Some Personal Thoughts: Why Should I Care About Mars? By Robert Gass Over the course of the last year some game changing discoveries have been made about the planet Mars. In my opinion, these discoveries should have been front page news on all the world’s newspapers – but they weren’t. In fact most news outlets didn’t even carry the stories. This begs me to ask the question why? I brought this question up to a group of friends the other night and to my astonishment their reply was simply “why should I care about Mars?” Uh - okay fair question. After all Mars is over a hundred million miles away – it’s a desert where the temperatures drop so low that carbon dioxide freezes out of the atmosphere at night! So why should anybody care about Mars? On August 6, 2012, NASA landed an incredible new rover on Mars. Its formal name was the “Mars Science Laboratory” but most of us knew it simply as Curiosity. Curiosity was sent to Mars not to find out if there was life on the planet; it was sent to find out if Mars ever had an environment that could have supported life. If the planet was never capable of supporting life to begin with, why bother looking for life there in the first place? To accomplish this task NASA equipped the rover with a battery of scientific instruments and cameras – 19 in all! Among these was a suite of instruments called Sample Analysis at Mars. Sample Analysis at Mars is a miniature science laboratory designed to study samples from the planet, be they from the surface or the atmosphere, and determine their composition in unprecedented detail. NASA also gave the rover a drill so that it could bore several inches into the rocks it found - a depth at which the material would have been un-effected by the solar radiation that bathes the planet unimpeded by its thin atmosphere. To land Curiosity on Mars NASA used a new landing technique called “Sky Crane”. As the rover descended towards the surface, a hypersonic parachute was deployed to slow the rover down to the point where it could drop out of its protective aeroshell. A back pack then took over and guided the spacecraft to within a few hundred feet of the surface. It then hovered and a crane lowered the rover down to the ground. This successfully got the rover to the surface but while the back pack was hovering, its rockets blasted the surface and contaminated it with their exhaust. So once Curiosity landed, the first thing the scientists wanted to do was to drive the rover away from the landing site to an area that was not contaminated. Here they would find a suitable target and then unleash their entire science package on it to make sure all the instruments had survived the trip from Earth and were ready for action. They would then drive to their primary exploration site which was some miles away. The area they picked was called Yellowknife bay. Not only was the area close by and uncontaminated but as it turned out, it was also very interesting. Yellowknife bay appeared to lie within an ancient stream bed that had long since gone dry. Sedimentary rocks were everywhere and there were what appeared to be white veins of minerals deposited within them. The team used the spacecraft’s drill to bore into one of these rocks and to everybody’s surprise, instead of being red like everything else on Mars, the interior of the rock was grey. They next used the robot arm to scrape up a sample of the mysterious grey material and deliver it to the Sample Analysis at Mars suite. The mysterious grey matter turned out to contain clay. Ok my kid plays with clay what’s so special about clay? Clay is special in this case because it only forms in the presence of clear, fresh, water. Curiosity had just found evidence for the long term presence of drinkable water on Mars! But there was more. Sample Analysis at Mars also preformed detailed chemical analyses of the sample and not only did it find organics, the basic building blocks of life, but it also found every chemical ingredient necessary for life to exist! It then analyzed the atmosphere and found that the planets atmosphere had been eking away for eons. By working backwards the team was able to conclude that the planet once possessed a much thicker atmosphere capable of supporting clouds and other forms of weather. Taken hand in hand with the rest of Curiosity’s findings there was only one logical conclusion – Mars was once a habitable world! For the first time in history we can now say with certainty that at least at one time, our solar system had two habitable worlds. This is Earth shaking news and this is why people need to care about Mars. For over 200,000 years, as long as modern people have been around and probably longer than that, humankind has been asking certain fundamental questions. Who are we? Where do we fit in the greater scheme of things? Are there other worlds like our own? Now we can at last answer one of those questions. Yes, there are other worlds like our own. In fact there was once one right next door. If habitable worlds like our own are so common that the one solar system we can examine in detail produced two, what does that say about the rest of the galaxy? What does that say about the universe? And what does that say about our place within it? This is why people should care about Mars. The question is no longer did Mars once have life? The question now is if Mars does not, and never did have life, why not? Complex life exists on Earth because the Earth has been stable enough, for long enough, to allow evolution to occur. If Mars was once a habitable world then what happened to it? Something stunted its growth. Was there some sort of cataclysm? Or was it a slow lingering death during which the atmosphere leaked out into space turning Mars into a desert? What ever it was the big question is could it happen here on Earth? This is why people need to care about Mars. Mars is the only place in the universe that we know with certainty was once a habitable world. That by itself makes Mars the most Earth like planet in the solar system and the only place we know of where we can study, all be it through an ancient record, a habitable world other than the Earth. This is totally new. Never before have we been able to compare one habitable world to another. What new insights will we find? How will these effect how we view ourselves and our own world? This is why we people should care about Mars. Earth, Carl Sagan compared it to a pale blue dot. I think of it more like a sapphire. A tiny but brilliant creation cast upon the thick velvet blackness of space and time. For as long as civilization has existed we have believed her to be alone and unique within the cosmos. We now know this to be untrue. For at one time, at least for a while, the Earth had a sister and her name was Mars. And perhaps above all other reasons this is why people should care about Mars.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 15:01:30 +0000
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