Lives of the Planets by Richard Corfield

Author:Richard Corfield [RICHARD CORFIELD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-12-22T16:00:00+00:00

THIS NEW EDEN

It was one of the most moving things I have ever seen: two Martian warriors facing each other across the royal blue cloth covering the long table at the head of the Berrill Lecture Theater at my academic home, the Open University at Milton Keynes. On November 7, 2006, Colin Pillinger balanced on his crutches as he stood to welcome Steve Squyres to talk to the university about the staggering successes of the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

For Colin and all of us at the Open University, the occasion was tinged with melancholy because it was suffused with thinking about what might have been. What if Beagle 2 had possessed sensors to image the terrain and state of the Martian atmosphere as she flashed across the Martian sky, as the Mars Exploration Rovers’ landing pods had? What if her landing ellipse had been a kilometer to the east or west? Might she have missed that tiny crater’s rim and not spiraled in, thereby losing radio contact with Earth? Might she have landed safely on the good, flat Martian soil of Isidis Planitia, her solar panels unfolding to catch the rays of the distant sun as her marvelous mechanisms swung into action? What if the carbon machine had produced the goods? What if Dennis Leigh’s tiny mass spectrometer had produced definitive evidence for the presence of life on Mars? What if we now knew that we are not alone in the universe?

As we smarted from the loss of Beagle 2, Steve Squyres and his team pulled off one of the most remarkable feats of Martian exploration since Schiaparelli drew his first map of the surface. Mars Exploration Rover-A (Spirit) was launched on June 10, 2003, and her sister ship, Mars Exploration Rover-B (Opportunity), followed on July 7. Spirit landed just south of the Martian equator (175 degrees east and 14 degrees south) on January 4, 2004, while Opportunity landed in the region known as the Meridiani Planum (the Meridian Plateau), smack-bang on the Martian prime meridian (0 degrees east) and even closer to the Martian equator at only 5 degrees south on January 25, 2004.

The Viking missions had shown just how difficult it could be to select appropriate landing spots on Mars. Not only was it important to find a safe landing site that wouldn’t wreck your billion-dollar spacecraft, but there was also the issue of what you would find once you set down. The Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) were the direct descendants of the Sojourner rover of the Mars Pathfinder mission, which had tested the technology of roving vehicles on Mars in the late 1990s. The MERs were marvels of engineering—robotic geologists programmed to work for ninety days on the hostile surface of Mars under the guidance of distant mission control at JPL. They could move, image their surroundings in real time with stereo cameras at the same height as a pair of human eyes, pick up rocks, turn them over, drill into them, and analyze their chemistry.

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