The Sirens of Mars
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APPEARED TO BE RECEDING “Mariner 9,” NASA Science: Solar System Exploration (July 31, 2019).
MORE SPOTS SLOWLY APPEARED Haynes, personal interview by Johnson.
HEAD OF THE IMAGING TEAM BLURTED Ibid.
MOUNTAINOUS VOLCANOES Bruce Murray, interviewed by Rachel Prud’homme, audiocassette recording transcript, California Institute of Technology Archives and Special Collections (Pasadena, Calif., 1993), p. 82.
ONE OF THE LARGEST The central peak of Rheasilva on the asteroid Vesta is slightly taller than Olympus Mons, though the diameter of Olympus Mons is greater than Vesta itself.
“WE SAW THEM COMING” Haynes, personal interview by Johnson.
EARLY STUDIES HAD NOTED William Sheehan, The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), p. 156.
ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO BELIEVE Hartmann and Raper, The New Mars: The Discoveries of Mariner 9, p. 94.
MANY ON THE TEAM WONDERED , Ibid., p. 97.
EVEN A KNEE-DEEP RIVULET . Ibid.
Chapter 4: The Gates of the Wonder World
A PUBLIC-BROADCASTING RECORD Bill Carter, “ ‘Civil War’ Sets an Audience Record for PBS,” The New York Times (Sept. 25, 1990).
“SNOWBALLS OF SATURN” Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, writers, Cosmos, Season 1, episode 6, “Travellers’ Tales,” directed by Adrian Malone, et al. Aired Nov. 2, 1980. Australian Broadcasting Commission, Carl Sagan Productions, and KCET, 1980.
HALF A BILLION VIEWERS David A. Hollinger, “Star Power: Two Biographies of Carl Sagan Explore the Scientist as Celebrity and the Celebrity as Scientist,” The New York Times (Nov. 28, 1999).
SMOKED LOTS OF MARIJUANA Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), p. 214. Biographies containing stories of Sagan’s early life and career, from which many of the details in this chapter are drawn, include Spangenburg, Moser, and Moser, Carl Sagan: A Biography; William Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos (New York: Henry Holt, 1999); and Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life.
TURTLE-LIKE CREATURES Carl Sagan, Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 45.
“LARGE ORGANISMS…” Carl Sagan and Joshua Lederberg, “The Prospects for Life on Mars: A Pre-Viking Assessment,” Icarus, 28 (1976), p. 291.
THESE CREATURES, HE SPECULATED Ibid., p. 297; George Basalla, Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 110; “Mars: The Search Begins,” Time, 108 (July 5, 1976), pp. 87–90; Carl Sagan, Other Worlds (New York: Bantam Books, 1975).
DRINKING HYDRATED MINERALS Sagan and Lederberg, “The Prospects for Life on Mars,” Icarus, pp. 295–296.
SILICON-BASED GIRAFFES Sagan, “The Search for Extraterrestrial Life,” Scientific American, 271, 4 (October 1994), p. 93.
“SHOW UP AS A STREAK” David S. Salisbury, “Will Viking Find Life on Mars?” The Lowell Sun (July 8, 1976).
INTO A NEARBY FIELD Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), pp. 90–91.
BLOCK-LETTER HEADLINES Sean Hutchinson, “15 Highlights from Carl Sagan’s Archive,” Mental Floss (Feb. 6, 2014).
SHORT TECHNICAL VOLUME Arthur C. Clarke, Interplanetary Flight: An Introduction to Aeronautics (New York: Harper, 1952).
THE MAYO CLINIC Ray Spangenburg, Kit Moser, and Diane Moser, Carl Sagan: A Biography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Company, 2004), p. 12.
DIAGNOSED WITH ACHALASIA Ibid.
OBSESSIVE, NEUROTIC INFLUENCE Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), pp. 2, 9–11, 42.
FILLED WITH BLOOD Jorge Alberto Delucca, A Few Great Scientists: From Alfred Nobel to Carl Sagan (Bloomington, Ind.: Xlibris Corporation, 2017).
THESIS ON THE ORIGINS OF LIFE Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, p. 25.
PHD RESEARCH Carl Sagan, Physical Studies of Planets (University of Chicago PhD thesis, 1960).
HELP THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES In 1958, the National Academy of Sciences decided to more closely examine the idea of life beyond the Earth. Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize–winning geneticist at the University of Wisconsin, was invited to co-chair a panel on extraterrestrial life. After the group decided to draft a handbook of planetary biology, Lederberg brought up the possibility of a NASA contract for young Sagan. He wrote: “This really is a substantial job, and there is some problem in finding a sufficiently informed enthusiast to do the work. Fortunately Mr. Carl Sagan may be available for some months this summer, and perhaps again after he completes his dissertation in astronomy (planetary atmospheres) at the Yerkes Observatory.” Memorandum from R. C. Peavey to the Space Science Board, the Committee on Space Projects, and the Committee on Psychological and Biological Research, 13 April 1959, Joshua Lederberg Papers, 1904–2008. Located in: Archives and Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Md.; MS C 552. For a fantastic graphic history of these events, see also: Mary Voytek, et al., Astrobiology: The Story of Our Search for Life in the Universe (Mountain View, Calif.: NASA Astrobiology Program, 2010).
“SPADEWORK, MAINLY CONSULTATION” E. C. Levinthal, Cytochemical Studies of Planetary Microorganisms Explorations in Exobiology, NASA Technical Report No. IRL1213 (Washington: NASA, 1980), Attachment 1: “March 4, 1959 Letter from Lederberg to Jastrow.” See also: James E. Strick, “Creating a Cosmic Discipline: the Crystallization and Consolidation of Exobiology, 1957–1973,” Journal of the History of Biology 37, no. 1 (2004), pp. 131–180.
THINGS LIKE STERILIZATION Jacob Berkowitz, The Stardust Revolution: The New Story of Our Origin in the Stars (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2012), p. 132.
RISKING HUMANITY’S CHANCE “[S]ince the sending of rockets to crash on the moon’s surface is within the grasp of present technique, while the retrieval of samples is not,” Lederberg had argued in a manuscript he put together for Science, “we are in the awkward situation of being able to spoil certain possibilities for scientific investigation for a considerable interval before we can constructively realize them.” Joshua Lederberg and Dean B. Cowie, “Moondust,” Science, vol. 127, no. 3313 (1958), pp. 1,473–1,475.
NATIONAL ACADEMIES PANEL COALESCED WESTEX and EASTEX quickly commenced regular meetings, chaired respectively by Lederberg and Melvin Calvin, a chemistry professor at Berkeley.
AN EAST COAST GROUP, EASTEX, AND Steven J. Dick and James E. Strick, The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p. 25.
BOMBASTICALLY LAMENTED That member was Thomas Gold, a Cornell astronomy professor. The moment is described in Carl Sagan, “Wolf Vladimir Vishniac: An Obituary,” Icarus, vol. 22, issue 3 (1974), pp. 397–398.
“UNDOUBTEDLY THE WORLD’S” Eugene Kinkead, “The Tiny Landscape, Pt. 1,” The New Yorker (July 2, 1955), p. 29.
“NATURE, GOD, WHATEVER” Ibid.
FED TO SEAHORSES Kinkead, “The Tiny Landscape, Pt. 2,” The New Yorker (July 9, 1955), p. 39.
AMERICAN EXPORT LINES STEAMER Maya Benton, Roman Vishniac Rediscovered (New York: Prestel, 2015); Roman Vishniac, “Wolf Vishniac arriving with his family in New York Harbor on the S.S. Siboney, New York,” ca. 1940 (New York: International Center of Photography, 2013).
SOME DETAILS OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS Wolf Vishniac, Bo L. Horecker, and Severo Ochoa, “Enzymic Aspects of Photosynthesis,” Advances in Enzymology and Related Areas of Molecular Biology, 19 (1957), pp. 1–77.
HOW MICROBES USED SULFUR Wolf Vishniac and Melvin Santer, “The Thiobacilli,” Bacteriological Reviews, 21, no. 3 (1957), p. 195.
BUTTERFINGERED Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, p. 49.
VISHNIAC HAD A QUIET NATURE Wolf Vishniac, “Letter to Senator Cli
nton P. Anderson,” U.S. National Library of Medicine (Aug. 28, 1969).
IN 1959 “The Search for Martian Life Begins: 1959–1965,” in Edward Clinton Ezell and Linda Neuman Ezell, On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet, 1958–1978 (Washington, D.C.: The NASA History Series, 1984).
“WOLF TRAP” Wolf Vishniac, “Extraterrestrial Microbiology,” Aerospace Medicine (1960), pp. 678–680; “The Search for Martian Life Begins: 1959–1965,” in Ezell and Ezell, On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet, 1958–1978.
WORKING MODEL Vishniac originally developed the device to demonstrate “the feasibility of automatic remote detection of the growth of microorganisms…[h]e wanted to prove that such an instrument could be built.” In 1961, he arranged a contract with Ball Brothers Research Corporation to develop a more complex breadboard. “The Search for Martian Life Begins: 1959–1965,” in Ezell and Ezell, On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet, 1958–1978.
ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL PALEONTOLOGISTS The elder Simpson was George Gaylord Simpson, who served as the curator of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology from 1959 until 1970.
TEASED THEM ABOUT George Gaylord Simpson, “The Nonprevalence of Humanoids,” in This View of Life: The World of an Evolutionist (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), pp. 253–254; John D. Rummel, “Carl Woese, Dick Young, and the Roots of Astrobiology,” RNA Biology, 11, no. 3 (2014), pp. 207–209.
INSTRUMENT DUBBED “GULLIVER” David Warmflash, “Celebrating Viking: Gilbert Levin Recalls the Search for Life on Mars,” Discover (July 20, 2016).
GULLIVER SOUGHT TO CAPITALIZE Gil Levin, the instrument’s inventor, was a sanitation engineer who worked in public-health engineering. The typical test was based on a simple idea: If many bacteria were present in a water sample, a lot of carbon dioxide would be respired after the sample was added to nutrient-rich media, but if only a little carbon dioxide was respired, below a certain threshold, the water was considered safe. Yet the typical method took a week or longer, which irked Levin, as no one was drinking last week’s water or swimming in last week’s ocean. Levin had been working away on a new concept, which would utilize radioactivity to make the same test thousands of times more sensitive. The idea was to monitor the release of carbon dioxide using a radioactive form of carbon. If organisms were present, and if they consumed nutrients made from carbon-14, the carbon-14 could be respired back into the air as carbon dioxide and registered on an inexpensive but highly sensitive Geiger counter. Only a tiny whiff of the gas would need to be present, which could massively expedite the detection time. Jay Gallentine, “What If,” Infinity Beckoned: Adventuring through the Solar System, 1969–1989 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016).
KITE LINE Once the kite line was sealed in a growth chamber, an ampule of labeled organic nutrients would be broken. If the nutrients were metabolized, the exhaled breath of the microbes would be trapped by a chemically coated film at the mouth of a shockproof Geiger counter.
NEARLY TWENTY Gallentine, Infinity Beckoned: Adventuring through the Solar System, 1969–1989, p. 17.
REQUIRED TOO MUCH DATA The idea of microscopic imaging had been considered, but the transmission of a vidicon image would likely require “105 bits for a bad picture”—the equivalent of a text message today—or “107 bits for a good picture”—about the size of a photo snapped by the first model of the iPhone. “When this very large data requirement and the problems of specimen preparation and slide searching were considered, no further attention was given to this device.” Life Detection Experiments Team, “A Survey of Life Detection Instruments for Mars,” NASA TMX-54946 Technical Report, NASA (August 1963), p. 15.
SOMETHING YOU MEASURED The prototypes of life detection instruments focused almost entirely on microbes: Microbes were always associated with higher life-forms. Microbes were fecund, and microbes were everywhere. It would be hard to find a bucket of soil anywhere on the Earth that wasn’t teeming with them. Detecting microbes could also be done at the micro-scale, an advantage with the space and weight for hardware so highly constrained.
PENNED A MOVING LETTER Vishniac, “Letter from Wolf Vishniac to Clinton P. Anderson, United States Senate.”
SCRUTINIZED HUNDREDS OF PHOTOGRAPHS S. D. Kilston, R. R. Drummond, and C. Sagan, “A Search for Life on Earth at Kilometer Resolution,” Icarus, 5, 79 (1966), pp. 79–98; Carl Sagan and David Wallace, “A Search for Life on Earth at 100 Meter Resolution,” Icarus, 15, 3 (1970), pp. 515–554; Carl Sagan, “Is There Life on Earth?” Engineering and Science, 35 (4), (1972), pp. 16–19.
NECESSARILY PRECLUDE LIFE Carl Sagan, “Statement of Dr. Carl Sagan, Department of Astronomy, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.,” Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings Before the Committee on Science and Aeronautics, U.S. House of Representatives, 90th Congress, 2nd Session (July 29, 1968).
LITTLE-KNOWN EXPERIMENTS The original “Mars jars” work began in the lab of military space medicine expert Hubertus Strughold, a fact that has been largely forgotten, in part because of Strughold’s role in the Luftwaffe’s aviation medicine research program during World War II, which included lethal low-pressure experiments on humans. Science and technology studies scholar Jordan Bimm has done fascinating research on this topic; see: Jordan Bimm, “What’s in the Mars Jar? Cold War Astrobiology and the Idea of Mars as a Microbial Place,” American Anthropological Association (Denver, Colo.: Nov. 2015).
“VARIETIES OF TERRESTRIAL MICROBES” Sagan, Cosmos, p. 119.
RESEMBLE A FOX TERRIER Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr., The Search for Life on Mars: Evolution of an Idea (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), p. 126.
SCIENCE ARTICLE IN 1969 N. H. Horowitz, et al., “Sterile Soil from Antarctica: Organic Analysis,” Science, 164, no. 3,883 (1969), pp. 1,054–1,056.
ALARMED HOROWITZ Cooper, The Search for Life on Mars: Evolution of an Idea, pp. 100–101.
DEEPLY TIED TO THE EXOBIOLOGY ENTERPRISE In addition to his role in WESTEX, Horowitz had been supporting the development of Gulliver. NASA had asked Levin to pick a co-experimenter from a list of PhD scientists to get continued support for the instrument’s development, as Levin did not have a doctorate and was seen as more of an engineer than a scientist. He picked Norm Horowitz (and soon began working in his spare time on a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, which he would earn in just three years). Jay Gallentine, Infinity Beckoned: Adventuring through the Solar System, 1969–1989, pp. 18–19.
AND THE SAMPLE BAKED His idea focused not on carbon respired by the microbes in the form of carbon dioxide but rather on carbon that had been “fixed,” assimilated into the cells themselves. The heat would be enough to destroy the cells, turning any carbon in the soil microbes back into a gas, and a positive Geiger counter reading would then serve as a powerful indication of living organisms. This was the Pyrolytic Release (PR) experiment.
A MODIFIED VERSION OF GULLIVER This was Viking’s Labeled Release (LR) experiment.
NICKNAMED THE “CHICKEN SOUP” This was Viking’s Gas Exchange (GEX) experiment.
THE MORE FOOD THE MARTIAN MICROBES GOT Cooper, The Search for Life on Mars: Evolution of an Idea, p. 99.
POINTLESS TO STERILIZE Norman H. Horowitz, To Utopia and Back: The Search for Life in the Solar System (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1986), p. 120.
THE VENUSIAN ATMOSPHERE “55 Years Ago: Mariner 2 First to Venus,” NASA (Dec. 14, 2017).
JUST AS VIKING WAS BEGINNING TO BE PLANNED Viking grew out of NASA’s Voyager Mars program, which was planned between 1966 and 1968 but cancelled due to risk and cost. The mission name was then used for NASA’s unrelated Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 missions to study the outer planets.
CROSSTOWN-RIVAL MIT Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, p. 107.
GEOLOGY AND GEOPHYSICS DEPARTMENT In 1952, MIT’s Department of Geology was renamed the Department of Geology and Geophysics. In
1967, it became the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and in 1983, it became the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. “MIT History, School of Science,” Institute Archives, MIT Libraries, July 2007.
“SPECULATIONS CANNOT BE CONFIRMED” Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, p. 107.
WRITTEN A LETTER Ibid., pp. 171–173.
FORGIVENESS AND FRIENDSHIP Harold Urey, quoted in Bill Sternberg, “The Sagan Files,” Cornell Alumni Magazine (March/April 2014).
REDID THE ENTIRE THING Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, p. 25.
SETTLING OF DUST Ibid., pp. 34–35. Vishniac, for his part, had his own creative hypothesis: Perhaps bright dust was accumulating on the surfaces of Martian plants, then gradually being shaken to the ground, revealing the dark leaves beneath. Extravagant, maybe, but rooted in evidence and logic. Both Vishniac and Sagan had an acute appreciation for what was known and what was unknown and a deep commitment to the idea that evidence could not be ignored—but in the absence of evidence, the possibilities were limitless.
“TURNED TOPSY-TURVY” Vishniac, “Letter from Wolf Vishniac to Clinton P. Anderson, United States Senate.”
“GREATEST EXPERIMENT” Gilbert V. Levin, “The Curiousness of Curiosity,” Astrobiology, 15, no. 2 (2015), pp. 101–103.
THERE WERE FORTY THOUSAND PARTS “Viking Lander: Creating the Science Teams,” in Ezell and Ezell, On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet, 1958–1978.
SHOEHORNED INTO A SIXTEEN-KILOGRAM “How Viking Instrument Studies Soil Samples for Signs of Life” and “The Viking Biology Project (Art)” in Mars Viking (Redondo Beach, Calif.: TRW, 1976), pp. 11–12.