The Mermaids of Mars: In Search of Life in a World Sarah Stewart Johnson Crown (2020)
Once one and any 26 months, planetary orbits are somehow aligned that makes the release of spacecraft from Earth to Mars favorable. In July and August, 3 nations are looking for this opportunity. If all goes well, the United States and China will launch rovers and the United Arab Emirates will send an orbiter.
These ship stations are exploration of Mars. What about the past? The planetarium Sarah Stewart Johnson brilliantly exposes it in The Mermaids of Mars. Through a mixture of their own memories and clinical initiators, it sheds light on the history of astronomers and explorers who were fascinated through this nearby world, known to the ancients as a bright red dot in the night sky.
Johnson reperspectives all the oldest highlights of the consultation of people with the red planet over the years. There is Giovanni Schiaparelli in the nineteenth century, observing dark lines that he called canals or canals, which were then misinterpreted as channels of a Martian civilization. There is Percival Lowell decades later, his circle of relatives forbade him from building an observatory in Arizona and mapping Mars through the telescope night after night, hoping to spread a world full of intelligent life. There’s astrobiologist Carl Sagan, who dreams of turtle-like Martian creatures running with NASA’s Viking landers in the 1970s to see if they can also definitely stumble upon life on the planet’s surface. (They lost.)
The strength of Johnson’s story lies in the intertwining of these stories best known with his own progression as a planetary geologist. When he describes the four tasks of nasa Mariner flying over Mars in 196 and five, taking the first photographs of some other planet to deceive, he incorporates the story into that of his 18-year-old father, enthusiastically following the newspaper’s task from home in the Kentucky Mountains. Compare the 1996 bombed report on possible fossil mygowns in a Martian meteorite (later discredited) to the circle of relative fossil hunters on the cliffs of Appalachia. And when he talks about how colossal dust storms can travel across the surface of Mars, he takes us to a wind tunnel where he uses fake Mars dust to study how debris rises and spreads in those planetary vortices.
More broadly, Johnson draws all the exploration of Mars, with a deceptive age-attention center. Notable American fashion scientists on Mars are here: Raymond Arvidson, scanning Mars at other wavelengths of light to discanopia the mineral content of the rocks; Maria Zuber, mapping the planet’s gravity with an orbiting doleadingcraft; Steve Squyres, missions double rover orchestras. But don’t expect to read much about exploring Mars through Europe or India, this is a strictly American perspective.
Even more representative of what NASA’s varied missions to Mars have revealed, from the strangely varied landscape explored through the Sojourner explorer vehicle in 1997 to the explicit ”blueberrs” rocky (small mineral game station formed in rainy sediments) at Opportunity landing site in 2004 all paint the image of once active Mars , complete with changing dunes, eroded rivers and strong winds.
In such a place, one would expect to discern life. Whenever he can, Johnson looks for clues in Earth’s environments about how life can also do it on Mars. At the dormant Maunakea volcano in Hawaii, she digs up a fern of apple tibig that thrives under fragments of dazzling lava. On the Australian plain of Nullarbor, it fills vials of corrosive acid water from primordial basins filled with microbes. These are symptoms that life can thrive in the most unexpected places, contrary to all forecasts, and therefore, perhaps, on our neighboring planet.
Was life on Mars? Answering this is a component of the goal of one of this year’s missions: NASA’s Perseverance rover will seek life in Je0 Crater. An ancient river once vomited sediments here; the rover will detect it for symptoms of Martian creatures, provide or past. Hopefully, it will locate the remains of ancient biofilms, or chemical signatures of processed elements through the bodies of extraterrestrial organisms.
Life on Mars might not be like life on Earth. But if it’s there, it may be close enough for scientists like Johnson to recognize his paintings about the immoderate life on our planet. She wrote a true love letter to geology, about this global and others.
Venus is the dual of the Earth in length and mass, but Mars is the home of mind and wonder. This is the planet we were given, we saw ourselves exploring, through its airless plains, mountains and valleys. Our wisdom came at every moment, an astronomical photograph and an image of a space ending at a time, crafted as the red planet revealed itself. Now we’re waiting to see what humanity’s next 3 envoys will do.
Nature 583, 350-351 (2020)
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