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CCNet SPECIAL -- VIKING AT 25:
REPORT ON THE SYMPOSIUM ON MARS EXPLORATION HELD IN WASHINGTON ON 19 JULY, 2001 (Part 1)
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By E.P. Grondine

APPLICATIONS FOR NASA FUNDING TO UNDERTAKE CRATER COUNTS ON MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGERY TO BE ACCEPTED IN THE FALL

Before proceeding with an over-all report on the symposium, there is one item which will be of great and immediate interest to several Conference participants. Last year at the Mars planning session in Houston I had asked Scott Hubbard, who was then undertaking the re-organization of NASA's Mars plans, about the funding for Martian crater counts. Scott had told me then that ensure the funding not only for the crater counts, but for analysis of all Mars data, including the data to come from future probes, was one of his highest priorities, and he was talking steps to assure that funding; further, Scott had spoken about the desirability of developing computer programs so that those crater counts could be done in a complete and exhaustive manner.

At the reception held after the symposium I had a chance to ask Dr. James Garvin, NASA's Lead Scientist for Mars Exploration, whether NASA was going to proceed with the crater counts which Hubard had desired. Dr. Garvin told me that researchers seeking funding to do crater counts on Mars Global Surveyor images would be able to apply for those funds in the fall from the Mars Fundamental Science research program.

MALIN HITS PROBLEMS DOING CRATER COUNTS
Another important item to mention before recounting the day's events is that I also had a chance to talk with Mike Malin about the Martian crater counts. I approached him asking about whether any other teams besides the one in Berlin were working on the problem of counts, and he told me that as the images from Mars Global Surveyor were distributed via the internet without any record of who was using them, he had no way of knowing. He then went on to tell me about some of the problems he and his team were having doing crater counts, which came as a complete surprise to me, as I had no idea they were working on them.

Malin told me they had tried to apply traditional hand crater counting techniques to the images but had been completely confounded by the problem of trying to identify what was a crater, what was a pit, what were earlier craters which had only "recently" been exhumed, and what were image artifacts. Some areas did not have any craters, and here they could either assume that those surfaces were young, or that their surfaces had been recently obscured. The end result was that it was becoming very difficult for them to reliably date any geological formations on Mars by counting the craters on them.

During the conference Malin had presented global images of the development and history of the recent dust storm on Mars, and had managed to identify the Hellas impact basin as its point of origin. Full body images of Mars recently released by NASA are oriented on the crater from the Hellas impact, and it appears that this impact event and its subsequent effects are now receiving greater attention from those at NASA.

OTHER RECENT NASA WORK ON THE HISTORY OF MARS IMPACTS
Further, during the conference James Garvin spoke about the new gravity maps of Mars. These were now revealing the impact history of Mars' northern hemisphere; so far, it appeared that the Northern hemisphere had been hit as often as the southern hemisphere, but the craters were now covered over.

VIKING, 25 YEARS LATER: THE 19 JULY MARS EXPLORATION SYMPOSIUM, HELD AT THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, DC



BACKGROUND


Generally, the most ardent space enthusiasts in the United States may be divided into two classes: those who want to send man to Mars soon, and those who want to send man to Mars sooner. Some idea of the intensity of these desires may be gained by noting that in recent years NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin has been under very caustic attack by some of the most extreme US space enthusiasts for not abandoning the International Space Station and the Shuttle and sending man to Mars immediately; even more remarkably, these attacks occurred at the same time Goldin was attempting to put in place the elements for a manned flight to Mars to occur shortly after 2010.

One thing is certain, articles on Mars always sell magazines, and it was little surprise to see the National Geographic Society lending its facilities for the symposium. The symposium was sponsored by the Lockheed Martin corporation, and in part this sponsorship appears to have been motivated by a desire by Lockheed Martin to compensate for its role in the failures of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander probes; in another part it was also probably motivated by the fact that the Lockheed Martin corporation sells both launchers as well as scientific probes, so any increase in the public's enthusiasm for Mars programs translates into a bottom line benefit. Noel Hinners, the lead engineer on both the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander had worked in organizing the symposium, and I had an opportunity to thank him once again for the detailed description which he had provided to us of the problems he had hit, and he took some comfort in the knowledge that his story had proved of benefit to Conference participants. Despite NASA Administrator Dan Goldin's acceptance of full responsibility for the MCO and MPL failures, the dual failures have had a very bad effect on Hinners' health, and he is now walking with a cane.

THE CHANGING FACE OF MARS
Thomas Young, who headed up the landing team for Viking, told one story which strikes me as being particularly revealing. When the Mariner IV probe had returned to Earth the data containing the very first detailed image of the surface of Mars, the software which had been developed to convert that data into a usable image had failed. Jack James, the lead engineer, and a young assistant had then taken the raw hexadecimal dump of the data and had begun to convert it into an image by hand, an incredibly laborious process.

As the image of Mars' surface gradually emerged, all that appeared was craters and yet more craters, not the rivers and fields and forests, or the canals or buildings, or any of those things which so many had so fervently expected to see for nearly a century. Faced with an image that appeared very similar to the surface of the Moon, James turned to his assistant and said, "You've just seen something very extraordinary. You've just seen the death of the planetary program."

And then he had added, "We've got about an 8 hour head start on everybody else in looking for a new job."

My feeling that afternoon was that of being among 500 or so people who had still not gotten the news. Even though all acknowledged the undeniable, even comparing the image of Mars held in the era before modern space probes with that held afterwards, most of the presentations focused on water on Mars and the search for life, and on what symposium participants perceived as a real need for manned visits there, rather than on the real Mars, one of epochs of impact debris stacked atop previous epochs of impact debris, all of it stirred together and shaped by carbon dioxide "storms", "rivers", and "oceans"; a planet so different from the Earth and far from it that it would take an incredible effort to send even a few men there to visit briefly.

For the most part the symposium's participants and attendees were all old enough to have grown up during the times when the earlier misconceptions about Mars were still prevalent. As is usual today, these paid for the appearance of a group of young people from among the very much smaller group of current Mars enthusiasts; this, as though to re-assure themselves that their earlier efforts had not been for naught, that their life's work had had meaning, and that their dreams live on in some way.

But the plain fact evidenced since Mariner IV by all of NASA's budgets is that when those first real pictures came down from Mars, the urgency of flying men to Mars ended for most people.

The engineers present at the symposium spoke about engineering in a time when NASA's funding accounted for 5% of the total budget of the government of the United States. Viking itself cost somewhere around $1 billion dollars, and that number is in the dollars of those times: when you consider that a hamburger from McDonald's cost .15 dollars then, and costs .79 dollars today, it is quite probable that this amount translates into nearly $6 billion of today's dollars. It is remarkable that under Dan Goldin's administration NASA has sent 4 probes to Mars for about 1/6 of this amount, less than $1 billion of today's dollars, including not only the two which failed, but also another two, Pathfinder and Global Surveyor, which succeeded far beyond anyone's expectations.

THE SEARCH FOR LIFE
As for Mars, after Mariner IV many had still hoped that there would be life there, maybe not the intelligent life they had dreamed of finding, but some form of life nevertheless. When Viking had not found conclusive evidence of life, interest in Mars had faded even further, not to be renewed for some 20 years.

But once our understanding of life and the forms it could take once again made it again possible to hope for life on Mars, NASA had renewed the search. Several of the symposium’s technical presentations focused on the forms life could take, and how we could find it in those cases. Dr. Garvin spoke of the current hopes for water on Mars and endorsed the illusions held by many as to how recently bodies of water existed on Mars. He pointed to sedimentary layers, which he posited must have been formed by water, but gave no consideration to the possibility that these layers might be the result of varying impact rates, coinciding with Mars' (and the Earth's) passage through the plane of the Milky Way. Garvin explained other geological formations as hydrological in origin, with water as the working fluid, but he minimized the possible role of CO2 as a working fluid in their formation, even when it is known that water can not behave in the same way it does on Earth at the temperatures and pressures found on Mars.

Whatever the fantasy, reality always has a way of intruding; and while for the most part Garvin focused his talk on the search for water and life, at points he was emphasized the role of the Hellas impact event in the evolution of Mars, and the new gravity crater maps of Mars' northern hemisphere. He still held out hope that some craters were "ice filled", though he did not mention that this might be CO2 ice; it was as though he was trying to break the news of the existence of craters on Mars gently to the crowd, or at least in such a way that it did not interfere with his funding.

Garvin left little doubt that the search for life will dominate Mars studies for the next decade. The Mars Odyssey spacecraft is focused on the search for hydro-thermal geological formations; that orbiter is going to be followed by 2 rovers in 2004 looking for either evidence of hydrothermal activity or of hematite deposits. NASA will then try to get very fine detail images from Mars orbit of the surface of Mars, and then will send rovers equipped with equipment capable of working at a very fine scale -- and this equipment may include equipment capable of looking for fossils.

The search for life will continue, even after it is dead.

Two of these new pieces of equipment were discussed during the symposium. The first of these was a laser operating in frequencies which cause dual carbon chemical bonds to fluoresce. This is especially useful in detecting life forms which live just under the surface of rocks, such as the life forms found flourishing under the surface of rocks in the Antarctica. The other piece of equipment discussed is an x-ray topographic unit the size of a laptop computer, which is capable of finding fossils within rocks, and of providing 3-dimensional images of those fossils which can then be radioed back to scientists on the Earth.
(Part 2 in Following Post)