Donna Shirley Interview (page: 5 / 8) Mars Exploration Program	Print Interview

What do you think it is about Mars that so transfixed the entire population? I don't know a person who wasn't looking at your pictures from Mars.

Donna Shirley: John Nobel Wilfred from the New York Times was giving a talk at a seminar and he said, he thinks it's the same reason we make up imaginary playmates when we're kids. We want there to be somebody out there. We want somebody to play with, so we want to go find them. That's the fascination. Like in the movie, Contact, they were looking for signals from advanced civilizations. That's the fascination. Maybe we're going to find life there, new places to live.

There's the deep ocean frontier and the space frontier, and that's all that's left. Of course the frontier of the human spirit, the frontier of our ability to survive with each other and not destroy our planet is a big frontier.

Mars is the closest planet to us in the solar system. Physically, Venus is a little closer. But you can melt lead on the surface of Venus, it's like 700 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface of Venus. Venus had a run-away greenhouse effect. As a matter of fact, it was by exploring Venus that we learned about greenhouse effects. Now we're watching out for what we might be doing to the earth. Could we turn it into Venus? We might be able to.

Mars, which is 50 million miles farther from the sun than we are, is cold. Even thousands of years ago, civilizations always had a name for Mars. It was always a god of some sort. It was thought to be war-like by most cultures, because it was red. People have been fascinated with planets because they don't act like other stars and Mars kind of stood out because it was red.

In the late 1800s, Percival Lowell built a telescope at Flagstaff, Arizona. He believed he could see canals on Mars. He was a very good communicator, like Carl Sagan. He wrote three books about Mars, all based on the idea that there were these ancient civilizations on Mars, bringing water down from the Poles to irrigate their crops and so on.

Then all the science fiction writers said we could live on Mars. They also wrote about Venus, but Venus was always viewed as this hot, muggy, unpleasant place, and Mars was somehow really neat. We had his John Carter of Mars and Arthur C. Clarke and Heinlein, and Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs all saw Mars as the place where they could think about otherness. They could think about cultures and races other than our own, that might be just out there, almost within reach.

I think that's part of the fascination, it's so reachable. Until 1965, everybody believed that Lowell's Mars was right, that there were conditions that would support life as we know it. In 1965, Mariner 4 flew by Mars and killed all the Martians. It took pictures that showed that Mars was much more like the moon. It was cratered, with almost no atmosphere. Between 1965 and about 1988, there was no Mars science fiction.

There was this huge amount of Mars science fiction up to 1965, and then there's a big gap. But, the scientists kept wanting to know about it. Could our planet turn into a deep freeze? Could our planet turn into hell? We need to understand all of these planets.

So we kept going back to Mars with our robots. In 1971 we orbited, and all of a sudden, Mars wasn't a dead planet. It had this giant volcano that was bigger than any volcano in the solar system. It's as big as the state of Missouri, and 90,000 feet high. It's three times as high as Mount Everest. There's a canyon that's five miles deep, 3,000 miles long; it would stretch all the way across the United States. There's been some sort of violent activity. Mars was a living planet at one time, unlike the moon which was always dead. So, then people said, "There's all of this volcanic activity, that's how life got started on earth." We could see places where water had been on Mars. So we said, "Hot dog, maybe there's life on Mars!" Not John Carter of Mars and Dejathorus, but maybe bacteria.

So we sent Viking. Viking landed, scooped up the top 10 centimeters of dirt and tested it. You'd put the dirt into some chicken soup and if there's bacteria in there it will eat the chicken soup and grow and give off gas, as many of us do after a good meal. Well, they didn't get that. No life. Viking had even killed off the bacterial Martians. In the meantime, they were going to explore Mars from orbit, because we wanted to understand the climate. What happened on Mars to make it the way it is?

Mars Observer was launched in '92 and it was a failure. But, in the meantime, we started thinking about, "Okay, life lives on earth in many places where we wouldn't have believed that it would have lived." So, scientifically, we found life at the bottom of the ocean, living off of just the gases coming out of vents. No light, but there it is. We found life down in the Columbia River basalts, several kilometers down, just living off of rock and heat - life in Antarctica, in frozen, frigid conditions, inside rocks. So, anywhere there's liquid water on earth, there's life. So, we said, "Gee, you know, maybe there's life on Mars."
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The culmination was this meteorite that we know came from Mars. In 1996, some people led by Dave McKay from JSC thought they found evidence of chemistry inside this meteorite that was indicative of past life. [That caused] enormous controversy! People are fascinated with the idea that there might be life out there, so now we've changed the Mars Exploration Program from looking for climate and resources to -- yes -- looking for life. Maybe it's because of what John Nobel Wilfred said, that we want imaginary playmates, we don't want to be alone in the universe.

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