JPL marks Red Planet flyby
Scientists, engineers and authors convened at La Cañada’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Monday to ponder earthlings’ innate curiosity about the possibility of life on Mars and how the past 50 years of planetary exploration has both shaped and confounded it.
At a panel discussion marking the 50-year anniversary of the Mariner 4 flyby over the Red Planet in July 1965, the project’s engineers shared memories of securing a key American victory in the space race and succeeding when several prior missions had failed.
“The science was, to be honest, secondary,” recalled Norm Haynes, who worked as a systems analysis project engineer for Mariner 4. “It had to get there, and it had to do something. We were in a competition with the Russians — we were kind of like Cold War warriors. So the whole thing was to make it work. And we didn’t have any blueprints. We just had to do everything we possibly could.”
Haynes was joined Monday by Mariner 4 spacecraft systems manager John Casani and Gentry Lee, director of science analysis and mission planning for the Viking 1 and 2 Mars missions in the mid-1970s and a science fiction author.
Also participating were JPL’s Sarah Milkovich, science systems engineer for several modern Mars missions, and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, known for his Mars Trilogy “Red Mars,” “Green Mars” and “Blue Mars.”
Casani shared the two simple maxims that governed and motivated Mariner 4 team members.
“(The craft) had to work as long as the mission was active. And it had to work well enough to get data back,” Casani said. “Those were the two guiding principals in spacecraft development, and I don’t think they’re any different today.”
A seminal moment in the mission came on July 15, 1965, when the spacecraft relayed a grainy black and white image of the Martian surface, taken from a distance of 17,000 kilometers, back to Earth. It was humanity’s first close-up look at another planet, and one that had a profound effect on human thinking about Mars, according to Lee.
“Before that moment, in all of history, human beings were free to think Mars could be anything they wanted it to be,” Lee said, recollecting the panic ensuing from Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio reportage of a Martian invasion in 1938.
Less than three decades later, Mariner 4 would offer a realistic, but decidedly more desolate, contrast.
“All of a sudden, Mars went from, ‘It can be anything,’ to ‘This is a place,’” said Lee.
Subsequent crafts Mariners 6 and 7 later captured clearer images of the planet’s surface, which allowed scientists to begin identifying geologic areas. Since then, each successful launch has reaped valuable new information about Mars that hints at its creation and whether humans could ever dwell there.
Lindsay Hays, a JPL science systems engineer and moderator of Monday’s discussion, probed panelists about which unanswered questions still intrigue them and asked them to guess what the scientific legacy of current and near-future missions might be 50 years from now.
Robinson — who admitted his fascination with the concept of transforming extraterrestrial environments into Earthlike habitats, or “terraforming” — said he wanted to know more about toxic chlorinated hydrocarbons found on the Martian surface that hint at microbial life, but could pose a serious threat to human visitors.
Speaking on future missions, Milkovich said rock samples collected from the yet-to-be-launched Mars 2020 rover could someday make the Red Planet as knowable as another celestial body that once entranced the human imagination.
“The amount that we understand the moon exploded from bringing back samples from the moon and bringing all of the laboratories on Earth to bear on those rocks,” she said. “I am hopeful that in the next 50 years, we’ll be able to do that with Mars.”
