Sky at Night on tour III : Follow the water
JPL was personally something of a disappointment. We got some wonderful interviews - which you’ll see in due course - with many of the people involved in Mars missions past and present, and I feel like I’m finally getting my head around exactly what the current state of our knowledge of the planet is. Why the disappointment? JPL has always had iconic status and yet, partly through pressure of time and partly through the security restrictions that applied to us as foreign nationals, I didn’t get to see much more than the outside of the buildings. I’m sad in particular that we didn’t make it to the control room.
We then drove across the desert to Tuscon, Arizona, where many of the people involved in the Phoenix mission are based. This is a lander, not a rover, which will stay in one place for three months, analysing the soil that we believe has significant amounts of water ice just beneath it. NASA’s strategy is to `follow the water’ on Mars, in the hope that it will lead us to an understanding of where life is, was or could be. (Incidentally, despite all the prompting from the Bush administration, it’s clear that landing man on Mars is as far off as it ever was; no-one is talking about even a robotic sample return mission this side of 2020.)
I’ve been musing about whether `follow the water’ is the right tactic. It’s true that the presence of water has an enormous influence on the geology and chemistry of the planet, and that that in itself constitutes a reason for investigating. But it seems to be that by pitching the program of Mars exploration as a quest for life, we (the scientific community) risk shooting themselves in the foot. The people I’ve talked to on this trip - for the most part geologists - are interested in Mars for its own sake, and for what it can tell us about the evolution of planets in general. Life is part of that story, but it would be a shame if in a decade’s time this enormous effort were to be seen as a failure because the answer was not the `correct’ one.
Of course, that’s easy for me to say! In the meantime, you are all required to go and marvel at the images provided by the HiRISE camera on MRO. There’s a LOT still to come.
