I listened to NPR's "On Point" with Meghna Chakrabarti while on my meals on wheels route yesterday. The episode was called "Exploring Mars to Better Understand Earth." She interviewed Ken Farley, the geochemist and project scientist of Mars 2020, responsible for the landing of the Perseverance Rover on Mars after 8 years of development and a 7 month voyage of 300 million miles. She started by playing sounds of wind on Mars, and the sound of the driving of Perseverance on Mars, which began my delight in the episode.... I delighted in Meghna's delight, starting with her delight in these sounds, and continuing throughout the episode. She repeatedly says things like she is "in awe", in "amazement of the accomplishment", the landing was "spectacular", that story "is fantastic", the lasers making a popping sound "is awesome." She says she realizes scientists have to maintain a certain rational skepticism even as they engage in these "super exciting" projects. I knew that this was going to be my blog entry for the day after she gives this amazingly delightful laugh at 4:50 and says, "I'm never gonna outgrow my like 12-year-old self when I hear about theses kind of accomplishments in others parts of the solar system. It is so great." It was so great to hear Meghna's excitement about this exciting scientific accomplishment. Here are a few facts I learned:
- Perseverance has landed in a crater, that 3.5 billion years ago was a large lake (40km across hundreds of meters deep) that would have been a very habitable environment, so it is a good place to seek evidence of life. On Earth at that time, there was just microbial life so it is most plausible that any life to be found on Mars will be microbial, but even these microbes could be very different than microbes on Earth. -- perhaps life "as we don't know it", possibly not a DNA based life, possibly containing different compounds.
- There is lots of evidence that there was once water on Mars: canyons and shorelines, evidence of oceans, lake, river delta, etc. Clearly the climate changed, but scientists are not sure why (and they are not sure how Mars was ever warm enough for water to begin with). One theory is maybe it lost its magnetic field, which resulted in a loss of atmosphere, which created the current climate on Mars, now extremely cold and dry, with a very thin atmosphere, and a surface that is not habitable for life.
- Perseverance contains the MOXIE experiment ("it is pretty exciting") and it was able to successfully convert carbon dioxide to oxygen, which is important if there were ever a human mission to Mars. MOXIE = Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment
- Ingenuity is the "rotor craft" (helicopter or drone) that completed the first flight on Mars and has dual blades more than a meter across.
- It is incredibly complicated to calculate the probability of life in the universe, considering we have discovered billions of stars and most stars have planets around them, and the fact that life may not be as we know it. Meghna says that "I just look at the sheer numbers, the vastness of space and the universe, and it does not seem possible to me that in all that space that we're the only ones."
- The Mars Society held a competition to create plans for a permanent Martian city that would house 1 million people, and be as self-supporting as possible, with plans for its economy, politics, society, culture, and the production of a wide variety of products, including food, clothing, electricity, consumer goods, machines, and vehicles. (The top 20 plans will be published in "Mars City States: New Societies for a New World,” due out in 2021, and it is definitely on my to-read list!)
- Near the end of the episode, Meghna says, "Every time we do a space show, someone sends us a message that says this...", and then she reads the most recent message: "Mars: a big huge dead rock hundreds of millions of miles away, we spend billions to explore it. I'd be more impressed if your guests journeyed a hundred feet to engage with their neighbors and explore the relationship with community and the precious earth under our feet; it is a colossal waste of time and resources." So she asks, "What is the argument for the effort and the money and the cost for exploring another planet?" Ken gives a couple of interesting answers (especially that the money spent is modest compared to, for example, military or pandemic spending), but his best answer is: "This is part of being human. Exploration. Art. These are things that we do in addition to simply staying alive. And I think it has great value from that point of view and from the point of view of inspiring scientists of the future to go on and do great things that may have nothing to do with Mars exploration. It is part of the encouragement of a scientific, science based culture."
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