Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Traveler's Guide to Mars

Episode Date: September 1, 2003

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This is Planetary Radio. Mars Day has come and gone, but the season of Mars continues. Hello everyone, I'm Matt Kaplan. What would you want to take along with you on a Mars voyage? Air, water, food, and maybe a traveler's guide to Mars. Luckily, Dr. William Hartman has just written exactly that. He'll be with us in a minute. Bruce Betts will help wrap up the Mars Day festivities

and present a new trivia contest question. And Emily returns with this week's question and answer segment. As you're about to hear, she's following the water. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, What if Mars never had a thick atmosphere and warm climate? How could the outflow channels on Mars be carved without liquid water? At present temperatures and atmospheric pressures,

liquid water exposed at the surface of Mars would rapidly freeze or boil away, so it doesn't seem likely that vast floods of liquid water Liquid water exposed at the surface of Mars would rapidly freeze or boil away, so it doesn't seem likely that vast floods of liquid water could have carved the Martian outflow channels without a different climate. But it turns out that there are several possible scenarios for floods of liquid water on Mars even if the temperature and pressure has always been the same. Scientists have long suspected, and the Mars Odyssey spacecraft has recently proved, that a great deal of water is trapped beneath Mars' rocky surface in the form of ground ice or even groundwater. The interior of Mars is still hot, so water trapped several kilometers underground is probably liquid.

If a large supply of ground ice or groundwater were located near a heat source such as a volcano, then it would be possible to suddenly melt the ice. If the ice melt happened on a slope, the melted ice could pour out of the ground. But would this water last long enough to do anything? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Bill Harpin, welcome back to Planetary Radio. Thanks very much. Good to be here. I have seen travel guides for Italy. I've seen travel guides for New York City, you know.

I've seen Rome on $5 a day. You've been looking for an interesting one to get to some interesting place, right? Something a little further removed, shall we say. How about a traveler's guide to Mars? That's the book. I have to admit, confess that this was the publisher's idea to do it in that format. I had submitted an idea for a Mars book, and they said, let's make this lighter. Let's make this a traveler's guide to Mars.

So the thing that we did was to pick about 36, 38 places on Mars. And places is an important word because they really are like places we can go on the Earth. And I tried to pick spectacular places and places that told us something about Mars and then weave them together into kind of a story of the chronology and history of Mars. You did, and it's a great book. And it is just absolutely packed with the most beautiful photographs and illustrations. And it is more, I should say, than a traveler's guide to Mars. It's a personal chronicle of Mars.

In fact, you have recurring sections of the book that you call My Martian Chronicles. Slight pinch from Ray Bradbury. A little bit. My Martian Chronicles. Yeah, my editor was saying, well, tell us what it's like to do research and go to these meetings and explore, you know, the photographs of Mars. So I put in somewhat more personal little anecdotes and stories about doing the work and kind of wove those into little four and five page chapters on these different places

on Mars. And the book is actually in the format that if anybody's bought one of these travel books, you know, to find their way around France or whatever, it's that format. It's a very thick book, but it's this sort of tall format that fits easily into a bag, I guess. And I was a little concerned about that at the beginning, but, you know, it actually works out because the Mars Global Surveyor pictures that we use a lot of, those tend to be long north-south strips, so they can fit nicely on some of these pages if we want to crop them that way.

Yes, I have just now randomly opened to one. There is an inset here. It is the original photo of the infamous face on Mars taken by one of the Viking orbiters. And then around that, the much higher resolution photo taken by the Mars Global Surveyor. Right. And in a sense, on this page, how lucky I am to have randomly opened this, because, I mean, here's a good deal of the history of our research on Mars. Well, that's right.

That incident was interesting because it really tells us a little bit about our own society that, you know, there really weren't very many scientists that thought that there was anything particularly strange about the face on Mars. If you look at the back of our new American quarters, each state has their symbol on the back. And New Hampshire has the old man of the mountain, the great stone face of New Hampshire. But, you know, nobody says there were aliens running around in New Hampshire building sculptures of human faces. I really kind of feel that this face on Mars thing was a little bit more of an example of our less admirable end of the media promoting something that nobody really took seriously.

But, you know, the story that I put in the book about that, which is a little sidebar called Your Tax Dollars at Work, was the story about how NASA headquarters was getting so much pressure to get a picture of the face on Mars when our orbiter got into orbit that instead of waiting a few months until our pre-programmed picture of the face would be taken when we passed over that area, they said, no, no, no, you've got to drop what you're doing and spend the money to reprogram and get the picture right away because all the tabloids are coming after us. And the argument was, well, the taxpayers paid for this thing and they want to see this picture.

And, you know, I just leave it to the reader. Is that really the valid argument here? I don't know. But, you know, I do think we were kind of of a lot of people were hoodwinked into thinking this was something important and probably never was that significant in the first place. As disgusted as I am by what the popular media did with the face on Mars, I'm not sure it was entirely negative. I suppose the silver lining is if they're interested in Mars at all, I guess that's a good thing, right? We have to be careful about

inventing reasons to be interested in Mars, but it generated interest at least. So there's a lot of other interesting pictures there. There's a website we should probably mention. If you like the pictures in the book, the company that built

the camera, our big telephoto camera that's taking these pictures is Mike Malin's organization, Malin Space Science Systems. So they have a wonderful website, www.msss.com, that has not only a picture of the week or a picture of the day on it, but over 100,000 of these pictures. And you can go in there and find the map of Mars and look at all the little boxes and click on a box, you know, and you'll get a picture of that area. So it's very impressive, this huge amount of information that we have. And

people go and surf that site, they may be the first people to really look closely, or maybe the second or third people to look at those pictures. It is a great site. And what we'll be able to do is we'll put the link up to Mainland Space Systems on the page on the Planetary Society website at planetary.org. We'll probably put another one on there for the Planetary Science Institute, where you spend a lot of your time. That would be great. Yeah, we have a really interesting little nonprofit.

We have a couple of groups now around the country, and it's all research. I mean, the good side is we don't have all those academia faculty committee meetings and things like that. The downside is we don't have any state money or anything. We're all on soft money. But through some miracle, we've been going for 30 years and doing research on various missions, programs on Mars and the moon and asteroids and so on. Yes, you've been around long enough now, and this is documented in the book,

that you have seen a lot of changes in our view of Mars and an incredible evolution in the sophistication of our ability to learn more about that planet. In a lot of ways, that's one of the great interests of Mars. I mean, you want to know what the real Mars is like, but what I call mythic Mars has been so interesting over the last couple hundred years. called mythic Mars, has been so interesting over the last couple hundred years. You know, it was in the late 1700s that people had telescopes good enough, Herschel and others, to see clouds, polar ice cap, features that made it look like Earth,

and everyone began to get the idea, hey, these other planets are really like the Earth. Well, then there was a slow evolution away from that. So by 100 years ago, in the late 1800s, you had Percival Lowell, slow evolution away from that. So by 100 years ago, in the late 1800s, you had Percival Lowell, who felt that there was actually a Martian civilization building canals to carry the water from the polar ice caps down to the equator. And H.G. Wells then wrote the first Mars invasion story, War of the Worlds. And then we had Ray Bradbury and his stories. And each generation had its own view, you know, best estimate of what Mars was like at that time. And we probably went through a kind of bottoming out, I suppose, in maybe the 60s when the first probe close-up pictures came back and showed craters like the moon.

Everybody said this is a dead planet like the moon. And anybody who listened to this show last week heard Bruce Murray talking a little bit about this history of Mariner 4. Everyone got depressed, except maybe Ray Bradbury. Well, he's never depressed. That's true. He is the eternal optimist. But that turned around. Now, well documented in your book, we're pretty hopeful again.

I think that's the big story here. And I was just at a Mars Society meeting where Bob Zuber was talking about this being the first book to really present the kind of the post-Viking modern picture. There's been a lot of developments in just the last couple of years and even the last six months that move us much more toward the following, that, yes, the surface of Mars is this frozen, dry, dusty, Yes, the surface of Mars is this frozen, dry, dusty, beautiful planet that we've seen in the pictures from Viking and the Pathfinder lander. But what people hadn't quite recognized or appreciated is that under that surface, it's a wet planet in the sense that there's probably massive underground ice deposits in a lot of regions of Mars, especially the upper latitudes.

That's where the water apparently went. You know, our mystery after Mariner 9, let's say, in the 70s was that here's this dry, dusty planet, but it's laced with dry riverbeds. And so where do these riverbeds come from? Where was the water? Where did the water go? Was it really water? You know, all of those questions.

Well, now it seems pretty clear that there was a lot of water there at the beginning. It probably sank down into the surface. Probably the cratering, the early impact cratering, tends to produce a highly fractured and powdered surface layer in the upper couple of miles, just like on the moon where we had all that powder and rock chips and so forth that the astronauts walked around on. Great medium for the water to sink into. Very porous.

Very porous. And then Mars is colder than the Earth, and especially as the atmosphere thinned out because of the low gravity, so the little molecules are drifting off into space, atmosphere thins out, CO2 greenhouse effect goes down, maybe Mars gets colder. Anyway, the water sinks in and freezes, and so we have this massive ground ice. Now the interesting thing is it's not just ice down there,

but we know that there's been recent volcanism on Mars. We have our samples of Mars rocks that were blown off Mars. The youngest one of those is 170 million years old. Listeners will say, well, that's really old, but it's really young for a planet. It's the last few percent of planetary time. And we have lava flow samples. I mean, these are pieces of ordinary basalt lava that flowed out on Mars in the last few percent of its history. So it's an active volcanic planet.

Now think about that. If we've got lava running around under the surface and it's coming up through ice, you're going to melt ice every time that happens, and you don't even need to have lava to do that. If you just create a little Yellowstone Park on Mars where there's a geothermal area and you just raise the temperature under the ground a few tens of degrees, just the lava comes somewhere close, that can melt the bottom of the permafrost layer. So we may have aquifers or underground rivers of liquid water running around under Mars.

So, you know, that's been a revolution. And then I'd say just in the last year or so, there's much more movement toward detecting and believing that we're really seeing some ice and water flow features right up there on the surface, fairly young features, including possible glacial features. Let me stop you there, and we'll pick up with that after we take a quick break. We are talking about his new book, A Traveler's Guide to Mars, which is available from Workman Press. We'll be back with Bill Hartman right after this. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group.

The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in the Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits.

You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, PlanetarySociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. We're back with Dr. Bill Hartman, Planetary Science Institute,

scientist on the Mars Global Surveyor Mission, many other missions, and primarily, at least as far as we're concerned right now, the author of A Traveler's Guide to Mars, The Mysterious Landscapes of the Red Planet from Workman Press. Bill, we were following the water there, just like NASA, and we figured out that, well, where there's warm stuff coming from the center of Mars, it might be melting ice, and we know on Earth that where we find water, we might find life. Yeah, and that's really, I think, the big driver of Mars exploration now is this whole question of if we really had a planet, next-door neighbor planet over there, that had a lot of water,

did life get started on it? planet, next door neighbor planet over there that had a lot of water, did life get started on it? And, you know, I like to say that that's really the perfect scientific question for many people, for everybody, because either answer is really profound. If we go to Mars and we find that life started there, that's the first time we really know that we're not alone in the universe, which is, you know, a very profound thing. It means that life can start on other planets. And we don't really know that we're not alone in the universe, which is a very profound thing. It means that life can start on other planets. And we don't really know that that's true, in spite of all our movies and aliens and so on.

Yes. On the other hand, if we go there, and this is a planet that had water, and somewhat like the Earth in its early history, and it never did start life, well, does that mean we're more alone in the universe than we thought? Maybe it means there's something wrong with our ideas about how life got started. So that would be a very profound result. So Mars has the chance to tell us something about that. What do you think of Arthur Clarke, who says that we're going to find out that Mars is

teeming with life, overflowing with life? Well, you know, it's not ruled out. And something that I think biologists have been reacting partly to the Mars exploration, there's been a lot more interest in microbes and bacteria and life forms under the surface of the Earth. Now, we know the surface of Mars is sterile. It's irradiated by UV. Why is that? It doesn't have an ozone layer.

That's why we're worried about losing our ozone layer. That solar ultraviolet would come in and sterilize things. But the underground of Mars is protected. And I've heard statements that there's actually more total living material under the surface of the Earth than there is up here on the surface. And we tend to think of ourselves, you know, we grow up in all our kid books that we read and, you know, cows and chickens and ducks,

and we go to school and learn biology, and you just absorb the message that we are the main show in town, the big animals, the people, the deer, the redwood trees, the whales. But, you know, we're actually the kind of anomalous, aberrant, bizarre products of evolution up here on the surface, bizarre products of evolution up here on the surface. And most of life is about microscopic single-celled bacteria and microbes and things that are down there in the ground doing their thing. So that could be the case of Mars. And if we have aquifers and water underground on Mars, who knows what might be in that.

I think it's 50-50, but I think that's why we want to go over to that planet and find out. Start digging around. Well, I have my fingers crossed. Let's go back to the book. You have something like three dozen areas of Mars that you focus on here. But we don't have time. This is like if it's Tuesday, it must be Tharsis or something. If you had to pick three, tell us why you would choose those as your top three places in your whirlwind tour of Mars.

Well, I guess there's always Olympus Mons. It's been seen from the Earth as a white spot for a long time now. It's the biggest volcano in the solar system we know. There's a picture in the book that I particularly like. We have lava flows that have come down the slopes of Olympus Mons. There's a big cliff at the base of Olympus Mons, and there's a spectacular picture from our mission that shows these big lava flows where they've poured over the side of the cliff and down onto the plains.

So that would just be a really impressive thing to see. Well, there's the old Inca City. That's fun. That's a place where there's some intersecting faults and ridges that kind of make rectangular patterns like little rooms of an ancient ruin. And we now know it seems to be a fracture pattern from a big impact in that area. There's one of these riverbeds that I kind of like.

It's called Marte Vallis, and it's cut into young lavas. So already that tells you we're dealing with an unusual place where water came out even in recent geologic time and eroded into young lava plains. But then there's a neat place where a lava, a still more recent lava flow has come down over the bank of the riverbed and down the riverbed and then solidified. So you have these like three layers, the recent lava,

the still more recent river channel, and then the still more recent lava flow that went into the river channel. Neat places, lots of neat places. And I'll tell you where I would want to go. You have it on page 138. I want to go to this ancient ocean, the site of this once upon a time Martian ocean. Well, you know, there's another wonderful big controversy. We have a number of

serious and leading people in the field who think that they actually can see shorelines around the deeper plains of Mars, the lower plains, as if there had been shorelines. And there's famous places like that on the Earth, like out in the Bonneville salt flats, where there was a big prehistoric lake, and you can still see the shorelines. And that may well turn out to be correct, because even in this picture that we're looking at here as you're holding the book, you can see clearly that there have been these river channels that have emptied into that deep, low plain. So the big issue is, is that plane really an ancient seafloor? Are we really looking at an ancient dried-up seafloor? Or maybe we're looking at an ancient dried-up seafloor that has

lava flows and sediments and other things on top of it. Or maybe it's never been a seafloor at all. So that's one of these grand questions of research. And in fact, in this very chapter where you have this great picture from Mars Global Surveyor, which is actually from the laser altimeter, not from the camera. Yeah, it isn't even a photograph. It's a topographic. Incredible resolution, though. It's an example of how you tell a very human story because you talk about, is it his name Parker, I think?

Yeah, Tim Parker. And how he actually had to, at one time, sort of back off from claims. Well, that's right. I mean, he was way out in front of everybody, wrote, I think, a doctoral dissertation talking about these possible ocean basins. And, of course, this was kind of anathema. What's this crazy guy, Tim Parker, talking about? How did he get a Ph.D. with that wild theory?

And now we're all talking about that. And, I mean, he was really right that there's interesting features there. And it still remains to be seen if this really was a major ocean bed, but the topographic maps have really shown that the things that Tim mapped as shorelines actually are at the same elevation all the way around, which means they could be the surface of an ocean. Oceans are flat, right? You have a great line. It was Tim Parker's line.

It was, that's why you have to have a motorboat to go water skiing. There's no slope. That was Tim's way of saying oceans are flat. Great line. Yeah. Bill, we're about out of time. The book is available where? Well, it's really all over.

It's in the Barnes & Noble's and Borders and the big stores. And the locally owned stores go in and help your locally owned bookstore. It's on Amazon. It's around. And the book is A Traveler's Guide to Mars, The Mysterious Landscapes of the Red Planet by William Hartman. And here's a preview because you handed me this before we got to talking on microphone here. And it is the really lovely cover that I guess they're going to put around the paperback edition of your novel, Cities of Gold. Right.

A novel about the Southwest and the first European explorations up into the West. So that's just another area of exploration, but there's some fascinating stories about those first Spanish travelers that came up here. What is it about you and these beautiful, dry, magnificent landscapes? Yeah, I don't know. I'm this transplanted Pennsylvania boy, and so you get out in the beautiful, dry, magnificent landscapes. Yeah, I don't know. I'm this transplanted Pennsylvania boy, and so you get out in the desert, and then you get warped, I guess. Bill, we're out of time.

I'm sure we will be talking to you again in the future on Planetary Radio. I want to thank you very much for joining us here today. Thanks very much. Bill Hartman has been our guest. His new book, as we said, is A Traveler's Guide to Mars from Workman Press. I'll be back with Bruce Betts right after this second visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. How could the outflow channels on Mars form if it never had a warm, thick atmosphere?

Liquid water could be released from underground sources by several processes, including volcanic eruptions or large asteroid or comet impacts. But how could this water survive long enough to carve the channels on Mars? It's true that the water would not survive for long, but the volumes of water that could be released by volcanic events or asteroid impacts is huge. Researchers estimate that the amount of water released in one Martian flood was 300,000 cubic kilometers. That's enough to flood the entire North American continent to a depth of 30 meters. This much water would not evaporate instantaneously.

It could flow across the Martian surface for days or even a week, ripping up giant boulders and scouring the land, carving the outflow channels, as all the time its surface bubbled and boiled in the thin air. It would have been quite an amazing sight. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now, here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Back down from the mountain this week with Bruce Betts for another edition of What's Up. Yes, indeed, we have returned and we are still excited but a little less punchy. What an exciting week it has been, I mean the previous week,, with Mars Day and enormous interest and lots of people who took your advice

and went out and looked at that red planet. Yes, thank you. And if for some reason you're the one person who hasn't, go do it. Still time. Mars, still glorious. It will rise around sunset and set around sunrise. You can see it in the east in the early evening and the south in the middle of

the night and the west in the pre-dawn hours. And it is stunning and still brightest object up there except for the moon. Have fun. We certainly have in the last week, although we're losing a lot of sleep going out and looking at Mars. I'll say. I was out there on Mars night with the telescope and it was spectacular. I mean, it is stunning. You really need to find somebody with a telescope, folks, if you don't have one. It is, and even with my stunning Kmart special, it still was nice, and I could pretend that I was seeing the polar cap, the south polar cap, which through any decent small telescope you will be sure you're seeing.

What else have you got for us? Everything else is really a challenge to get in terms of looking at the sky, so I'd really focus on Mars again this week. This week in space history, September 1, 1979, Pioneer 11 became the first spacecraft to fly past Saturn. September 3, 1976, back to Mars, Viking 2 landed on Mars. Now on to Random Space Fact. You've gotten so good at that.

He leans away from the microphone so I can do the echo. It works just great. Especially amazing was the echo on the mountain. That's true. You didn't even have to add echo. I'm sticking with the Mars theme here. I hope that makes everyone happy. Let's talk about Mars' moons.

Mars has two very small moons named Phobos and Deimos. They were named using the Roman words for fear and panic. The aides of the Roman god of war was, of course, Mars. You know, I never thought about that. Phobos? Phobia. I'll be darned. Well, thank you, Bruce.

Explains why you've had that strange phobia to small oblong moons that look like potatoes. Shall we go on to the trivia contest? Yeah, let's. It was so hard. I know. Last week, from the top of the mountain, I asked you what planet on August 27th would be closer to Earth than it has been in nearly 60,000 years? And unless you slept through the last few shows, you probably should have known the answer. We didn't have as many answers this time, though, because I think people thought, oh, they must be kidding.

Well, we weren't. It was a legitimate question. And we do have a winner. He happens to be somebody who's a regular listener, regularly enters the contest. As far as I know, he's not won yet. It was Paul Boucher. Paul Boucher of Lafayette, Indiana, Purdue University to be exact, who had the correct answer.

Mars. Congratulations. I've got to read this. He said, at first, I was thinking it might have been a trick question, and I was going to go with Pluto. But after many hours of extensive research, which cost me that great in advanced Newtonian mechanics, I determined that it was indeed Mars. So congratulations, Paul. Excellent. I'm glad he put some work into it, figuring it out. Let's go on to this week's question. Again, keeping a bit of a Mars theme.

The Mars Exploration Rover B spacecraft, specifically the Opportunity rover, is going to Meridiani Planum on Mars. Why is it going there? Just random? Just for fun? They like the latitude and longitude coordinates? Actually, I'll be more specific. The question, to be specific, is what mineral was observed from orbit that intrigued people about that landing site? Why are they going to Meridiani Planum with the Opportunity rover?

How should people enter, Bruce, and get those entries in by noon this coming Thursday? Go to planetary.org, follow the links for Planetary Radio, and you'll find out how to enter. Also, other fun things on planetary.org you should keep track of in these weeks of Mars. We have our Mars Watch 2003, including over 300 events around the world, including many that are still going on, that you can attend to learn more about Mars and to find a place where you can look through people's telescopes. That's at planetary.org slash marswatch2003. You can also learn about the seven spacecraft, the two that are there now and the five on their way,

and also more about the red planet itself at our Exploring Mars website, which can also be found from planetary.org, in this case planetary.org slash mars. Can I mention one other thing that I just found out about? Please do. Just on a recent day, the Planetary Society website, which, of course, is hugely popular anyway, but because of all of this wonderful Mars stuff going on, had well over like four and a half million hits.

So I think we're on to something here. I think so. Mars, it's exciting, and we're excited that people are getting excited about it. And I'm excited just saying excited over and over again. So look up in the night sky and think about Mars. Thank you. That's a very excited Bruce Betts here with us as always. Control yourself.

He's dancing now. Anyway, it's What's Up, folks. You regulars know that, but it's a regular feature right here on Planetary Radio. Do the Martian. Next time, we'll leave Mars temporarily and journey to the solar system's biggest planet, Jupiter. I hope you'll join us. Thanks very much for listening to Planetary Radio, and have a great week.