Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Andrew Chaikin's Passion for Mars

Episode Date: October 27, 2008

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Author Andrew Chaykin's Passion for Mars, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier, and this week into the hearts and minds of explorers of the red planet. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. His earlier work, A Man on the Moon, has been called the definitive story of the Apollo program. Now, Andrew Chaikin has written A Passion for Mars. We're going to give it as much time as we could spare during today's show, but there's much more of my conversation with Andy at planetary.org slash radio. The book has been beautifully produced by Abrams. It is chock full, I love saying that, chock full of images of Mars, artist concepts of how we've dreamed of getting there,

and portraits of the passionate scientists and engineers who have devoted their lives to its pursuit. A great Q&A from Emily Laktawalla is still ahead of us, as is our weekly What's Up visit with Bruce Betts, but let's get right to Andy. He spoke to us from his home in Vermont. Andy, this is a conversation I've been looking forward to for so long. I can't tell you I'm really pretty excited just to have you on the show. Should have done it years ago. Thank you for joining us on Planetary Radio. Thank you, Matt. It's really a pleasure to be here. All right, I'm going to start right up front, make very clear my bias. I finished the book two, three days ago. I do not usually get the chance to speak in the first person plural on

this show, but folks, if you are a regular listener to this show, I have to tell you, this is our book. You need to read this book. If it were a song, it would be the anthem of the Explorer. And by Explorer, I include not just those with a passion for Mars, but all good scientists. And I think this book is as much, if not more, about that than it is about Mars itself. So, Andy, there you go. I'm not holding back. Well, you know, I think I may actually steal some of what you said and put it on my website, because it's wonderful. And I have to say that when I was writing this book, and this one took four years, which was only half as long as I spent writing A Man on the Moon, but it was a long, hard four years. It was a different

kind of writing for me. But really, I think my goal was not only to reach the general public, of course, but to give something to all of the diehards out there, the real Mars lovers, the real lovers of space exploration, and even especially the people who have made space exploration happen. You know, I feel that with this book, I am trying to give something back to them for making this such an incredible time to be alive. Some of them, you know, as you read, are people that I've known in my life and have been close to and others I've only read about. But all of them, I think, are, you know, we're all sort of kindred spirits. Well, I want to talk about a lot of those people.

But really, you go back to Percival Lowell. And before that, I mean, from Percival Lowell to Steve Squires and beyond. It is this passion that all these guys shared, even if they didn't really share much else in characteristics. Right. And I think Lowell is a perfect example of how Mars literally casts a spell over human beings. Everywhere you look in the history of the study of Mars and the exploration of Mars, you find that it is a planet that, over and above all the other worlds of our solar system, really captures the human mind, the human spirit. And people have a way of just turning their lives in the direction of Mars again and again and again.

And, you know, the anecdote that I opened the book with of Bruce Murray looking at Mars for the very first time through the 60-inch telescope at Mount Wilson in the fall of 1960, there's Bruce as a geologist who up till this time has been more involved with oil exploration than anything else. But now he's at Caltech. And as one of the perks of being at Caltech, he gets to go up to Mount Wilson, look through the 60-inch at Mars. And on this October night in 1960, he literally, by his own description, falls in love with Mars. And that is the moment that I picked to begin the story, because that is the moment at which Mars changed from an astronomical object into a geologic one. It changed from the blurry, almost apparition

in astronomers' telescopes that was maddeningly vague, even on the best of times, into a world that we could really go explore and find out what's really there. Of course, what's really there is something that we are still learning, and that process has been unfolding now for several decades. But that is emblematic of the book, the fact that here is Bruce Murray, who's a very kind of matter-of-fact, not a romantic guy.

As I say in the book, his whole approach to science was just the facts. But as I say, he literally was falling in love with Mars. You profile so many of these wonderful people, and you do it warts and all, and still their basic heroism, is how I think of it, really shines through. You already talked about Bruce Murray, I think one of the greatest human beings I've ever personally met.

And, you know, Carl Sagan, here are two guys who spent a good part of their many years together arguing with each other without reservation. And yet they were able to get together with Lou Friedman and start the Planetary Society. And, you know, it's my colleagues at the Society who told me that these guys never stopped going at each other. And yet they were still united. That's right. I can just imagine. united. That's right. I can just imagine. You know, it's a neat story because Bruce came at this with the feeling that, you know, especially after Mariner 4, which Bruce was the younger member, the junior member of the imaging team on Mariner 4. So here he is in 1965,

junior member of the imaging team on Mariner 4. So here he is in 1965. Mariner 4 flies past Mars. Nobody's ever seen what the surface of Mars is like up close. And the shock of that mission is that the pictures show that there are craters on Mars. There are very large craters on Mars. And that right away told them that there was a very ancient surface that had not been modified since the very-like, the Earth analog that many scientists had suspected and that many more had, many in the public even, had hoped, and that it was an abode of life and that it would turn out to be the most Earth-like world in the solar system. Here was a world that looked like the moon. Furthermore, the other instruments on Mariner 4 revealed that the atmosphere was exceedingly thin, just a tiny fraction of what it is on Earth.

No ozone layer to screen out harmful radiation from the sun. So basically you're talking about an ancient, frigid, radiation-bathed desert. Lovely place it sounds like, doesn't it? At that point, anyway. Yes, and the york times came out with an editorial right after mariner 4 that called it the dead planet instead of the red planet now on the other hand you have carl sagan and and carl's approach was in many ways a mirror image of bruce's bruce was the kind of man who as say in the book, stared unblinkingly at the facts, whereas Carl looked at those same facts and stubbornly pointed out what they did not rule

out. He was interested in the possibilities that were not ruled out by the facts. One of the most memorable, probably the most memorable example of that, was a symposium that Bruce organized at Caltech the day before Mariner 9 went into orbit. Bruce was on a stage with Carl and with Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, and it was what Murray called a tag team wrestling match. Only it seemed at times as if Murray was the only one on his team and everybody else was kind of, you know, against him. And it was made into a book, which I think was one of the best books about Mars ever done and was tremendously influential on me, not only for the science, but also for the poetry and the discourse. I mean, that was where I discovered Ray Bradbury.

I was not a, I still am not a science fiction reader, but Ray's poetry and his prose, just his statements about Mars and about space exploration you know we're incredibly and still are incredibly powerful that's andrew chaykin who has written a passion for mars more in a minute this is planetary radio hey bill nye the science guy here i hope you're enjoying planetary radio we put a lot of work into the show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the Society's Vice President. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar

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Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a planetary radio t-shirt members receive the internationally acclaimed planetary report magazine that's planetary.org slash radio the planetary society exploring new worlds welcome back to planetary radio i'm matt caplan author and space advocate andrew chaikin's latest book is A Passion for Mars, Intrepid Explorers of the Red Planet. Again, there's much more of our recent conversation at planetary.org slash radio. We were talking before the break about Bruce Murray, the geologist who became the head

of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and who has had to change his view of Mars more than once in his life. Bruce, to his credit, realized that he needed to change his view as time went on. You know, Mariner 9 went into orbit and found not only these giant volcanoes and canyons, but these ancient river valleys that indicated, you know, without a doubt, that Mars had once been a much more hospitable place. So, you know, Bruce had to stop and rethink his view. You mention in the book this great phrase that Murray rechristened Mars as the land of broken paradigms. Yes, and that really came out of the Mars Global Surveyor mission.

Yes, and that really came out of the Mars Global Surveyor Mission, and in particular the instruments, one instrument called MOLA that has mapped the topography of Mars in exquisite detail, and that was the, as much as anybody, Jim Garvin was the driving force behind that. That was the laser altimeter, right? Exactly. So as MGS circled Mars, this laser took thousands upon thousands of readings of the elevation of the surface, and then those were combined into a global topographic map of Mars. And for the first time, gave Mars its third dimension and allowed people to really see what the lay of the land was, not just looking at photographic evidence. Now, the other thing, of course, on Mars Global Surveyor was an incredibly powerful camera that was created by Mike Malin, who had been Bruce's student. And again, the multi-generational quest. Bruce had been Mike Malin's advisor, came to Malin's office to see some of these new images coming down that now showed features just a few feet across, you know, in some cases.

Unprecedented detail and revealed a planet far more complex, far more mysterious and fascinating than we had even realized at that time. Andy, who do you look to now as those who the torch has been handed to in the exploration of Mars? I think many of the people who are doing Mars exploration now, the young scientists and engineers who are working on the current missions and future missions, the people who are just coming out of grad school and trying to tackle the mysteries that we're seeing with the data from HiRISE and the other new data that we're getting in, and of course analyzing the data that has been coming in in the last several years.

You know, it's the members of the Mars Society, young and old. It's the members of the Planetary Society, the people who tune into this broadcast and keep the flame alive. You know, I think that there is a perception out there that somehow the excitement of space exploration doesn't translate to the younger generations today. And I challenge that. I think that there is an explorer in every single one of us. It's innate in us. You know, it starts when we crawl from one room of our house to another when we're just learning to walk. It's in us, and it either gets nurtured or it gets beaten out of us, but it's there. And I think that people don't realize, because it's been so long

since anybody has been out of low Earth orbit, I don't think they realize how exciting it's going to be to be able to look up into the sky some night, at the moon even, and say, you know what, there are people living and working up there and discovering amazing things and making it possible for us to become a space-faring species, a multi-planet species. And someday, people are going to be able to look up at Mars. We can't even see Mars with our eyes except as a bright star-like point of light in the sky, it looks like a star. It looks, you know, except for the fact that it moves differently and it doesn't twinkle and so forth. You know, we really, if we're able to look up at that bright orange dot and say there are humans living and working there, we truly will have passed a milestone for the human species that will be

tremendously powerful. As I say, I hope I live to see that point. If I don't, I have every faith that it will happen. Andy, we should let you go, but I got to compliment you on one more set of illustrations in the book. Nice work on the Mars occultation. Oh, thank you. Yeah, right. Well, I was completely captivated by the 1911 occultation photo that was in National Geographic when I was 10 or 11 years old. And so when the 2003 closest approach came along and I found out there was going to be an occultation visible in Florida, I sprang into action and I turned myself into a Mars imager, at least for that event, and I'm very proud of what I was able to accomplish. Well, as somebody who has also bounced along a road with my telescope rolling in the backseat of the car under a blanket, I can identify.

Ah, but did you do it in a hurricane? No, no, no, I was not on the outskirts of a hurricane. in a hurricane. No, no, no. I was not on the outskirts of a hurricane. Would you close this for us with really the way that you close the book with a few words from the guy I think of as the original Martian, Ray Bradbury, right out of the last page of the book? Let me start from the bottom of 271, okay? Sure, go ahead. In the summer of 2000, when I was working at space.com, I commissioned Ray Bradbury to write an essay about Mars for the debut issue of our print magazine, Space Illustrated. In his piece, Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars,

Bradbury called us celestial nomads halfway through a million-year journey. Quote, looking back at the cliffs from which we sprang, looking up at a heaven that seems almost within reach. We were seemingly trapped in mid-stride, free of the protection of the solid rock in which we hid to invent fire. Now we stand unprotected in an invisible rain that showers from the universe and will either cleanse us or melt us to nothing.

And so Bradbury, who as a 10-year-old boy, beseeched an orange dot in the summer sky to take him home, put a pin in the map of what he has called our journey from romance to reality, saying, quote, we are the betweens. He also gave me the answer I didn't have for that college interviewer back in 1973 who asked, why Mars? Quote, we have been given eyes to see what the light-year worlds cannot see of themselves, Bradbury wrote. We have been given hands to touch the miraculous.

We have been given hearts to know the incredible. Can we shrink back to bed in our funeral clothes? Mars says we cannot. Andy, thank you so much. It has been a tremendous thrill and great fun to have you on Planetary Radio. Thank you, Matt. I really appreciate it. And, you know, on to Mars, as they say. Ad Astra, as others say. I hope to have you back sometime. We'll eagerly await your next work. Thank you, Matt. Andrew Chaikin turned from planetary science to journalism almost 30 years ago.

His A Man on the Moon, the triumphant story of the Apollo space program, was turned by Tom Hanks into From the Earth to the Moon, the award-winning HBO series. He's a former Sky and Telescope editor. He wrote for Space.com. He lectures often, often to young people, and you can hear him from time to time on national public radio and elsewhere. We will, as I said up front, put the link to his website, andrewchaikin.com, where you can always learn more about this show, planetary.org slash radio.

We'll be learning more about the current night sky from a guy who knows it pretty well, Bruce Betts. In this week's edition of What's Up, that'll be right after we hear from Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, Cassini didn't finish all its mission goals before its primary mission ended. Does that mean the mission was a failure? I don't think Cassini could be a failure by any definition.

But it's quite true that more data will help scientists produce better answers to the questions the Cassini mission sought to answer. Cassini's value will eventually be measured by the peer-reviewed papers that make it into scientific journals, revolutionizing Earth's understanding of the Saturn system. But a lot of things have to happen before those papers get into print. First, Cassini has to take data with its 12 instruments and return that data to Earth. Then, each instrument team has to calibrate the data, correcting it for the peculiarities of their instruments and for the inevitable effects of aging on the spacecraft.

The first publications come out a few months to a year after the data returns to Earth. These first papers usually describe the circumstances under which the data was taken, point out any interesting trends, and offer the first interpretations, which most often turn out to be at least partly wrong. Other scientists respond in more peer-reviewed papers with opposing viewpoints. This process goes on for many years,

with scientists presenting their work at conferences and criticizing others' presentations until, one hopes, the scientific community eventually arrives at a consensus. This lengthy process has only recently reached maturity for the data from the Galileo mission, which arrived at Jupiter a decade before Cassini got to Saturn. Cassini is still returning new data to Earth every day, and has already returned more than ten times as much of it as Galileo. No doubt many more discoveries lurk in Cassini data that no scientist has yet had a chance to examine. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us

at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society and an astronomer, and therefore uniquely qualified to tell us about the night sky. Hey. Hey, it's good to be back. I just want to tell you what a good time.

I think it was obvious. I had talking to Andrew Chaykin and once again encourage people to go to the website where they can hear like three times as much as we had time for in the radio show. But planetary.org slash radio. Wow. You guys did have a good time. Yeah, we really did. I hope to have him on again sometime soon. We have you on every week to tell us about the night sky. In the evening sky, you can check out Venus after sunset over in the west. It's the really bright star-like object. And if you rotate yourself to the left towards the south, you will see Jupiter also appearing as a very bright star-like object. Those two are just going to keep getting closer and closer till about the end of November. So it'll be fun to watch in the sky. Meanwhile, in the pre-dawn, you can check out Saturn over in the east, getting higher and higher.

Below Saturn, you have a chance within the next few days or weeks to, or next week or two, probably to check out Mercury low down on the horizon looking also bright star-like. Not nearly as bright as those evening planets right now, but still good to look at. By the way, Saturn, if you take a small telescope or a big one and take a look at Saturn right now, the rings are getting very close to edge on. So they vary during the course of its orbit, whether we see them very open, they call it, or close to edge on, they're close to edge on. Let us go on to random space fact.

Venus. The surface of Venus, it's really, really, really hot. And I just, you're supposed to say. How hot is it? It is so hot that you could melt a Tootsie Roll. No, no, come on. You could melt many, well, you could melt lead. That's the usual one.

Yeah, yeah. It's not nearly as interesting as a Tootsie Roll, but it's much more impressive. It is. It's about 900 degrees Fahrenheit, about almost 500 degrees Celsius. It stays that way because of that big nasty greenhouse effect, the thick atmosphere. Also something very interesting about Venus temperatures is that atmosphere is so thick and insulates from the outside sunlight so well that the temperature is nearly uniform. Certainly at any given altitude, it just pretty much stays the same temperature all the time.

Trivia contest, and we asked you, within 10 light years of Earth, what is the most massive star? How'd we do, Matt? Lots and lots of answers. It seems to be picking up here. I don't know if it's because we're building up to the sixth anniversary or what. But Lindsay Anderson is our winner for the week. Now, Lindsay, a lot of people should remember, is our friend from Down Under who sends these essay-like responses

to the question every week. I don't think he's won. I think he did win once, but it's been a long time. And sure enough, he has let us know that it is Sirius A is the most massive star within ten light years of Earth, the dog star. Earth! So we're going to send Lindsay a nice little Planetary Radio t-shirt and let us know what's happening for next week. And it's actually next week when our winner will also get a Planetary Society membership,

a one-year free membership as we lead up to that sixth anniversary. But give us a question. Name the three major geologic time periods for Mars. So for Mars, just like we have all sorts of different time periods they've defined, the whole Jurassic, Triassic, the more recent Pleioploistocene, Holocene. Well, what are the three big ones that Marsologists use for Mars geology? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. I take it it's not past, present, and future. No, that's a really good answer. Most geologists would want something more complicated than past, present, and future.

Well, let's see if our listeners can give us something more complicated by Monday at 2 p.m., Monday, November 3rd at 2 p.m. Pacific time. And let's also remind people, we don't have the anniversary contest yet, folks. That's my fault, mea culpa. But we can remind you that we sure have some great, great prizes. From Vision Video Games at www.actually it's easier just to do spacestationsim.com

That's what we're giving away, Space Station Sim. That terrific simulation game that you can play on your computer, build and operate your own space station. From Vision Video Games. Florian Knoller has that set of five commemorative covers made by the JPL Stamp Club and the one that actually flew on the helicopter that recovered the Apollo astronauts who were on the Apollo-Soyuz mission, and our grand prize, the SkyScout,

the Celestron sky scout personal planetarium coming to us from opt that's oceanside photo and telescope uh at optcorp.com more next week maybe we'll actually have the contest for you and those are really cool prizes aren't they i wish i could enter we should give them away i i'd love to just keep them. I know it would be fun, but it would be wrong. Hey, can we do a shout-out here that has been a long time coming to Steve Nerlich? And he has a website that people might want to take a look at, www.cheapastro.com. Cheap astronomy. People want to get into astronomy.

It's not a bad place to look. Steve was listening to the show the other day, and he said, well, gee, you talk about all these other people. I don't make any money off of mine. Can you just mention the website? And I told him absolutely not. All right, everybody. I've turned for inspiration once again to my sons for what you should do. All right, everybody, I've turned for inspiration once again to my sons for what you should do.

And I think everyone should go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about aliens with socks on their head. Thank you, and good night. Well, they're obviously not on Venus because they don't need to keep their ears or antenna warm there. He's Bruce Betts. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Next week we'll be at the legendary Palomar Observatory for a preview of the new PBS documentary, The Journey to Palomar.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.