Editorial»
What would Martian neighbours mean for earthlings?
JAN 13 - The story of astronomy is one long, slow assault on our sense of self-importance. The ancients knew they were at the center of things. Their eyes told them that the sun and stars moved around them day and night, eternally circling their snug homes. It took the abstractions of science to undo the obvious. Copernicus dislodged the Earth from its place of glory and put the sun in the center. Before long, astronomers discovered that the sun was commonplace and that our own brilliant galaxy, the Milky Way, was actually just one of billions of star parties. Recently, astronomers have proposed a new glue for the universe, dark energy. It is incontrovertibly real, they insist, but, so far, beyond human comprehension.
The record of cosmic insults, already staggering, could get worse if the current invasion of the red planet proves successful. While rocks and sand now hold center stage, the ultimate purpose of the work is to track water and what seems to be its nearly inevitable companion, life. Explorations of Mars - relatively dry now but wet long ago, scientists believe - are considered more likely to uncover fossils than extant forms. Even the White House has caught extraterrestrial fever. This week, President George W. Bush is expected to announce plans to set up a human colony on the moon and eventually to send Americans to Mars to redouble the American exploratory push.
Even if just one little Martian were to come to light, however small and ugly, old and desiccated, its discovery would have ramifications far beyond the scientific. It would suggest that we are not alone in the universe. “Some eminent people say it will be terribly depressing, that we’ll feel ignorant, and they predict a planet-wide inferiority complex,” said Frank Drake, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a pioneer of the hunt for extraterrestrial life. “My take is that it could have the opposite effect,” he added. “It could motivate us to think that if we worked hard we could be as good as them, motivate us to make progress much more quickly than we are. I’m an optimist. It’s more fun.”
The European Mars Express went into orbit last month bearing radar that will probe more than 1,600 meters, or about one mile, beneath the surface, mapping aquifers, permafrost and underground rivers. Just after New Year’s, the American rover Spirit bounced to a successful landing in Gusev Crater, a giant scar that perhaps once held a lake; the Spirit is now preparing to probe Martian rocks. Its mechanical arm will bore into them to reach unweathered material, analyze their composition and peer at them with a microscope. There is a chance, though slim, that the wheeled robot could find evidence of life.
“It could be the microscopic imager might see something where you say, ‘Hey, that looks familiar,’” Michael Meyer, the senior astrobiologist at NASA headquarters in Washington, said in an interview. The Spirit, and its twin, Opportunity, which is scheduled to land later this month, cannot perform complex chemical or biological tests that could prove the presence of life. NASA aims to tackle the hardest questions last, after years of geological spade work to see if Mars was, or still is, conducive to life. The robot geologists are to look mainly for traces of water, examining rocks, minerals and land forms for clues to the planet’s watery past.
By 2009, NASA plans to launch the Mars Science Laboratory, a roving mobile explorer that will focus on some of the hard chemistry questions. The next step would come as early as 2011, when a lander explores the terrain and drills deep and fires back samples of Mars for study on Earth, letting scientists marshal their best instruments to the hunt for subtle life clues. NASA says this approach might involve the use of miniaturized tools to allow Mars landers to drill hundreds of meters deep into the ground to look for life, dead or alive, past or present. If Martian life is found, Earthlings face two very different interpretive hurdles. If there is DNA and protein present, as there are in Earth creatures, then Martian life might be seen as coming from Earth via cosmic collisions that over billions of years sent microbes flying on rocky debris through space like windblown seeds. (Or, an equally possible theory that scientists hold is that all terrestrial life originally came from Mars.)
The other, more startling possibility is that Martian life is distinctly un-Earthlike. That would suggest that evolution is a cosmic imperative and that living things of one sort or another exist nearly anywhere in the universe. 5 meter height, making it ready to drive off the lander that delivered it to Mars, The Associated Press reported from Pasadena, California. The rover could reach the Martian surface as early as Wednesday, the space agency said Saturday. The unfolding was one of the most complex deployments ever performed by a robotic spacecraft, said Chris Voorhees, mechanical systems engineer. Posted on: 2004-01-13 02:21
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