Martian Summer

  When he was in high school, Peter resolved he was going to become a great writer.

  “The only problem, I wasn’t all that good at it,” he says. Although, to be perfectly frank, it’s not true. Peter has a great gift for narrative. He knows that it is only through story that he can recast complex ideas into exciting, easily digestible bits. Without that, the science he and so many others do is lost to the wider world. He expects his colleagues to do the same and often shakes his fists at their outrageously confusing graphs and explanations. Before the mission Peter sat in on all of the practice press conferences and media training sessions the science team underwent.

  “There’s too much information … We can’t understand any of that … Who’s going to think the study is exciting? … I don’t even know what that is, and I run this mission!” Peter would shout from behind a folding table while his co-investigators practiced explaining their instruments to an imaginary press corps.

  “You’re going to lose your audience in the details. You have to try to tell a story,” he would reiterate over and over again.

  After high school, Peter decided to set aside his dream of being a great writer. Science came more naturally to him. Some of the rebellious teenage angst he felt toward his father’s profession subsided. Nevertheless, the pull of counter-culture was still strong. It was the sixties.

  “I was ready to leave home and start experiencing the world,” Peter says. Peter started his studies at Occidental, a small college in California. He didn’t stay long.

  “There was no excitement. I wanted to be part of the social revolution going on outside my window,” he says. Peter transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. There he could study physics but also hear Allen Ginsberg and The Grateful Dead.

  “I was at the first ‘Be-In’ in Dolores Park,” Peter says with pride. “There were people everywhere off their heads on acid.” Smith struggled through school. “There was so much going on, I just couldn’t compete with the more dedicated kids,” he says. “They seemed to want it more. I was happy enough to muddle through.” His junior year, everything changed.

  “Before that, it was 1969 outside my window. How could I pay attention?” He couldn’t. Peter was coasting along and didn’t really know what he wanted out of life. Then, midway through his sixth semester at Berkeley, in a class on electricity and magnetism, Peter Smith found his calling.

  Peter pushes the bread off his plate and holds it up.

  “Why does this plate have a reflective pattern?” Peter asks. I don’t know. “What is light? How do we experience this?” The course material proved more exciting than the sci-fi he’d devoured as a kid. It seemed to work its strange magic and felt better than the headiness he experienced in Dolores Park.

  “I wanted to understand; and the only way to do that was to get to work,” he says. The professor of the electricity and magnetism class, Sumner Davis, is a teacher Peter will never forget.

  “He starts class one day by saying he had never had a student in the entire history of his teaching career score so low on a first exam and then go on to get the highest grade on the midterm,” Peter says. “I knew he was talking about me, because I failed the first exam and was pretty sure I got an A on that midterm,” Peter says with a big grin. He got an A+.

  “I went up to him after class and asked him for a job. You don’t even have to pay me. I just want to work on this,” Peter recalls.

  “I’ll pay you anyway,” Professor Davis replied.

  “Then he led me down to the second basement. I didn’t even know there was a second basement,” he says. They traveled down a long hallway and through a small door.

  “I started to get a little nervous. He opened the door and it looked like Dr. Frankenstein’s lair. There were tubes and beakers and wires,” Peter tells me. “Gosh, it was a dream.”

  They went into a long black room bored deep into the bedrock to reduce the vibrations from street life above.

  “The machine looked like a giant beast with tubes and lenses for eyes,” Peter says. It was better than he could have imagined.

  “Here’s your desk. You start today,” Professor Davis told him.

  “What do I do?” Peter asked.

  “You’ll run the spectrometer,” Davis replied.

  “In my six months there, I learned more than my previous three years in university. I learned every part of that machine,” Peter tells me.

  PETER USED THE EXPERIENCE IN THE SECOND BASEMENT TO GET HIS next job with one of Davis’s former graduate students.

  “I left for Hawai’i as soon as I graduated. I rented a small boat and lived on it with a friend. We could hear the music from the bar in the harbor. It was great. And I was a spectroscopist. My mother loved to say that I was a spectroscopist,” he says.

  Peter loved space as a boy. He would imagine himself in the sci-fi books he read, fighting aliens on Mars. At the University of Hawai’i he lived out those boyhood fantasies.

  “It was an institute for astronomy, so I decided to take some classes. I went up to the telescope on Mauna Kea, and it re-ignited my interest in planets.”

  “We weren’t just building spectrographs there; we were building spectrographs for space,” he says. “I learned how to build to space-hardened equipment.” Equipment that goes into space needs special certification, it has to survive radiation, shaking, freezing, heating, and a host of other tests. NASA wants to see space parts with pedigree on missions it finances. You must show that your space equipment has a history of performing well in space. It can be a tricky process. He finishes his lasagna. We order dessert.

  “Dana gets all fussy if I eat like this,” he tells me. Dana and Peter married in the back yard of Peter’s rocket-ship–shaped home in 2005. A mutual friend introduced them in 2001 just before Peter won his Mars commission. Try competing for attention with a Mars mission.

  “I asked if she wanted to go SCUBA diving on our first date. Dana said she didn’t know how. Neither did I,” Peter says. “So we learned together. What better way to get to know someone?” They signed up for the class and had a great time together, and although it was a stretch to add SCUBA to an already overbooked Mars schedule, they somehow managed to complete the course. The final certification dive took place in the Gulf of Mexico (Arizona is not known for its scenic beaches).

  “Dana called me in a panic. I was out of town for Phoenix business when the SCUBA instructor called to ask if we wanted one or two hotel rooms. She didn’t know what to tell him. I said ‘One!’ Isn’t that the point?” Peter says with a big laugh. “We’ve been together ever since.” And very happily, his face certainly never lights up with a huge smile when I come by the SOC.

  Dana is a sculptor. She spends most of her time in a studio on the edge of town where she crafts outlandish dinosaur-themed pieces. My favorite is a religious icon called “Triceratops and Child.” You can see her work featured in the Tucson airport.

  Dessert arrives. Peter says after living like a sailor on a boat in Hawai’i, he felt called back to Tucson. And so he returned to the University of Arizona to get his Ph.D. in optics. He did two years of his program before getting restless.

  “Frankly, I got bored and started to think I didn’t really need to go through the whole process,” he says regretfully and takes a spoonful of tiramisu. He left with his Master’s degree. In the hyper-competitive world of building space instruments, a lack of a Ph.D. was a mark against him. With so few missions, competition for commissions is highly competitive and sometimes elitist.

  Peter landed a job in Tucson at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Lab in 1978. The same year, his father published his memoir, Life’s a Pleasant Institution: The Peregrinations of a Rockefeller Doctor.

  Peter returned home. He got married and had a daughter, Sara. The marriage didn’t work out, but it gave him the thing he says he’s most proud of.

  “She’s a force in the world. Truly a great heart and certainly one great thing I’
ve done,” Peter says. The Phoenix mission coincides with his thirtieth anniversary at the lab.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  PARALYZED OPS

  SOL 84

  NILTON RENNO RETURNS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. He sends me an email saying he will not return to the SOC, deciding it would be better to work on his “liquid water on Mars” paper in his own lab.

  After the original water splashup on sol 47, Mike Hecht apologized to Nilton for his attack at the EOS.

  “I retract my primary objection to your speculations,” Mike said in a message, and added that he now believed the perchlorate findings made Nilton’s hypothesis possible.

  Then something changed his mind. Mike Hecht has new reservations and evidence that Nilton’s argument is flawed. And to prove it, Hecht gave a presentation of his own at the end-of-sol science meeting. Through a series of complicated equations, Hecht presents his idea that the lander struts, where the nodules form, represent the coldest point in the area (a local minimum), and the nodules are growing because of frost, the result of a cold spot.

  Mike and Nilton both agree on the presence of ice (frozen water) and vapor (gaseous water), but can’t come to terms over the evidence for liquid water. The upshot is, Hecht still thinks Nilton is wrong and he should not publish his water paper.

  “There isn’t enough evidence,” Mike Hecht says. He argues Nilton will damage the credibility of the team when he publishes his paper.

  Nilton, for his part, cries foul. And one of the reasons he didn’t come back is because Mike Hecht has the tools in the MECA lab to test the hypothesis for Nilton’s argument about thermodynamic evidence for liquid water, and Nilton says Mike asked his team not to run the experiments.

  Hecht says it’s a question of resources. They don’t have enough right now. With only a few weeks left in the mission, there are still a lot of chemistry results that require analysis.

  None of the other team members are too eager to comment either way. They call the dispute a “distraction.” Things are personal now. Nasty voicemail messages and bitter email exchanges are just the beginning.

  “It’s a bit awkward,” one of the scientists tells me.

  “Why would he do this?” Nilton asks.

  Surprisingly, Nilton and Mike are good friends. Well, they were. They both worked at Caltech, and Mike even spent a summer living at Nilton’s home, while they worked on Matador—the dust devil project.

  Two years ago, a mini-rivalry developed. Nilton and Mike got into a dispute over a piece of data that Mike claimed Nilton was suppressing; it was in a calibration report one of his graduate students wrote. Nilton was insulted.

  He wrote Mike Hecht to let him know.

  “I told Hecht that I believed in ethics more than anything,” he tells me.

  Nilton replied to Hecht’s emails accusing his graduate student, Manish. He included the entire list that Hecht copied on the original message. The list included Manish, his graduate student, and Miles Smith, a current Phoenix team member and postdoctoral researcher in Hecht’s research group.

  To Hecht, that was an unacceptable betrayal. He should have never included his students and postdocs on an email that questioned his judgment.

  Since then, they are frenemies. Now this melted ice thawed their cold war. Hecht says Nilton should not be allowed to publish.

  “I was careful to follow the rules, and I should be allowed to say whatever I want,” Nilton says.

  After all the evidence is gathered and both men rest their cases, it’s Peter’s decision. He’ll play Judge Judy and adjudicate the dispute. But in order to do so, he needs time to understand the arguments they’re making. One thing Peter doesn’t have right now is a lot of free time. He still needs to keep the funding coming so Chris doesn’t have to fill out more pink slips and the mission doesn’t fall apart.

  It’s not an easy decision, either. Either Phoenix found the most interesting bit of Mars science in decades and there really is liquid water, or announcing it would be an embarrassing mistake. Some of the scientists who took up Nilton’s cause have already built new Mars models based on his work. David Fisher, a Martian glaciologist on the mission, suspects Nilton’s discovery is going to change how people understand the formation of the polar caps. He’s already trying to model this new idea, and he has some promising results on how Nilton’s discovery enables the ice caps to move over time.

  “Nilton’s brine might solve some of the mysterious gaps in timing,” he tells me.

  “It’s just an idea. No one should be afraid of new ideas,” Nilton says. He argues that there’s no downside for Peter and the team to support him. There’s certainly interesting evidence; why not explore it further? Nilton points out how he carefully followed all the “rules of the road” as the mission dictates for reporting the finding at EOS meetings, inviting any team member who wished to take part in his liquid water research as co-authors.

  Hecht doesn’t have a lot of time or interest in talking to me about it, so I can’t really know why he’s so strongly opposed. I ask him questions in the hall or in the kitchen, but I only manage a “yes” or “no” before he disappears, making me a bit biased toward Nilton (or just lazy pursuing Hecht). Especially since Nilton tried to explain his thermodynamic models and hypothesis countless times over the last few months, and with nearly infinite patience. A fair number of our conversations consisted solely of me saying “I’m not sure I understand.” Eventually I made a mental image of pickle juice and antifreeze forming fantastic Martian brines and Nilton’s argument would briefly come into focus. Hecht’s explanation is lots of thermodynamic equations, difficult. To Hecht’s credit, he is pursuing the science in an effort to disprove Nilton’s theory. And who knows what great things will come out of it. Science stories are rarely smooth.

  A good science story is powerful, and Nilton works hard on his. Just like his little obelisk joke, he’s interested in making sure his audience gets it. In this regard, he provides the basic axioms and they can evaluate for themselves if his conclusion is valid (or funny). Nilton has equations, but he also has a good story. This might be part of what’s got Mike so upset.

  “Please understand that what you are attributing to us are simple summaries of our conclusions as conveyed verbally to the media, not step-by-step analyses,” Mike responded to an engineer’s inquiry about not understanding his argument against liquid water. Hecht notes that no peer-reviewed journal has published Nilton’s claim for liquid water on Mars.

  “If Hecht is so convinced, why doesn’t he publish a counterproposal?” Nilton asks.

  “This is Nilton’s crazy idea. The burden of proof is on him,” is Hecht’s response. Human nature cannot be divorced from science.

  THE MISSION PLODS ON; AND SLOWLY BUT SURELY, NEW DISCOVERIES keep coming in. There were two more successful scoopfuls for MECA and TEGA. This time, TEGA detects calcium carbonate. This finding is a lot easier to digest. It’s not a ground-water contaminant or rocket fuel, it’s TUMS! Yes, calcium carbonate is the main ingredient in TUMS, and it’s also on Mars. Perhaps an ancient alien civilization had indigestion? The scientists surmise otherwise, but they are pleased because calcium carbonate is usually formed in the presence of liquid water. This calcium carbonate did not form recently, but more likely it formed at a time when there was likely lots of water on Mars—not the tiny amounts that Nilton and Mike are arguing about. If there’s lots of calcium carbonate, it could tell a story about lots of liquid water flowing on Mars. Maybe there was a giant salty ocean on Mars. This is an exciting development.

  But there are new problems too. There’s an issue with TEGA. A sticky valve continues to cause havoc. The gas that usually escapes through this valve is getting trapped. When the pressure builds, the signal gets all fouled up and the atom-weighing capabilities of TEGA become unreliable.

  “Also, there might be an issue with the beaker temperature sensor in WCL cell three,” Richard Quinn says. “It may be prudent to consider cell number two
to be the last.” Richard says we’ll have to keep an eye on the length of the day so we can get a full run. In his opinion, they should go for their last sample in a rock-laden trench called Stone Soup.

  “But that’s just my opinion. Of course I’d like us to dig as deep as possible and then see what we get,” Richard says.

  “I spoke with Sam Kounaves and that was his opinion too,” Dick Morris says. Ray Arvidson says Stone Soup is a go.

  The onset of winter brings more surprises. Jim Whiteway, the Canadian weatherman who’s been quietly collecting data, shows a series of photos strung together to make a movie. To everyone’s amazement, it’s snow falling on Mars. Whiteway and his team discovered that Mars has clouds and it snows. What? It snows on Mars. This still doesn’t mean that it rains on Mars—unless Nilton has some crazy tricks up his sleeve. Snow on Mars is unexpected and an amazing discovery. We all applaud and there might even be a gasp. The seasons are changing; it’s winter.

  There are more and more empty desks each day. Mark Lemmon, Tom Pike, and Morten Madsen have already said good-bye.

  “I’m so proud of my kids,” Morten said on his last walkabout through the SOC. “They responded to every challenge we threw at them. I’m really proud.”

  Just last night, Christina von Holstein-Rathlou—one of Morten’s students—prepared an EOS talk about frost forming on the telltale. It twinkles and shimmers when the sun reflects off the little telltale mirror—a little disco-ball first on Mars. Of course it’s the signal that this is our last song of the night.

  Morten was glad that his “kids” got a chance to work a Mars mission and make a real contribution. They’ll be the next generation of the Danish space program. We talked about visiting each other.

  The spacecraft team is long gone, managing heat, data, and everything else from their base in Denver. Equipment starts to disappear too.