"The rovers are our proxies - their shadows on Mars are our shadows."
Bethany Ehlmann
Planetary Society president;
Professor of Planetary Science
and Associate Director, Keck Institute
for Space Studies, Caltech
Since its inception in 1980, the Planetary Society has staged ten Planetfests to commemorate significant milestones in space exploration, starting with the Voyager 2 flyby of Saturn in 1981, and then of Neptune in 1989, where Chuck Berry performed Johnny B. Goode in recognition of the song's inclusion on the gold record album attached to both of the Voyager probes.* Subsequent Planetfests have recognized events such as the unsuccessful Mars Polar landing in 1999, the Spirit rover's safe touchdown on Mars in 2004, and Curiousity's in 2012.
The most recent Planetfest, in honour of NASA's Perseverance Mars probe, took place this last weekend via Zoom. (I was a little surprised by the timing, in that if they'd waited another week, we could have been celebrating the probe's arrival on the red planet, but the organizers may well have decided that an unsuccessful landing would have put a damper on the event.)
The two-day celebration of Martian exploration featured an eclectic array of speakers, including an impressive selection of planetary scientists, engineers and NASA representatives; well-known science fiction authors Kim Stanley Robinson and Andy Weir; and Star Trek: Voyager actor and space exploration advocate Robert Picardo in conversation with producer, director and writer Brannon Braga, best known for his work on three television series and two movies in the Star Trek franchise.
This varied group of speakers, united by their shared passion and commitment to both the present and the future of space exploration, covered a wide range of fascinating, informative and insightful topics over the two days of the event.
After an introduction by Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye, Planetary Society president Bethany Ehlmann delivers the keynote speech for the weekend - Mars Mind Meld: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Mars. Her presentation provides a broad overview of Martian exploration, and looks at the questions that probes such as Perseverance will help to answer.
For Ehlmann, the most important question is: what happened to Mars that eliminated water and possibly life? Although there are only a few weeks of the Martian year when the environment allows liquid water to exist, Mars is covered with evidence of water - as Ehlmann points out, "the plumbing of Mars is exposed" - there is visible erosion of the surface by water, clay substrates, formations like those found around geothermal springs on Earth, and so on, all pointing to a time in the past when Mars may well have been more habitable than it is now.
Provided all goes well on the 18th, Perseverance's extended mission on the surface of Mars will take it up the Midway delta that feeds into the Jezero Crater landing site**, allowing it to explore successive layers of Martian history as it proceeds up out of crater and moves a billion years further back in time.
In addition, the probe is not only an explorer, but a cacher, with the ability to store drilled samples from the various exposed strata for eventual return to Earth. It's hoped that these samples, each about the size of a piece of chalk, will allow scientists on Earth to answer questions about Martian climate, Martian change, and Martian life. They're playing the long game on the process: the current strategy for sample return involves a three year wait.
The eventual exploration of Mars by humans will immeasurably accelerate the process of scientific investigation, but until then, the robotic rovers act as proxies in our place - as Ehlmann eloquently puts it, "their shadows are our shadows".
- Sid
** I was charmed to see that she had a Post-It™ tab on the Martian globe in her office to indicate the Perseverance landing site.
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