Chris Lintott’s Universe

Let me tell you the story of this weekend’s program. The first few months of my time on the Sky at Night were dominated by thoughts of Mars. Looking back at the list of programs, it appears that we didn’t do as much as I thought we had to cover the arrival of Mars Express, Spirit and Opportunity at the planet but they were much in our mind throughout.

One of the first questions Patrick asked in our February 2004 program was ‘why only a 90 day mission’ for Spirit and Opportunity, and at the time we’d agreed that we’d do another Mars program once their mission had ended. Eventually, we gave up and this month’s program is, as I’ve already said, a double length special about missions to Mars.

I went up to Birmingam on Thursday to record the last of the voiceover, and - thanks to the hard work of the producer and (small) team - it’s looking good. There are so many incredible images around that it’s easy to make a beautiful program. Enjoy!

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.

Apologies for the lack of posts recently - I’ve been dashing around before going off to a conference next week. The highlight of the week was interviewing Steve Squyers, the principle investigator on Spirit and Opportunity. We last talked just over a year ago, and it’s incredible to think that the rovers are still happily rolling around Mars having survived their second winter.

The interview will be broadcast as part of our Mars special in January, but for now you can listen to Steve’s lecture to the OU here.

I’m really looking forward to starting work on our special Sky at Night on Mars, due for broadcast as the 650th program in January. We’ve had this in the diary for years, but kept waiting for the rovers Spirit and Opportunity to die. We’re still - thankfully - waiting, and we eventually blinked first. One of the most memorable parts of interviewing the rover’s principle investigator, Steve Squyers, was hearing him describe just how overwhelmed the team felt by a mission that had lasted eight times its scheduled lifetime and that was a year ago!

All of which serves as a prelude to this fantastic spoof by The Onion (which contains occasional swearing).

Sometimes, all too rarely, there is a news story which needs no further explanation. How wonderful is this image? The rovers have been doing incredible things (and I’m looking forward to interviewing their creator, Steve Squyers, again next month) but to see one of them from orbit just illustrates how rapidly Mars exploration is advancing.

More Mars over the weekend…

UPDATE : I forgot to add these pictures and reconstructions which were sent in by Stuart Atkinson.