The Sirens of Mars
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HOLES IN ITS WHEELS Mike Wall, “NASA’s Curiosity Rover on Mars Is Climbing a Mountain Despite Wheel Damage,” Space (May 3, 2016).
POOR DRILL Curiosity’s drill went on hiatus in late 2016 after a motor failed; a new percussive drilling technique (called Feed Extended Drilling) designed by JPL’s engineers successfully brought the drill back to life eighteen months later in 2018; Guy Webster, “Curiosity Rover Team Examining New Drill Hiatus,” NASA (Dec. 5, 2016); “Curiosity Successfully Drills ‘Duluth’,” NASA Science Mars Exploration Program (May 23, 2018).
VERA RUBIN RIDGE A special issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research detailing discoveries in the Vera Rubin Ridge is slated to be released in 2020.
EVIDENCE OF DARK MATTER Vera C. Rubin, W. Kent Ford, Jr., and Norbert Thonnard, “Rotational Properties of 21 SC Galaxies with a Large Range of Luminosities and Radii, from NGC 4605 (R= 4kpc) to UGC 2885 (R= 122 kpc),” The Astrophysical Journal, 238 (1980), pp. 471–487; J. G. De Swart, Gianfranco Bertone, and Jeroen van Dongen, “How Dark Matter Came to Matter,” Nature Astronomy, 1, no. 3 (2017), p. 0059.
85 PERCENT OF THE “Synopsis: How Dark Matter Shaped the First Galaxies,” American Physical Society (Oct. 2, 2019).
LEARNED TO TELL TIME Interview of Vera Rubin by Alan Lightman, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics (College Park, Md.: April 3, 1989).
PAINTING ASTRONOMICAL OBJECTS Maiken Scott, “Vera Rubin’s Son Reflects on How She Paved the Way for Women,” The Pulse (Jan. 12, 2017).
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT A TIME “Dark Matter Discoverer Vera Rubin Blazed New Trails for Women, Astronomy,” Georgetown University News (Feb. 23, 2017).
NOT OPEN TO WOMEN In 1965, Rubin also became the first woman to observe at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory. As Princeton professor Neta Bahcall remembers: “They told her, ‘It’s a real problem because we don’t have a ladies’ room,’ so she went back to her room and took out a little piece of paper and cut it into a skirt and went to the bathroom door and stuck it on the men’s figure on the door. She said, ‘Look, now you have a ladies’ room.’ ” See: Jenni Avins, “ ‘Devise Your Own Paths’: The Enduring Wisdom of Vera Rubin, Groundbreaking Astronomer and Working Mother,” Quartz (Dec. 27, 2016).
AVERSE TO SHARP ELBOWS Dennis Overbye, “Vera Rubin, 88, Dies; Opened Doors in Astronomy, and for Women,” The New York Times (Dec. 27, 2016).
“NOBODY WOULD BOTHER [HER]” Ibid.; Lisa Randall, “Why Vera Rubin Deserved a Nobel,” The New York Times (Jan. 4, 2017).
MAJORITY OF THE UNIVERSE Overbye, “Vera Rubin, 88, Dies; Opened Doors in Astronomy, and for Women,” The New York Times.
NEAR THE END OF HER LIFE Rubin was only the second woman, after Caroline Herschel in 1828, to win the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal. She also received a National Medal of Science in 1993, the highest scientific award in the United States. Many also believe she should have been awarded a Nobel Prize for her work; see: Randall, “Why Vera Rubin Deserved A Nobel,” The New York Times, and Sarah Scoles, “How Vera Rubin Confirmed Dark Matter,” Astronomy (June 2016).
“TO HAVE A FAMILY” Vera Rubin, Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters (New York, Springer Science and Business Media: 1996).
SHE HAD FOUR CHILDREN Overbye, “Vera Rubin, 88, Dies; Opened Doors in Astronomy, and for Women,” The New York Times.
BECAME A PLANETARY GEOLOGIST Dave Rubin is a sedimentologist in the department of Earth and planetary sciences at U.C. Santa Cruz and a participating scientist on the Mars Science Laboratory science team, focusing on sediment deposits and geomorphology.
“I’M SORRY I KNOW SO LITTLE” Overbye, “Vera Rubin, 88, Dies; Opened Doors in Astronomy, and for Women,” The New York Times.
Chapter 11: Form from a Formless Thing
A VILLAGE NAMED JEZERO D. C. Agle, “NASA Mars Mission Connects with Bosnian Town,” NASA News (Sept. 23, 2019).
LINKED BY A HUNDRED WATERFALLS Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia. See: “Discover the Most Beautiful Lakes in Eastern Europe,” SNCB International.
RUMORED TO BE HEAVY WITH DEUTERIUM “Pliva Lakes and Watermills,” Visit Jajce.
NAMED AFTER SMALL TOWNS “Categories (Themes) for Naming Features on Planets and Satellites,” Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, International Astronomical Union.
SMALL CRATER NAMED “Jezero,” Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, International Astronomical Union.
ALSO HELD A LAKE C. I. Fassett and J. W. Head III, “Fluvial Sedimentary Deposits on Mars: Ancient Deltas in a Crater Lake in the Nili Fossae Region,” Geophysical Research Letters 32, no. 14 (2005); B. L. Ehlmann, J. F. Mustard, C. I. Fassett, S. C. Schon, J. W. Head III, D. J. Des Marais, J. A. Grant, and S. L. Murchie, “Clay Minerals in Delta Deposits and Organic Preservation Potential on Mars,” Nature Geoscience 1, no. 6 (2008): 355; T.A. Goudge, “Stratigraphy and Evolution of Delta Channel Deposits, Jezero Crater, Mars,” Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, 48 (2017).
PLUNGING HUNDREDS OF METERS Emily Lakdawalla, “We’re Going to Jezero!” The Planetary Society (Nov. 20, 2018).
BEVY OF SPACECRAFT If all goes well, also launching to Mars in 2020 will be the Kazachok lander, built by Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. It will collect images and monitor the weather at Oxia Planum, as well as deliver the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin rover to the surface to study rocks and soils. The rover will sink a drill deeper than ever before under the surface of Mars. One of its most exciting instruments, the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer, will have the ability to detect a wide range of organics in the samples it collects. The Chinese also plan to launch a mission on one of their enormous Long March 5 rockets. Their first Mars attempt, a joint mission with the Russians, sadly failed after lift-off in 2011, but in 2020, the China National Space Administration will go it alone with its HX-1 mission. According to news sources, the orbiter will carry cameras, radar, spectrometers, neutral and energetic particle analyzers, and a magnetometer, and will be joined by a solar-powered rover (capitalizing on the success of China’s Yutu-2 rover, which explored the moon’s far side in 2019). A spacecraft called Hope from the United Arab Emirates also plans to launch in 2020, on a Japanese rocket, with the goal of mapping Martian weather from orbit and studying climate dynamics and atmospheric escape. It will be the Arab world’s first attempt at a mission to another planet, and a hugely impressive feat for a country that didn’t even have a space agency until 2014. All these probes will join NASA’s ongoing InSight mission, a geophysical lander that arrived in 2018 to study seismic activity and internal heat flow, as well as NASA’s Mars Odyssey mission, which found water ice in the subsurface when it arrived in the early 2000s and now serves as a communications relay. Also looping the Martian skies are the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission; NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter; NASA’s MAVEN mission; the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a joint effort between the European Space Agency and Roscosmos; and Mangalyaan, also known as the Mars Orbital Mission, the Indian Space Agency’s thrilling first mission, which arrived in 2014 for less than the cost of making the movie Gravity. For more information, see: Emily Lakdawalla, “Similarities and differences in the landing sites of ESA’s and NASA’s 2020 Mars rovers,” Nature Astronomy, 3 (2019), p. 190; Mike Wall, “4 Mars Missions Are One Year Away from Launching to the Red Planet in July 2020,” Space.com, July 25, 2019; Andrew Jones, “China’s first Mars spacecraft undergoing integration for 2020 launch,” SpaceNews, May 29, 2019; Sam Lemonick, “3 rovers will head to Mars in 2020. Here’s what you need to know about their chemical missions.” C&EN, 97, no. 29, July 21, 2019; Eshan Masood, “UAE Mars probe will be Arab world first,” Nature News, July 31, 2019.
ALL BUT A FEW PATCHES Martin J. Van Kranendonk, Vickie Bennett, and Elis Hoffmann, eds., Earth’s Oldest Rocks (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2018).
POLAR CAPS WAX “The Changing Ice Caps of Mars,�
� NASA Science Mars Exploration Program (Nov. 27, 2018).
SPIN AXIS ARCS Kevin W. Lewis, Oded Aharonson, John P. Grotzinger, Randolph L. Kirk, Alfred S. McEwen, and Terry-Ann Suer, “Quasi-Periodic Bedding in the Sedimentary Rock Record of Mars,” Science, 322, no. 5,907 (2008), pp. 1,532–1,535; J. Taylor Perron and Peter Huybers, “Is There an Orbital Signal in the Polar Layered Deposits on Mars?” Geology, 37, no. 2 (2009), pp. 155–158.
FROM GEOTHERMAL FIELDS Armen Y. Mulkidjanian, et al., “Origin of First Cells at Terrestrial, Anoxic Geothermal Fields,” PNAS, 109, no. 14 (2012), pp. E821–E830.
REPEATED CYCLES Jay G. Forsythe, Sheng-Sheng Yu, Irena Mamajanov, Martha A. Grover, Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, Facundo M. Fernández, and Nicholas V. Hud, “Ester-Mediated Amide Bond Formation Driven by Wet–Dry Cycles: A Possible Path to Polypeptides on the Prebiotic Earth,” Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 54, no. 34 (2015), pp. 9,871–9,875.
ROVER’S CHASSIS The rover will also be delivered by a duplicate SkyCrane entry, descent, and landing system. Eric Hand, “NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover to Feature Lean, Nimble Science Payload,” Science (July 31, 2014).
SMALL HELICOPTER The helicopter drone weighs less than two kilograms and is just over a meter wide. It is designed for ultra-low density atmospheric flight, and if it succeeds, it will be the first aircraft flown on another body in the solar system. The helicopter features twin rotors and a solar array and will attempt five flights of up to 90 seconds above Mars’s surface. Meant as a test craft, the rotorcraft carries no scientific equipment apart from its cameras, which will return images of Jezero Crater from above. See: D. C. Agle and Alana Johnson. “NASA’s Mars Helicopter Attached to Mars 2020 Rover.” NASA, 28 Aug. 2019 and Preston Lerner, “A Helicopter Dreams of Mars.” Air & Space Magazine, April 2019.
JUST AS HEAVY The arm’s instrument-laden turret weighs forty kilograms. Michelle Lou, “Watch the Arm of NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover Perform a Bicep Curl,” CNN (July 30, 2019).
DRILL SEVERAL SAMPLES The rover will carry forty-two sample tubes, including five engineering spares, but it is designed to acquire only twenty samples over the first 1.5 Mars years. The plan is for the rest to be acquired during the extended mission. Ken Farley, “Mars 2020 Mission,” Fourth Landing Site Workshop for the Mars 2020 Rover Mission (Glendale, Calif., Oct.16, 2019).
SIZE OF A PENLIGHT “Robotic Arm,” NASA Mars 2020 Mission.
CACHE WILL REMAIN THERE The current strategy for returning the samples involves a fetch rover that will deliver samples to a Mars ascent vehicle, which will help prove technologies required for human exploration. At present, it is envisioned as an international endeavor, with the main mission hardware provided by NASA and the European Space Agency. “Sample Handling,” NASA Mars 2020 mission; Justin Cowart, “NASA, ESA Officials Outline Latest Mars Sample Return Plans,” The Planetary Society (August 13, 2019).
AND BROUGHT HOME Even though a great deal of material has already been naturally transferred from Mars to Earth, and even though the deliberate goal of NASA’s Mars Sample Return effort is to return ancient rocks with evidence of ancient life—not any living organisms—the potential for extant life makes it imperative that NASA and its international partners take extreme caution in handling any samples returned to Earth. NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection, in collaboration with the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR), an international scientific body, has implemented strict policies to protect Earth from possible life-forms returned from space. Several sample quarantine scenarios are being explored, including the use of specially built Biosafety Level-4 containment facilities (BSL-4, those used for fatal diseases with no known vaccines or treatments) as well as possibilities in orbit. See: Bergit Uhran, Catharine Conley, and J. Andy Spry, “Updating Planetary Protection Considerations and Policies for Mars Sample Return,” Space Policy (2019); Sarah Knapton, “Martian Rocks Could Be Quarantined on Moon Before Travelling to Earth,” The Telegraph (London: Dec. 5, 2019); Yoseph Bar-Cohen, Mircea Badescu, Stewart Sherrit, Xiaoqi Bao, Hyeong Jae Lee, Erik Bombela, and Sukhwinder Sandhu, “Sample Containerization and Planetary Protection Using Brazing for Breaking the Chain of Contact to Mars,” Behavior and Mechanics of Multifunctional Materials XIII, vol. 10968, International Society for Optics and Photonics (2019), p. 1,096,802.
THE PRECISE AGE Melanie Barboni, Patrick Boehnke, Brenhin Keller, Issaku E. Kohl, Blair Schoene, Edward D. Young, and Kevin D. McKeegan, “Early Formation of the Moon 4.51 Billion Years Ago,” Science Advances, 3, no. 1 (2017), p. e1602365.
AN INDELIBLE RECORD Prabal Saxena, Rosemary M. Killen, Vladimir Airapetian, Noah E. Petro, Natalie M. Curran, and Avi M. Mandell, “Was the Sun a Slow Rotator? Sodium and Potassium Constraints from the Lunar Regolith,” The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 876, no. 1 (2019), p. L16.
A MILLION PASSENGERS, SENT ON Sarah Knapton, “Elon Musk: We’ll Create a City on Mars with a Million Inhabitants,” The Telegraph (London: June 21, 2017).
HOME TO A RELICT RIVER DELTA Timothy A. Goudge, Ralph E. Milliken, James W. Head, John F. Mustard, and Caleb I. Fassett, “Sedimentological Evidence for a Deltaic Origin of the Western Fan Deposit in Jezero Crater, Mars, and Implications for Future Exploration,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 458 (2017), pp. 357–365; Timothy A. Goudge, David Mohrig, Benjamin T. Cardenas, Cory M. Hughes, and Caleb I. Fassett, “Stratigraphy and Paleohydrology of Delta Channel Deposits, Jezero Crater, Mars,” Icarus, 301 (2018), pp. 58–75.
MOST LIKELY TO TRAP THINGS Jack D. Farmer and David J. Des Marais, “Exploring for a Record of Ancient Martian Life,” Journal of Geophysical Research Planets, 104, no. E11 (1999), pp. 26,977–26,995.
BIND AND BURY ORGANICS Bethany L. Ehlmann, et al., “Clay Minerals in Delta Deposits and Organic Preservation Potential on Mars,” Nature Geoscience, 1, no. 6 (2008), p. 355.
ONE OF THE ROVER’S MAIN TARGETS Sanjeev Gupta and Briony Horgan, “Mars 2020 Science Team Assessment of Jezero Crater,” Fourth Landing Site Workshop for the Mars 2020 Rover Mission (Glendale, Calif.: Oct. 17, 2019); Kennda Lynch, James Wray, Kevin Rey, and Robin Bond, “Habitability and Preservation Potential of the Bottomset Deposits in Jezero Crater,” Fourth Landing Site Workshop for the Mars 2020 Rover Mission (Glendale, Calif.: Oct. 17, 2019); Ken Farley, Katie Stack-Morgan, and Ken Williford, “Jezero-Midway Interellipse Traverse Mission Concept,” Fourth Landing Site Workshop for the Mars 2020 Rover Mission (Glendale, Calif.: Oct. 18, 2019).
RICH BOTTOMSET BEDS Hydrated silica, a mineral that’s terrific for preserving microfossils and other traces of life, has also been detected near the edge of the delta in what may be its bottomset layer, adding to excitement of exploring this locality. Other exciting targets within Jezero include a bathtub ring of carbonates that may represent an ancient lakeshore. J. D. Tarnas, J. F. Mustard, Honglei Lin, T. A. Goudge, E. S. Amador, M. S. Bramble, C. H. Kremer, X. Zhang, Y. Itoh, and M. Parente, “Orbital identification of hydrated silica in Jezero crater, Mars,” Geophysical Research Letters (2019); Briony H.N. Horgan, Ryan B. Anderson, Gilles Dromart, Elena S. Amador, and Melissa S. Rice, “The mineral diversity of Jezero crater: Evidence for possible lacustrine carbonates on Mars,” Icarus (2019): 113526.
TRIANGLE SHAPE Donald Prothero and Fred Schwab, Sedimentary Geology: An Introduction to Sedimentary Rocks and Stratigraphy (Second Edition) (New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 2004).
“ERASED FROM TIME” Haleh Ardebili, “No. 2822: Herodotus,” Engines of Our Ingenuity (Aug. 21, 2012).
“AUTOPSY” Herodotus, Histories, trans. George Rawlinson (The Internet Classics Archive), II.
THINGS HE NOTICED Herodotus, An Account of Egypt, trans. G. C. Macaulay (Project Gutenberg, 2006).
“SILTING FORWARD OF THE LAND” Ibid.
AKHET Nigel C. Strudwick, Texts from the Pyramid Age (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), p. 87.
ONLY CONSONANTS REMAINING Ibid.
DECORATED THE JARS Ibid.
PATTERNS WOULD REMAIN Ibid.
THE PELUSIAC BRANCH W.W. How, A Commentary on Herodotus (Project Gutenberg, 2008).
HIGH AS FIVE METERS Joshua J. Mark, “Egyptian Papyrus,” Ancient History Encyclopedia (Nov. 8, 2016).
WORLD WAS CREATED Janice Kamrin, “Papyrus in Ancient Egypt,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art (March 2015).
“GIFT OF THE RIVER” J. Gwyn Griffiths, “Hecataeus and Herodotus on ‘A Gift of the River,’ ” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 25, no. 1 (1966), pp. 57–61.
RED-HOT OVENS Herodotus, An Account of Egypt, trans. G. C. Macaulay.
MADE GARLANDS From Theophrastus, Historia Plantarum (IV, 10), as quoted in “Papyrus,” Encyclopedia Britannica (1911).
HERODOTUS’S WRITINGS FOUND Lionel Casson, “The Library of Alexandria,” Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 43.
GREAT LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA Roy MacLeod, ed., The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004).
UNBROKEN SCHOLARSHIP Roy MacLeod, ed. The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004).
GREAT LIGHTHOUSE Judith McKenzie and Peter Roger Stuart Moorey, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, c. 300 BC to AD 700, vol. 63 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); James Crawford, Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings (New York: Picador, 2017).
COPIED BY SCRIBES Claudii Galeni, Opera Omnia, vol. 17.1, ed. D. Carolus Gottlob Kühn (Leipzig, Prostat in Officina Libraria Car. Cnoblochii, 1828), p. 605.
COLLECTION GREW “When Libraries Were on a Roll,” The Telegraph (London: May 19, 2001).
THE PERSIANS, THE BABYLONIANS Thomas Greenwood, “Euclid and Aristotle,” The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review, 15, no. 3 (1952), pp. 374–403.