In spite of Peter’s objection to the drama around the sideshow surrounding Nilton’s findings, he’s upbeat about the work.
“Nilton’s blobs led to a lot of interesting findings on perchlorate. The liquid water that he saw on the legs probably had a lot to do with the effect of the force of the rockets that came at landing. The planet is not covered in liquid water. But it might be covered in perchlorate, and that might have big impact on how we measure organics,” Peter says.
The perchlorate findings pointed the team in a new and interesting direction. Viking I and II searched for organics and found nothing. That led most Mars researchers to think there is no organic material and little possibility for life, at least in the equatorial regions of Mars. That was one compelling reason to send Phoenix to the nortern plains. Maybe something was different up there. The Phoenix findings might break open the possibility that Mars is a quite bit different than we imagined.
Perchlorate is a powerful oxidizer. When it’s heated in TEGA (or in the thermal analyzer that Viking had) it might have destroyed any evidence of organic material. That’s why Phoenix or the Viking mission didn’t see it; not because it wasn’t there. Chris McKay and his colleague Rafael Navarro-González decided to test this new hypothesis. They went down to the Atacama Desert to find out what would happen if they repeated the Viking experiments with soil from this desert in Chile. They added perchlorate, roughly the amount that the MECA team calculated, to the Atacama soil—which has organic and biologic material in it. When they ran the experiments, they found no traces of organics. They were gone. But they did see some of the same signatures from the release of chlorine. Same as Phoenix!
“That might not be proof, but it’s a good fingerprint,” Peter says excitedly about the future of Mars.
While the Viking experiments were redone in the hyper-arid desert of Chile, one of Peter’s grad students, Doug Archer, investigated a mysterious gas release that the TEGA team saw at 300 degrees Celsius. Peter thinks it represents the moment perchlorate destroys the evidence of organics. Still more clues that Mars might indeed be covered with organic and possibly biologic material. We just can’t detect it quite as easily as we originally thought.
“He thinks he can show that there’s one to ten parts per million of organic material in the soil. That’s like 0.0005% of the soil. Now we’ve got liquid water and organics,” Peter says, pretending to smash his fist on the table as an exclamatory gesture. And it just gets better. Selby Cull, a student from Ray Arvidson’s group, is looking into evidence that there was perchlorate all over the landing site. And maybe that will lead to showing that perchlorate is all over Mars. She thinks she sees evidence in the some of the SSI photography.
“So even if Nilton’s liquid water is just a local condition, perchlorate is probably not,” Peter says with enthusiasm about ongoing discovery. “This makes this mission a real stepping stone. This is a great segue for the next Mars mission, MSL [Mars Science Laboratory]. They have a way of detecting organic material by heating and another method that doesn’t use heat. We don’t have proof, but we’re getting closer to understanding.”
Perchlorate is a great story. Maybe there are microbial friends on Mars using it as a food source. And wouldn’t it be an ironic twist if this very food source burned up these organics and microbes, hiding their presence from human detectors for decades. And to complicate this picture, perchlorate is extremely toxic to humans. If it’s all over Mars, that would pose a big problem for human explorers of the future.
“Don’t forget about the dust story. These are the highest-resolution pictures ever taken of Martian soil,” Peter says, pulling together all the research into a kind of winding Mars narrative. “There’s two sizes of soil. The larger particles that would feel like sand. They look like little footballs and the sand is all different colors. There are clear ones and black ones. Some people think they’re volcanic glass. But the other size we see is the tiny fines; it would feel like face powder.” These tiny bits in the Martian regolith would get everywhere and we would need to consider how to mitigate this dust problem for the astronauts if it has all this toxic stuff in it. Mars would be a truly dangerous and exciting place. Would this perchlorate story dampen any hopes to some day establish a colony on Mars? That question will take a long time to answer.
“The paradigm of Mars as being uninhabitable, that we have from the Viking mission, is probably wrong. The ‘you can’t find life on Mars’ story that we hear is certainly not the full story. There’s more out there, and we’re on our way to finding it,” Peter says. Then we eat.
“THE SCIENTISTS WERE WORRIED THAT ‘AVIATION LEAK’ MIGHT HAVE paid you to release data,” Peter tells me when we meet the following afternoon. “So I had to keep you out of certain meetings. When we first started planning the mission, I thought it made sense to have three pillars: science, education, and promotion.” The third pillar didn’t go over well. There was a lot of resistance to “promoting” the mission. People were hyper-sensitive to the idea of marketing a mission to the public.
“How would you even know a mission is having a mission if they don’t advertise any better than a grade ‘C’ movie?” Peter asks rhetorically. “No one was too excited by that idea. I thought people were going to revolt when I suggested we advertise the mission.” This certainly helps explain the “awkward red-headed stepchild” of space feeling I had for the better part of the mission. The conventional wisdom is that space is so awesome, people will just flock to it without any effort to bring people in. Peter felt pressure from key members of the team every time he pursued a larger media angle for the mission. They resented the idea that he would pay someone to drive participation outside of a purely journalistic or educational play. He didn’t want to have a mutiny before they even launched. So he needed to proceed with extreme caution. It’s fine if they want to keep commerce out of their science, but they could at least make an effort to sell space science to their constituents.
“We wanted to do a bug’s eye perspective to show what it would be like to get scooped up and baked in TEGA. Who wouldn’t want to see that? But no one wanted any part of it. ‘We can’t say we’re going to find life on Mars,’ they all complained.” Peter and I shake our heads.
They failed to see how this was one way to make a personal connection with the audience and let them feel like part of the discovery.
“I want to do things that people will get excited about.” Peter understands in order to do that, you have to make it personal. Touch people. He clarifies that he’s a scientist and not a policy man, but he thinks it’s important that people are excited about how their research dollars are spent. “We need a vision. We need someone to propose something that would excite people. I think that NASA should focus on sending a manned mission to an asteroid!” Peter thinks asteroids are an exciting way to push our technical space capabilities and explore something brand-new.
“Let me show you something,” Peter says as he disappears into his office. He returns and clears a space on the table. It’s filled with an exam he’s meant to grade this weekend. Peter shows me a movie of all the near-earth objects that have been discovered since 1980; about half a million. The visualization shows a crowded solar system and scary red blips of asteroids that cross the Earth’s orbit uncomfortably often. The movie, made by a British astronomer, shows how the discoveries progress over time, most happening only in the last few years. There are no words in this movie, but the message is clear: the better we get at looking, the more we find.
“This is something people would care about because these are relevant. These are a potential threat to the Earth and we’ve never been to one. Some day one of these guys is going to be coming at us.” Peter closes his laptop. “This is it. This is our exciting mission. Let’s figure out how to adjust the orbit and save ourselves. You can try pushing it with thrusters, pulling it with gravity, putting a solar sail or ion engine on it. It doesn’t take much to move if you have time. It would be over the
course of years. Wouldn’t that be a great mission? We’d be taking control of our space. We’d prove a concept. And maybe it would take two or three missions. But you’d get a lot of great research in moving these things. I think people would love it.”
Peter explains how it all works. He gestures with his hands to show an asteroid being tailed by a spacecraft.
“You don’t have to land on it the way you do on the moon, so it’s less dangerous. You just drift over. Swing on down on some kind of tether and pull yourself back.” Sounds pretty straightforward. “And of course, I’m working on some new miniature HD cameras that would film every move they’d make. Don’t you think?”
That sounds amazing. One of Peter’s other projects is getting miniature HD cameras space-certified so that all missions have great imagery to share with the viewers back home.
“If we’re going to do something with humans, it should be interesting. The problem with the space station is that no one really knows what goes on up there. They’re doing interesting things, but do you know what it is?” Peter asks me.
“Something with crystals,” I say, embarrassed because I’m supposed to know these things.
“Right,” Peter says. “There are interesting experiments going on there, but we can get more from our investment.” Build something interesting. Peter is working on a project called Osiris Rex. It would be an unmanned trip to an asteroid. A first step toward the larger manned mission to an asteroid which Peter thinks is the right path for NASA. Osiris Rex, a well-funded Discovery-class mission. It would land on an asteroid, retrieve a sample—not just dust—and bring it back to Earth for study. A lot of the work that would go into such a mission would rocket our understanding and further planetary and deep-space missions.
“Maybe it’s gonna be Space X. Or maybe Burt Rutan comes up with a new safe way to do things. But it’s time for something new. The shuttles were designed in the late seventies. They need a warehouse of parts to keep running because no one makes them anymore,” Peter tells me. “Wouldn’t people like to see NASA on the cutting edge? That’s part of the reason I want to build new cameras. I don’t want to send 1990s cameras to Mars anymore. There’s a thrill in trying to build something great for space. Maybe others are working on them and they’ll get there first, but I want to build my own. I don’t want to buy someone else’s.”
Peter will continue to work on miniature HD cameras, an asteroid mission, and even a moon-landing project over the next few years. After that, he thinks he might retire.
“Retire, but not sit around. Maybe I’ll start a company or something.” He objects to my insinuation that he’ll just sit in a rocking chair when he moves from his rocket-ship–shaped home in the center of town out to an adobe in the hills.
AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY CLOSED ITS CAPE CANAVERAL bureau and fired many of its staffers, including Craig Covault. He now reports for an online space magazine. He maintains that his White House sources were correct.
Phoenix II was packaged up and sent to JPL for a little spruce-up before it takes its final trip to the Smithsonian in Washington. And NASA cancelled the Scout Program that gave rise to Phoenix. There won’t be any more pitches for low-cost innovative freelance-led missions to Mars for the foreseeable future. The next Mars mission, Mars Science Laboratory, called “Curiosity,” is scheduled to launch at the end of 2011. Stay tuned.
*Smith, Peter. “H2O at the Phoenix Landing Site.” Science. 3 July 2009: Vol. 325, no. 5936, pp. 58-61.
INDEX
A
Aldrin, Buzz, 6, 159
ALH84001, 4, 317
Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, 34
Anselarian, Garu, 27–28
Antarctica, 4, 5, 14–15, 217, 317
Apollo mission, 3, 159
application process identifications (APIDs), 101–3, 198–99
Archer, Doug, 307, 328
Armstrong, Neil, 6, 159
Arvidson, Ray
and permafrost, 186
and safed shutdowns, 183
and scraping mission, 219, 223
and soil samples, 29, 62, 63
and TEGA results, 77, 82–83, 90, 180, 281, 320
and water possibilities, 186, 192–95
asteroids, 330–32
Astronomy Magazine, 125
astrosociology, 210
Atacama Desert, 263, 265–66, 328
Atmospherics Science Theme Group (ASTG), 44, 112, 180–82
Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), 246, 257, 268, 323
Aviation Week & Space Technology, 25, 123–24, 239, 246–47, 250, 255, 258–59, 272, 282, 291, 294, 332
B
Baby Bear sample, 91–92, 252
bacteria, 317
balloon-popping, 210–11
Banks, Maria, 152
Bargmann, Joe, 237
Bass, Deborah, 176
Bell, Julia
and finding ice, 131–32, 135–36, 144
and missing pieces, 109
and photo mosaics, 175
and RA dig, 285, 287
and safed shutdowns, 182
and scraping mission, 204
Big Lebowski, The, 314–15
Biological Potential (BSTG), 44–45
Bitter, Carla, 51, 107, 253
Blaney, Diane, 189, 312
Bode, Rolfe, 149, 229
Bonitz, Bob
and missing pieces, 114–15
and PIT, 44, 321
and RA team, 194
and scraping mission, 169, 173, 219, 221–22
and soil samples, 12
and sprinkle test, 51, 56
and TEGA results, 90
Bowman, Cassie, 161–62
Boynton, Bill
and finding ice, 130, 136, 139–43, 228, 238
and Gerard Droege, 155–56
and hydrogen, 11–12
and ionizer, 163–64
and missing pieces, 116
and permafrost, 14, 70
and press conferences, 264, 284
and scraping mission, 220, 223
and soil samples, 62–65
and sprinkle test, 49
and TEGA results, 37, 78, 81–83, 90–91, 122–23, 178, 250–54
and water possibilities, 201–2
Branson, Richard, 244
brine, 187–89, 196, 200, 304–5, 315, 318.
See also perchlorate findings; salts
Brockovich, Erin, 257
Brown, Dwayne, 263–64
Burning Coals sample, 308–9
Bush, George W., 129, 208, 247
C
calcium carbonate, 305, 307, 317
cameras, building, 5–6, 64–70, 147–48
Capricorn 1, 233
Carsten, Joseph
and PIT, 148–50, 321, 323
and rock flipping, 270–71
and scraping mission, 171
and TEGA results, 90, 92, 308–9
and WCL, 164–66
Carswell, Allan, 111
Cassini mission, 66
Chase, Jim
and finding ice, 135–36
and lost day, 100–101
and photo mosaics, 175–76
and press conferences, 24
and safed shutdowns, 183
and sprinkle test, 57
Chemistry Science Theme Group (CSTG), 44
chlorine, 178, 250–52, 264, 295, 328
circadian rhythms, 26, 280
Clark, Ben, 59, 140–41
Coleman, Gary, 51
Collins, Michael, 159
conspiracy theory, 123, 247–57, 266, 282–84, 286
control room description, 41–48
Cook, Clive, 97, 100, 222, 275–76, 307
counter-fatigue group, 61–62, 75, 209, 311
Covault, Craig
article by, 291
and conspiracy theory, 247–49, 282–84
and finding ice, 239
firing of, 332
and MECA, 258–59
and press conferences,
264, 272
and TEGA results, 123–25
Cowling, Keith, 250, 266
Cox, Matt, 293, 296
Cull, Selby, 328
Cupboard sample, 233–34, 257, 269, 292
Curiosity mission, 332
D
Davis, Sumner, 299
De Jong, Eric, 68, 71
de Paula, Ramon
and finding ice, 228
and safed shutdowns, 183
and scraping mission, 171–72
and TEGA results, 160, 174–75, 179, 245, 267
and WCL, 166
Deep Space Network (DSN), 25
Delta-II rocket, 5
Denise, Bob
and lost day, 102–3
and MARDI imager, 313
and missing pieces, 109
and RA dig, 286–89
and RA team, 194
and TEGA results, 146, 320
descent imager, 66, 313
“Dig Czar,” 29, 35, 58, 63, 90, 92, 309
dirt
checking, 49–59
compounds of, 12
samples of, 18, 29–40, 62–64
scooping, 9
size of, 329
Discovery Channel, 274
Dixon, Cameron, 133, 162–63
documentary, 274–75
Dodo-Goldilocks ice, 115, 137, 151, 207, 216, 313
Dodo-Goldilocks trench, 34, 82–83, 89–90, 137, 151–52, 313–14
Droege, Gerard, 153–56, 220
drop-dead uplink time (DDULT), 108
Drube, Line, 46, 168–69, 183–84, 234, 324
Dunn, Katie, 182–84, 218, 260, 309–10
dust devils, 110–12, 303
E
Earth time transition, 276–80, 288, 292–93, 307–8, 311
Eastwood, Clint, 51
Education and Public Outreach (EPO), 144, 193
Elachi, Charles, 227, 255
Ellehø, Mads, 78–79, 234
end of sol (EOS), 92–96
energy source, 295
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