As the taiga forest gave way to tundra, I felt like the giant in “Micromégas,” thundering about the stands of dwarf willow trees, which were never taller than my knees. The bogs and streams with wild reindeer tracks gave way to windswept heath and lichens as we climbed in elevation. The landscape was littered with boulders, which I kept mistaking for people. The water that trickled all around seemed so pure that I stopped bothering to add iodine before gulping it down.
One morning halfway through the trek, however, my stomach began to tie itself in knots, and by evening, I was vomiting. I felt miserable, but I’d gotten sick before out in the backcountry. The Arctic summer was benign, nothing compared to the Antarctic. The temperatures hovered above freezing. The grass was green. I told myself I was just out for a stroll. All I had to do was get up and walk for a week.
But after a day or two, my body descended into a state of pure refusal. I laid in my tent, barely moving, black flies circling my head. And all I could think about, shaking and sleepless, was this person back in Cambridge: how intensely I wanted to be by his side, how cataclysmic it would be if I couldn’t walk my way back to him.
Slowly, through the fervor and fear, I began to realize that despite the vast interiority of any human life, there is a place where our boundaries can dissolve, where the continuity of the self can break, and we can blur into the existence of another human being. He was thousands of kilometers away, yet he was with me: in my dreams as I slept, fevered; up ahead as I walked, gazing out upon the same great horizon. I raced, thirsty, toward the cliffs, tripping and tumbling, grasping for something I couldn’t quite name. I was fraying, and he was catching the weave. I felt like those Arctic explorers who had gone off into the vast wilderness only to find themselves suddenly, shockingly, no longer alone.
ON A WARM November day, the Curiosity rover rose up off its launchpad on an Atlas V rocket, billowing fire and smoke, thundering across the lagoons of the Banana River. The fourth in a string of robotic rovers, it was off to Mars to look for evidence of an ancient habitable environment—a benevolent place where life may have taken hold. It was headed to Gale Crater, where, according to orbital data, water in low-lying terrain could have pooled and formed lakes.
The next morning I took a pregnancy test, and the faintest of pluses appeared. I’d hoped to be at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory when the rover touched down on August 5, 2012, but soon after, a doctor told me my due date: also August 5. The timing seemed impossible. Two creatures hurtling through time and space, destined to arrive simultaneously on two different planets.
Despite the tests, the obstetrician’s pronouncement, and the fact that an elaborate chemical machinery was kicking into gear inside my body, I couldn’t quite believe it. I buckled the seatbelt over my flat stomach and stared at my husband, blinking, as we drove along the Charles River back to our apartment. The philosopher-turned-lawyer grinned in his boyish way, stretching his arm around my shoulders.
In the days following the launch, the spacecraft settled in for a long cruise. A boost from the rocket’s upper stage had pushed it out of Earth’s orbit. It was journeying into the deep night, thermally stable and with plenty of power, arcing along its 567-million-kilometer trajectory. Never before had I given much thought to the machinery surrounding the rover—the descent stage and associated hardware, the heat shield, the backshell. It was like a whole second spacecraft, but it had a single purpose, to deliver the rover safely to Mars. Now I too was a vessel. The blood in my veins flowed from my heart to a second heart and back, and soon that heart was beating like a galloping horse. The center of my existence seemed to shift as well, from back behind my eyes—the helm of the starship—to somewhere deep in my abdomen.
I told my family about the pregnancy when they arrived in Boston for Christmas. My parents nearly broke into applause. Emily seemed a little unsure at first, but, sensing the excitement, she bounded in for a hug. She soon found a pregnancy book from the Mayo Clinic next to my bed and studied it intently for days, amazed that such a book existed. In the margins of the pages, she suggested names, including several that were an homage to her favorite actor, Tim Allen. Whenever she saw something that seemed important, she brought the book over to my husband—“Brother,” she called him. “You are her partner and her coach,” she told him, thrusting an image of a breech baby, dangling one foot into the world, onto his lap.
As the book instructed, I made the suitable course maneuvers. I stopped eating soft cheese and working with chemicals. I avoided caffeine, secondhand smoke, X-rays, kitty litter, hot tubs, and alcohol. I took a prenatal vitamin every morning and a DHA supplement. I shortened the one trip to the field I had planned, and when I arrived at the airport, I let the TSA pat down my body. I wore sensible shoes and watched my step. Instead of running in the mornings, I started to walk, and then began to walk slowly.
My restless little one began to somersault through the weeks, up until the night before he was born. He was in an “unstable lie” when I reached term, flipping every couple of days, and the doctors began to worry about the umbilical cord being compressed. There would be surgery, scheduled for the first available slot. I’d been told that the day an otherwise-healthy woman gives birth is the most dangerous day of her life. In all my years, I had never broken a bone or needed an X-ray. I hadn’t spent any time within the walls of a hospital.
When the time came, I shuffled to the operating table and sat on the edge as a resident tapped a needle between my vertebrae, then pushed anesthesia into my spine. I lay down beneath the bright lights. My husband and mother took their place at my side, and everything piled together: the sleepless night, the drive to the hospital, the difficulty with the IV. Then the scalpel dipped into my belly. There was the sensation of pressure but not pain, and only a moment later, the whoosh, the fall of my left hip back to the table, the tinny sound of a cry clamoring from my baby’s small lungs.
As my sister foretold, he was born breech: feetfirst into the world. He was pink and trembling, with beautiful navy eyes. Hours later, unable to walk, mooning from the painkillers, I clutched him tightly, trying to shoo the nurses away. I did not want to rest. I did not want to go to breastfeeding class. I wanted to hold him. His body had just been clipped free of mine. I explained that I’d had a C-section, fully expecting that to be a point in my favor as they tried to take him to the nursery. Of course he had to stay in my arms, having been pulled so quickly into the light.
* * *
—
I’D BARELY GOTTEN home to our apartment when, in the dead of night, Curiosity landed. Warm summer air was streaming through the fan in the window, and everyone had fallen asleep—my husband, my mother, my tiny son. I cradled him in my arms as I watched the live stream on the screen of my laptop, illuminating the room with a faint blue hue. We were perched on a big chair by the bookcase. His taxed little body, starving for milk that hadn’t come in, had collapsed against me.
Wide-eyed, I caught glimpses of friends and mentors among the rows of matching periwinkle polo shirts at JPL. They had been eating peanuts for luck, a long-standing tradition. Curiosity was landing via a “Sky Crane,” a sort of technological stork. Unlike Spirit and Opportunity, which bounced to a stop enveloped in airbags, the sheer mass of Curiosity required a soft landing. It was the size of a Mini Cooper, a metric ton, a car falling from space—nothing like it had ever been attempted.
The minutes ticked by as the spacecraft barreled toward the surface, nested inside that descent stage with its four steerable engines. The whole landing was only seven minutes, about the same time it took the obstetrician to tug my son from the womb. Shortly before 1:30 A.M. Eastern time, the parachute flew open. The rover dropped to the ground with a bridle and umbilical cord, both of which were promptly severed when the wheels touched the red dusty terrain. After the rover separated safely, the rest of the bundle powered away at full throttle for a crash landing off in the distance.
Once touchdown was confirmed—the signal that Curiosity was indeed on the surface and everything had gone according to plan—an all-male panel of scientists took the stage at von Kármán. I slowly rose from the couch and limped off to bed.
As I passed the bathroom, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My body was ripped and bruised and bandaged, and I could barely recognize its swollen contours. But in my arms, inside a blanket covered with caterpillars, was an immaculate baby. I swaddled him in the darkness of the bedroom. When I fumbled the final tuck, he let out a small cry. My husband stirred and quietly pulled back the covers for me. Then everything was silent again, except for the sound of our son’s tiny breaths. As I lifted him into his bassinet, I felt the kernels of his backbone. I touched his fingers, which curled like the tendrils of fiddlehead ferns.
* * *
—
CURIOSITY TOUCHED DOWN in an unknown land. Gale Crater was over 150 kilometers across, but the distant walls of the chasm cut the horizon, making everything feel a little closer. Not far from the landing site were dark dunes, and behind them, a breathtaking mountain, soaring higher than Mount Rainier above Seattle. Gale Crater was chosen because of the towering stack of sediments in its center. Mount Sharp was five and a half kilometers high, and thought to be one of the thickest geologic records in the entire solar system. The stratigraphy recorded a breathtaking stretch of Mars’s climatic and environmental history, including ancient terrain filled with soft clays.
It was a perfect place to explore. For years leading up to the mission, NASA’s mantra for Mars exploration had been to “follow the water,” but we’d found the water: ancient river channels, hydrated minerals, gullies, near-surface ice. With Curiosity, NASA was taking a new step, moving beyond the search for water to look for other signs of habitability. Curiosity was trying to understand the context: Was there a chance that microbes might have survived here? Were the right ingredients in place? If so, for how long? Long enough for life to gain a foothold? Were there simple organics, the bricks from which a house of life could be built?
The rover came to rest just north of Mount Sharp, facing east-southeast. The ground was the color of an apricot, stippled with small pebbles. Like my surgical team, the engineers had done a fabulous job—in their case, setting the rover down just two and a half kilometers from the center of the landing ellipse. It would be a long drive to Mount Sharp, which was still a few kilometers away, and Curiosity couldn’t set off immediately. Everything had to be tried out and confirmed. The rover’s computer software had to be updated. Then the communications link had to be tested. The team heard the first human voice beamed up to another planet and back, a message of congratulations from NASA administrator Charlie Bolden. The wheels got to practice driving forward, then back. The rover’s arm stretched out to test its components—the drill, the brush, the sieve. The instruments were checked to make sure they had made the journey safely. It seemed that every little thing sent the rover into SAFE mode, setting off a cascading series of errors that would leave it frozen, unable to move. The team would momentarily panic, then realize a particular range restriction or temperature limit didn’t need to be as stringent, at which point they would write an override function into the code.
* * *
—
BACK IN BOSTON, I too was getting into the swing of things, becoming less terrified that I’d somehow drop my son, let him fall from the changing table, forget him in the car seat, or overheat his little body in blankets. I learned that a particular pitch of crying meant he wanted to be held and how a hand to an eye was a clear sign of sleepiness. My own catastrophic exhaustion abated, slowly, replaced by the wonder of his circus tricks. He’d splash the bathwater with his hands open like stars, and sometimes in his sleep it would look like he was directing traffic. Often he would just gaze at me, his face so open and innocent, and all I could do was look back. Giving rise to a new human life felt like the ultimate experiment. What happens when you combine half your DNA with half the DNA of the person you love most? Who results? Who does he become? How does consciousness spring from within the plates of a small soft skull?
For most of that first year, I carried him everywhere I went—to my office, to the library, even to a conference or two. We had to be together every three hours anyway. I’d bundle him up and lift him into the baby carrier. He’d nestle his head into the warm space beneath my chin, and we’d head out into the day. While Curiosity was making its way to the base of Mount Sharp, covering kilometers of open space, we were pacing the inhabited eggshell of the Earth together. I had spent most of my life inside my head, and most days it was a welcome change to simply be in the moment, holding his tiny hands.
I still followed the mission from afar, momentarily trading my immediate world for the depths of space. When I did, I sometimes felt a pang of sadness that Mars might be slipping away. Opportunities only came around so often. The planets aligned and then swung back apart. They waited for no one, and NASA’s next rover wouldn’t land for another eight years. I was only a postdoc, and not a terribly productive one. Even if I scrambled, it wasn’t obvious to me that I’d catch up.
* * *
—
I FELT THAT longing most acutely as Curiosity began making major discoveries. The rover happened upon the rounded shape of river rocks, then a broken sidewalk of outcrop, fragments of cemented bedrock encasing stones and sand that had once tumbled downstream. It was an ancient riverbed, winding down from the northern edge of Gale Crater. It had once been rushing with water, perhaps as deep as my hip.
The rover continued on toward the junction of three different types of terrain that came together in a low-lying depression about four hundred meters away from the landing site on the way to Mount Sharp. It was named Yellowknife Bay, after Yellowknife, Canada, a place I’d always wanted to visit. Both Yellowknife, Earth, and Yellowknife, Mars, sat upon rocks that were four billion years old.
Where the ancient rivers emptied to standing water, the rocks took on a much different character. As the momentum of the rushing water gave way, fine-grained particles had a chance to slowly settle. The rock unit that Curiosity discovered, the Sheepbed mudstone, was the bottom of an expansive lake, with mud that would have squished in our toes. At one point in Mars’s ancient past, the lake must have swelled and evaporated—filling, emptying. The crater’s central peak might have even stood as an island.
* * *
—
IT WAS IN 2016, three and a half difficult, searching years after Curiosity landed, that I finally had the chance to join the science team. In that time, my son had started preschool and his younger sister had been born. And somehow, in the midst of it, I’d moved to Washington, D.C., and started a job as an assistant professor of planetary science.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which served as the base of operations for one of Curiosity’s main instruments, was only twenty-five kilometers northeast of my fledgling lab at Georgetown University. I knew Maria had begun her career there, and I instantly realized why she liked it so much. There were so many talented people and an impressive sense of collegiality. There was “Breakfast and Learn” on Tuesday mornings and “Colla-BEER-ation Hour” on Friday afternoons. I started spending lots of time there, and within a couple of months I was invited to become a visiting scientist with the Planetary Environments Lab.
The lab chief, a brilliant chemist named Paul Mahaffy, had built the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, also known as SAM, with help from French scientists. Paul had grown up in Eritrea, the son of American missionaries. When he wasn’t studying, he joined his six siblings in eating injera, collecting scorpions, and watching the laughing hyenas quarrel with local dogs. His village was near a huge granite spire, Emba Matara. At its peak was a great iron cross, as tall as a building. As a child, he would scramble to the summit, then climb to the top of the cross and sit there listening to the wind.
He now ran SAM, which felt like the beating heart of the mission to someone interested in the search for life. It was one of the most sophisticated spacecraft instruments ever made, weighing nearly as much as all of Curiosity’s other instruments combined. The whole rover chassis had been designed around its gold-plated box.
One of SAM’s jobs was to measure isotopes, different versions of the same atoms whose ratios helped reveal how much air and water were lost to space. By bouncing a laser back and forth, SAM could scour puffs of Martian air for methane, a gas that is made almost entirely by microbes here on Earth. Methane has bedeviled Mars scientists for nearly half a century. Mariner 7 scientists announced the discovery of a methane plume near the South Pole, only to retract their results a month later. In the early 2000s, powerful telescopes in Chile and Hawaii reported detections. Mars Express, an extremely successful European orbiter, also picked up traces, though an order of magnitude less intense. Then, inexplicably, the methane vanished, and for years no methane was seen at all.
SAM then found it again, uncovering not only its presence but a seasonal pattern, with levels rising dramatically in the summer. There were several possibilities. It could be coming from a dance of water and rock deep in the subsurface, a purely geological process. It could be ancient, created long ago and locked away in matrices of melting ice. Or it could be the exhalations of a small, still-active biosphere.
SAM also carried a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer, a core tool for understanding chemistry, particularly organic chemistry. I’d known about the machines since I was a kid. My father had earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry at the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains, at Berea College. As a technician in a medical examiner’s laboratory for the state in Frankfort, Kentucky’s capital, he ran and repaired the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometers that helped pinpoint chemicals in dead bodies during autopsies. I remember going to work with him one day, not long after the state decided to exhume President Zachary Taylor to test the theory that his sudden death in office could have been due to arsenic poisoning. I stood in my Keds in the tiled space in front of a laboratory freezer as my father opened the door. He passed me a 141-year-old toenail. I held the vial above my face, turning it in the light. I heard the tissue clink against the clear plastic. I was eleven years old, and I was holding part of a president—one who wasn’t poisoned, as my father’s lab discovered.
The Sirens of Mars Page 18
