Destination Mars

by Rod Pyle

  Perhaps not surprisingly, he also wrote some early works that could be classified as science fiction (alien encounters, no less). It should be mentioned that in his spiritual writing he at least made an attempt to bring the scientific method to his efforts.

  Asaph Hall (1829-1907) was a self-taught astronomer who nonetheless managed to wrangle a position at Harvard (he attended two colleges but never graduated from either). Despite his academic shortcomings, he managed to become at various times a professor of mathematics and the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. During his career, he authored over five hundred scientific papers about his astronomical observations, primarily about double stars and the planets. Working at the US Naval Observatory, Hall created maps of Mars and was the first to note its two moons, in 1877. The names Phobos and Deimos were suggested by a scholar at Eton, in Britain, as a fitting nod to Homer's Iliad.

  Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910) was far less eccentric than Flammarion and a more prolific mapmaker than Hall. He spent time observing on telescopes in locations as varied as Berlin and Russia, eventually returning to Italy. Besides his mapping of Mars, he is known for his discovery of the relationship between yearly meteor showers on Earth and the comets from which they originate. In the same year that Hall discovered the twin moons of Mars, Schiaparelli made some of his first detailed maps using his nine-inch refracting telescope in Brera, Italy. The lines he observed (or thought he did), and the derived markings on his maps, he termed “canali,” or in Italian, channels. He later claimed that he did not intend this to suggest intelligent engineering: “[T]hese names may be regarded as a mere artifice…. After all, we speak in a similar way of the seas of the Moon, knowing very well that they do not consist of liquid masses.”5 Elsewhere, he continued: “[W]e are inclined to believe them to be produced by an evolution of the planet, just as on the Earth we have the English Channel and the Channel of Mozambique.”6

  However, Schiaparelli himself confused the issue, perhaps cautiously bowing to popular enthusiasm: “Their singular aspect, and their being drawn with absolute geometrical precision, as if they were the work of rule or compass, has led some to see in them the work of intelligent beings…. I am very careful not to combat this supposition, which includes nothing impossible.”7

  His maps were of sufficient quality that they were used well into the twentieth century, almost to the dawn of the space age. But the canali were the overriding feature to most. In the popular mind, and in at least one eccentric American astronomer's, the word canali had a specific connotation, and intelligence was indelibly ascribed to his observed features regardless of his ambivalence to the idea. This notion quickly caught fire in the public mind.

  It should be noted that there was ample opposition to this idea in scientific circles. In 1894, American astronomer William Wallace Campbell (later to become the president of the University of California) performed spectroscopic analyses of the Martian atmosphere and noted little, if any, water or oxygen present. This should have crushed the dreams of many who envisioned advanced civilizations and vast oceans on Mars, or even water-consuming plant life, but this is not the way of the fertile and wishful mind. The idea of sentient Martians persisted, and grew.

  The aristocratic American amateur astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) was intrigued by a book Flammarion wrote about Mars (La planète Mars, 1892), and was further awed by Schiaparelli's work. In particular, Lowell seems to have fallen prey (as so many did) to the Italian astronomer's unfortunate choice of the word canali to describe the lines he thought he saw on the planet, thinking (or hoping) that this implied intelligent, intentional design. In short, Lowell and others interpreted this term, either consciously or not, as denoting artificial canals, built by intelligent Martians to save their water-starved world. In fact, Lowell went so far as to suggest a utopian, united Martian global government, for how else could they achieve these world-girdling civil-engineering projects?

  Lowell was perhaps the most fascinating of the “intelligent Martian” club. Born of a wealthy Boston family, his passions were few but remarkably powerful throughout his life. After his formal education, which resulted in graduation from Harvard in mathematics, he spent many years in Asia, specifically in Japan, about which he wrote influentially and with characteristic intensity. This literary training would serve him well when he later sought to popularize his theories about Mars, which in their own way did more to popularize planetary science (no matter how ultimately misguided his own ideas may have been) with his populist, if fantastic, theories.

  In 1894, with a few years of work on Mars already under his belt, Lowell traveled to the Arizona territory and chose a mountaintop just outside of Flagstaff to build his observatory. With a family fortune in textiles at his disposal, he built one of the finer American observatories of its time atop the perch he renamed Mars Hill. It should be noted that, within academia and “professional” circles, Lowell (regardless of that Ivy League degree in mathematics), was considered by many an amateur astronomer, despite rigorous self-training and his fine observatory. Nonetheless, for the next fifteen years he made careful and detailed studies of Mars through his large telescope, resulting in thousands of drawings and three books: Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908).

  It is worth mentioning that Lowell was one of the few “intelligent Martian” promoters who backed up his assertions with some generally solid scientific reasoning. He wrote convincingly of the relationship between Mars's age, its distance from the sun, and early planetary formation to support his ideas. Reading his books today, and understanding the sketchy evidence available to him and others of the time, one can enjoy the road map of his logic and feel the genuine passion of his notions. He was far from a tabloid journalist, despite the fantastic thoughts he put forth. For example, examine (and endure) the wordy excerpt that follows:

  …[T]he aspect of the lines is enough to put to rest all the theories of purely natural causation that have so far been advanced to account for them. This negation is to be found in the supernaturally regular appearance of the system, upon three distinct counts: first, the straightness of the lines; second, their individually uniform width; and, third, their systematic radiation from special points…. Physical processes never, so far as we know, end in producing perfectly regular results, that is, results in which irregularity is not also discernible. Disagreement amid conformity is the inevitable outcome of the many factors simultaneously at work…. That the lines form a system; that, instead of running anywhither, they join certain points to certain others, making thus, not a simple network, but one whose meshes connect centres directly with one another,—is striking at first sight, and loses none of its peculiarity on second thought. For the intrinsic improbability of such a state of things arising from purely natural causes becomes evident on a moment's consideration…. Their very aspect is such as to defy natural explanation, and to hint that in them we are regarding something other than the outcome of purely natural causes.8

  In other words, these lines must be artificial canals because they are straight, uniformly wide, and go from one point to another, and this is unlikely to happen by natural accident.

  Lowell went further, though, which may have done more to undermine his credibility than the faux canals. Another excerpt from the same book states: “Martian folk are possessed of inventions of which we have not dreamed, and with them electrophones and kinetoscopes are things of a bygone past, preserved with veneration in museums as relics of the clumsy contrivances of the simple childhood of their kind.”9

  Lowell, somewhat characteristically, took things a bit too far in his flawed but admirable enthusiasm. However, his copious writings, dated though they are, make for entertaining reading even today.

  It has since been argued that Schiaparelli, Lowell, and the others who so patiently charted the lines across the Martian surface may have done little more than traced the capillaries in their own retinas, either as
shadows cast through the structure of the eye or as reflected in the eyepieces of their telescopes. Nobody can be sure. What can be said with some authority is that no two observers saw quite the same patterns, and few users of modern telescopes have felt compelled to make note of such patterns in the last one hundred years.

  Nevertheless, the stage had been set for a Mars peopled in some way, by some thing. Fiction responded to this fertile landscape via men like H. G. Wells, whose The War of the Worlds, first published as a serial in Britain's Pearson's Magazine in 1897 and later as a novel in 1898, wrote the first truly compelling tale of interplanetary invasion. His account, well-spiced by a background in journalism (and written in this fashion), was perhaps the first truly horrifying work of science fiction, in many ways (along with writers such as Jules Verne) establishing that genre. It was a newslike accounting of the invasion of Earth by Martians, and it remains as chilling today as the year it was first published. Navigating the void between worlds in meteorlike spacecraft, the aliens fell to Earth and dispatched three-legged machines of war as invincible as they were fantastic. And to make matters worse, they did not only lust for our planet, but further insulted humanity by feeding on our blood through small tubes inserted directly into their stomachs on one end, and into human bodies on the other. Wells was a known critic of the British penchant for colonial adventures and empire, and was, as later charted by academia, quite consciously commenting upon the decimation of less advanced societies by warlike technological powers such as Britain. He could not have done so in a more colorful fashion. The book remains in print today, over a century later, in dozens of languages.

  Regardless of Wells's motives, The War of the Worlds, along with the ideas of Lowell, set the stage for popular thinking about Mars for almost seventy years. Adding to this was an offshoot of Wells's work, the 1938 radio dramatization of the book by Orson Welles (no relation) on his Mercury Theater of the Air radio program, which created a panic throughout the parts of the American East Coast within reach of the radio station.

  No literary conversation about Mars would be complete without mention of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Prior to his most famous literary invention, Tarzan, Burroughs penned a deeply imaginative suite of tales about Mars. The planet was known as Barsoom to its inhabitants. And what inhabitants they were. Barsoom teemed with a multitude of beings (some red and some green), eight-legged fighting steeds, airships and castles, kings and queens, princes and princesses, and classic bad guys and good guys—all at war with one another. In the latter category fell John Carter, quite literally. The hero of the tales, Carter was a veteran of the US Civil War who was working in the US frontier in Indian territory. Losing his way, he found himself hunted by angry Apache warriors. Hiding in a sacred Apache-owned cave, he was mysteriously transported to Mars, where he was introduced to the fighting races of the planet and, more memorably, the barely clad Princess of Mars. He began a series of deeply involving adventures, eventually returning to Earth. If only NASA could find that cave in the Western states, its annual budget would go much, much further…

  As late as the 1950s, an inhabited Mars still glowed brightly in the popular imagination due to a spate of motion pictures (notably, 1953's The War of the Worlds and Angry Red Planet in 1959) and fast-selling popular literature such as Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950). This last work was unusual in that it was a poetic and sympathetic look at the human colonization of Mars as a metaphor for the violent annexation of the Western frontier of the United States, complete with spiritually enlightened indigenous natives who are eventually wiped out by the bacterial plagues that hitchhike to Mars within the bodies of white men. Bradbury's take on Mars was not wholly dissimilar to Wells's in his observations of human malignancy.

  Thus, the possibility of Mars as a place occupied by intelligent and possibly warlike beings remained deeply ingrained in the popular consciousness. And despite the opposition by many scientists of the day who declaimed these Martian fantasies due to the extreme temperatures and lack of measurable water or a breathable atmosphere there, this popular mindset lived on.

  Then came 1965, and Mariner 4.

  Mariner 4 represented NASA's first journey to Mars, the second of two spacecraft to attempt the trip. This was a time when the space agency wisely launched its unmanned probes in pairs, which often saved the mission. Mariner 3 failed, but Mariner 4 sailed past Mars, returning twenty-one spectacular, if ghostly, images. In the process, Mariner smashed the Martian empire of previous generations to, quite literally, dust. The images returned by that robotic craft were grainy and indistinct, and involved some sophisticated guesswork to interpret, but they showed a Mars that astronomers had scarcely imagined for all their years at the eyepieces of their mighty telescopes. For what those marvelous instruments could not reveal was the truth that emerged from the Mariner images: Mars was a desert, a place of craters and windswept stone, and vast fields of oxidized sand. It was, in short, an apparently dead world.

  The mission was not an easy one. Launched with its twin, Mariner 3, only Mariner 4 made the full journey. Both craft departed Earth in November 1964, with Mariner 3 failing to fully jettison its protective shroud in Earth orbit. Unable to extend its solar-power panels, it soon died of battery starvation and now resides, mummified, in a lazy orbit around the sun.

  Mariner 4 fared better, following the planned trajectory to Mars. It is worth relating that after observing the failure of the fiberglass shroud to release Mariner 3, technicians descended to the cape and, within a matter of a few weeks, designed a new nose cone from metal with an improved release mechanism. This quick fix was indicative of those rough-and-ready early days of space exploration, and the new design worked perfectly. Mariner 4 left Earth orbit without incident in December and headed off for the long voyage to Mars, fifty-four million miles distant—if one could fly in a straight line. But one could not, and the distance traveled would be far longer.

  This was NASA's first success with Mars and only the second time a still-operating robotic probe flew by another planet (the Soviet Union had attempted as much, but all its machines failed before executing their primary missions). Mariner 2, launched in August 1962, had performed a successful flyby of Venus later that year (Mariner 1, true to form, was destroyed shortly after launch).1

  Mariner 4 arrived at Mars in mid-July 1965, returning twenty-one good images and part of a twenty-second as it sped past the planet just over five thousand miles distant. The craft was crude by today's standards, but in 1964 terms it was a miracle of engineering for the unknown. In total, the basic instrumentation on the ship would send home twenty-three million scientific measurements. Not all of these were specific to Mars; many were measures of dust in space en route, attempts to measure both Earth's and Mars's magnetic fields, and many others.

  Imaging was a paramount goal. The twelve-pound TV camera's images were stored to an onboard tape recorder and relayed back to Earth—twice to reduce the likelihood of errors—beginning a few hours after it left the Martian system. A primitive onboard computer converted the images to radio code to be relayed back to JPL via a global network of huge tracking dishes. Each of the twenty-one images, which were only 200 lines in resolution (the high-definition TV of today is 1,080 lines) took almost nine hours to download.

  The operation of this camera was intended to be completely automated. There was a long delay between ground-sent commands, reception by Mariner, and a return confirmation, due to the extreme distance from Earth, so various sensors were installed to enable the system to operate autonomously. These were basic light-measuring systems that would sense when Mars was close enough to illuminate a photosensitive element to a certain level, then trigger the various parts of the imaging system as the craft swung by Mars. It was a one-shot deal, and any error could negate the entire trip. The cameras had to eject a lens-cap (controllers, concerned about a failure at this step, had accomplished this through a “cheat” in operations months prior). They then had to warm up and begin the
picture-taking sequence right on time. Then, as Mariner 4 disappeared behind Mars after the flyby, the automated tape recorder (with three hundred feet of tape) would turn on and off in bursts to record the images for playback later, as the Earth was, for now, out of sight from Mariner's perspective. And this was just the imaging system—there were eight other experiments on board, most of which needed to perform in a timely fashion near Mars (one, an ionization chamber experiment to measure charged particles, had malfunctioned on the way from Earth).

  Worthy of mention is the occultation experiment, simple in design but very effective. At the moment that Mariner 4 began to go “behind” Mars from Earth's perspective, a radio transmission was scheduled to allow JPL to measure the effect of the Martian atmosphere on the radio waves. This allowed for a basic measurement of atmospheric density, the first proper measure of this property. It was far, far lower than expected—about 4 millibars. Prior to this it was thought to be perhaps 30 millibars. This was just one more nail in the coffin of the old Mars of the popular imagination (Earth is about 1,000 millibars).

  Many hours after the flyby, when the imaging playback had been collected at JPL, the data was fed through huge, state-of-the-art computers that were so slow that the imaging team took to posting the numerical printouts on the walls and using felt-tip markers or pencils to approximate the black-and-white value of the digits; they literally painted pixels. This gave them roughly shaded approximations of the imagery to enjoy until the computers had crunched through their tasks.