Personifying Rover to Line NASA’s Purse

While the world has been gazing in awe at the new pictures from the surface of Mars and admiring the daring and ingenuity of the scientists at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who are responsible for obtaining them, I’ve been equally struck by these scientists’ daring and ingenuity in describing what they’ve done.

They all seem to have agreed beforehand to personify the Mars Pathfinder mission and to anthropomorphize whenever possible the Sojourner Truth Martian Rover. As if to discourage the American taxpayer, who has bankrolled the mission to Mars, from looking at the breadbox-sized Rover and seeing a high school student’s erector-set science project, NASA seems to be orchestrating a campaign to get us to look at the gleaming box on wheels and see ourselves.

It’s one thing, and even somewhat traditional, to refer to a ship or spaceship as “she” or even to refer to the status of a complicated machine as its “health.” But there’s something more coordinated going on here: a poetic conspiracy. These scientists are “spinning” the whole mission into imagined life.

Seconds before revealing the first color photos sent back by Pathfinder (artfully managed on the Fourth of July), Peter Smith, principal investigator for the Imager for Mars Pathfinder, said to all of us, “Pretend that you are in the position of the camera. Your name is IMP.” The camera itself has been named for a fanciful spirit, and Smith was urging us to “throw” our imaginations out to it, as a ventriliquist throws his voice.

“For your first look,” Smith went on, “you’re sitting cross-legged on your petals, coming out of your seven-months’ meditation, and you start to raise your head and this is what you see.”

Rather than a jumble of wires, batteries and sensors, the poets of Pasadena clearly want us to imagine a spirit coming to life up there on the chilly, dusty red planet; not an alien spirit, either, but one that is connected to our own eyes and minds. As Flight Systems Manager Brian Muirhead referred quite boldly to the space probe that first day, “We’re just totally in love with our baby!”

Poets have lent a soul to the inanimate from the very beginnings of storytelling, whether in Homer’s simple “rosy-fingered dawn” or in Shakespeare’s fancier “Hamlet”: “But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill.”

Homer and Shakespeare, cynics might argue, were animating astronomical events for the sheer beauty and fun of it, whereas NASA wants us to care about their bright-eyed, smiling “field geologist” so that we’ll gladly endorse “her” continued funding. Isn’t playing music on the radio to “wake her up” each Martian morning carrying the animist thing a bit too far?

But the fact remains that we are being invited to participate vicariously in the most poetically presented geography lesson since Plato first suggested that the Earth itself is alive. For when these scientists of Southern California point to Mars and say to the world, “You are there,” they are, in a poetic way, virtually correct.