. E. Smith, J. B. Garvin, D. O. Muhleman, S. C. Solomon, H. J. Zvally, G. A. Neumann, O. Aharonson, and A. Ivanov, “Geometry of the North Polar Icecap of Mars from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter,” American Geophysical Union Conference (1998). It was published the same month; see: Maria T. Zuber, David E. Smith, Sean C. Solomon, James B. Abshire, Robert S. Afzal, Oded Aharonson, Kathryn Fishbaugh, et al., “Observations of the North Polar Region of Mars from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter,” Science, 282, no. 5,396 (1998), pp. 2,053–2,060. Also see: “New View of Mars’ North Pole Reported in Science,” EurekAlert! (Dec. 6, 1998).

  SMOOTH AS THE ABYSSAL PLAINS Oded Aharonson, Maria T. Zuber, and Daniel H. Rothman, “Statistics of Mars’ Topography from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter: Slopes, Correlations, and Physical Models.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 106, no. E10 (2001), pp. 23723–23735.

  “STRANGE, LARGE OCEANIC FISHES” “Background of the MOLA Investigation: Background and General Information,” MOLA Science Investigation, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

  “PLANETARY OBSERVERS” “The ’80s > Mars Observer,” NASA JPL; Michael C. Malin, et al., “An Overview of the 1985–2006 Mars Orbiter Camera Science Investigation,” Mars: The International Journal of Mars Science and Exploration, 5 (2010), pp. 1–60.

  AMIDST THE COAL FIELDS MIT News Office, “3Q: Maria Zuber, Daughter of Coal Country,” MIT News (Feb. 27, 2017).

  SCENES OF MISSION CONTROL “Maria T. Zuber,” YouTube video, posted by MIT Infinite History (April 8, 2016).

  LIEUTENANT UHURA Maria’s GRAIL mission to the moon would launch on the forty-fifth anniversary of Star Trek, her favorite television show. Nichelle Nichols, the woman who played Lieutenant Uhura, would be there to celebrate. When she took on the role in 1966, Nichols was one of the first African American actresses portrayed on television in a non-menial role (Martin Luther King once told her Star Trek was the only television show he let his children watch, and it was because of her powerful role).

  SCRIMPED AND SAVED “Maria Zuber: The Geophysicist Became the First Woman to Lead a NASA Planetary Spacecraft Mission,” Physics Today (June 27, 2017).

  FOR HOURS Maria Zuber, personal interview by Sarah Johnson (Cambridge, Mass.: May 1, 2019).

  WITH FIVE CHILDREN Ibid.

  UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA “Maria T. Zuber,” YouTube video, MIT Infinite History.

  FRANKLIN INSTITUTE Chandler, “In Profile: Maria Zuber,” MIT News.

  MODELS OF PLANETARY EVOLUTION As a graduate student, Maria worked on models of fluid dynamics, often involving highly nonlinear viscous fluids; e.g., see: M. T. Zuber and E. M. Parmentier, “A Geometric Analysis of Surface Deformation: Implications for the Tectonic Evolution of Ganymede,” Icarus, 60, no. 1 (1984), pp. 200–210; M. T. Zuber, “A
Dynamic Model for Ridge Belts on Venus and Constraints on Lithospheric Structure,” Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, 17 (1986).

  A CHEAPER VERSION “Maria T. Zuber,” YouTube video, MIT Infinite History.

  FINAGLED A SECURITY CLEARANCE Zuber, personal interview by Johnson.

  IN A REFRIGERATOR LIGHT Bruce Banerdt, “The Martian Chronicles,” vol. 1, no. 3, NASA.

  WHEN NASA EVENTUALLY APPROVED Zuber, personal interview by Johnson.

  SNAPPING ITS FIRST FAR-OFF PICTURES The MOLA instrument did not itself have a camera, but the spacecraft did. It was a three-component system, with one narrow-angle and two wide-angle cameras. Michael C. Malin, G. E. Danielson, A. P. Ingersoll, H. Masursky, J. Veverka, M. A. Ravine, and T. A. Soulanille, “Mars Observer Camera,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 97, no. E5 (1992), pp. 7,699–7,718.

  RIGHT BEFORE ATMOSPHERIC ENTRY Michael C. Malin, et al., “An Overview of the 1985–2006 Mars Orbiter Camera Science Investigation,” Mars: The International Journal of Mars Science and Exploration. The communications outage was planned to protect the spacecraft while the propulsion system tanks (which would be used to slow the spacecraft down, allowing it to be captured into orbit) were being pressurized.

  MARIA WAS HOPEFUL Zuber, personal interview by Johnson.

  EVERY TWENTY MINUTES John Noble Wilford, “NASA Loses Communication with Mars Observer,” The New York Times (Aug. 23, 1993).

  TRYING TO REESTABLISH CONTACT Wilford, “Another Hope to Save Mars Craft Is Dashed,” The New York Times (Aug. 26, 1993).

  CLOUDS IN THE PACIFIC Ibid.

  LIKE A PHANTOM Ben Evans, “And Then Silence: 25 Years Since the Rise and Fall of Mars Observer,” America Space (Sept.24, 2017).

  “I HOPE YOU FIND IT” Zuber, personal interview by Johnson.

  THE PANEL ANNOUNCED Like a great grizzly, the spacecraft had been hibernating, but the communications-satellite technology hadn’t been designed to lie dormant for months. In January 1994, the investigation panel from the Naval Research Laboratory concluded that the most likely cause of the spacecraft’s disappearance was a ruptured fuel-pressurization tank in its main propulsion system. Hypergolic monomethyl hydrazine may have leaked past valves during the eleven-month journey to Mars and inadvertently mixed with nitrogen tetroxide. The leaking fuel may have induced an extremely high spin rate and likely damaged critical components aboard Mars Observer itself. “Mars Observer Mission Failure Investigation Board Report Vol. 1,” NASA (Dec. 31, 1993).