May

25

Martian Chronicles.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

May 25, 2008 |

Today is the scheduled landing date of the Mars Phoenix Mission, which is studying Martian ice and the possibility of life on the red planet. It’s one of a long series of recent Mars missions. While the Mars Pathfinder, which landed July 4th, 1997, is, arguably, the most famous in recent missions (not including the Climate Orbiter, lost in late September 1999 due to confusion about metric and English measurement) there have been numerous Mars missions dating back as far as the 1950’s–and that’s not including the explorations made by telescope, most famously by Percival Lowell, who thought he saw canals on the Martian surface.

What’s incredible about being alive now is that we–anyone–can use a computer to track the missions and get updates almost as quickly as the scientists in the control room. While the world crowded around television sets for the original Moon landing, let’s not take for granted how amazing it is that we have access to so much information. Within days of the Mars Pathfinder landing I was able to watch a video of a Martian sunset. Within hours of the Huygens Probe landing on Titan I was able to see pictures of a place almost 1.3 billion miles from Earth.

In spite of being closer and significantly brighter, our other neighbor, Venus, doesn’t exert the same fascination as Mars. Its reddish color, after all, earned it the names Ares from the Greeks and Mars from the Romans–in both cases the God of War. Farther away from the Sun, Mars is also a potential jumping-off point for exploration beyond the habitable zone of our solar syste. While writers H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs saw Mars as a sinister, even dangerous place, Ray Bradbury, in an eerie echo of New World colonialism, made humans the threat. Ultimately, though, Mars is a stranger, more complex, more beautiful world than any writer has or ever will imagine. Happy landing, Phoenix. We’ll be looking up.

Update: Phoenix touched down safely. Sometimes the best laid plans do work out.


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