The Mars Mystery Page 7

  Russia scored the next triumph, too, by putting the first man into space. The successful mission of Yuri Gagarin in Vostok completely obscured the efforts of the American space program, which had been hastily kick-started in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik.

  In that year NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was founded.16 The United States also launched its own satellite, Explorer 1, sending it into orbit on a Jupiter C rocket provided by the U.S. Army at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. Then came Gagarins great success in 1961. Soon afterward President John F. Kennedy pledged that NASA would put a man on the moon by the close of the decade.

  Kennedy’s pledge was fulfilled on 20 July 1969 when Neil Armstrong took “one small step” out of the Apollo 11 lander onto the surface of the Moon—the thirty-third American probe to be sent there. This “giant leap for mankind” was a leap fueled by international competition and war. It was a leap into a new order of discovery, a leap that would give us a new view—that of Earth hanging in space, beautiful and unified, undivided by political and national boundaries.

  THE MARS MISSIONS

  It was the Russians who sent the first probe to Mars—the appropriately named Mars 1, which was launched on 1 November 1962. It is believed to have approached to within 195,000 kilometers of the planet, but all contact with it was lost on 21 March 1963 before it could send back any observations.17 Its fate is one that has mysteriously dogged many missions to Mars.

  NASA’s first Mars probe was Mariner 3, which was launched on 5 November 1964. Like its Russian predecessor, it too was a failure, going out of control early in the mission. Apparently its protective fiberglass shroud failed to eject on exiting the earth’s atmosphere, thus making it too heavy to stay on its projected course.18

  AMERICAN SUCCESS

  Three weeks and two days later, on 28 November 1964, Mariner 4 was launched. First blood went to the Americans as the craft sent back twenty-one photographs and vital new information, getting within 10,000 kilometers of Mars.19 The murky images picked up the planets densely cratered and lifeless surface. They were man’s first glimpse of Mars at close range—a glimpse that shattered many myths.20

  Just two days after Mariner 4’s launch, the Russian Zond 2 attempted to reverse the disastrous fate of Mars 1—and failed. In late spring of 1965 all contact with it was lost.

  On 24 February and 27 March 1969, NASA launched two new Mars probes—Mariner 6 and 7. Mariner 6 traveled to within 3,390 kilometers of Mars and took 76 pictures. Mariner 7 approached to 3,500 kilometers and sent back 126 pictures.21

  WASTELAND

  The early Mars missions were a disappointment to many. Bugged by technical failures, and overshadowed by the high-profile moon missions, the images they returned were not exciting. There was no vegetation—the dark patches of Mars proved to be “albedo areas” in which the red topsoil had blown away to reveal darker rocks underneath. There were no canals. Mars was heavily cratered and apparently very old.

  The first successful probe, Mariner 4, revealed that the Martian atmosphere was not nitrogen (as Moore and Jackson had proposed) but largely carbon dioxide, as were, in all probability, large areas of the frozen ice caps. Liquid water could not exist on Mars since the surface pressure was much lower than previously thought—lower than 10 millibars, not around 85.22 It was an inhospitable nightmare world—drab and lifeless, apparently devoid of any interesting features. And theories such as Lowell’s were dispelled like phantasms in the cold, hard light of the Martian day.

  As a NASA spokesman said:

  “We’ve got superb pictures. They’re better than we could ever have hoped a few years ago—but what do they show us? A dull landscape as dead as a dodo. There’s nothing much left to find.”23

  The next decade would prove this view of Mars as wrong as Lowell’s had been.

  6

  A Million to One

  The storm burst upon us six years ago now.

  As Mars approached opposition, Lavelle of Java set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the amazing intelligence of a huge outbreak of incandescent gas upon the planet. It had occurred toward midnight of the 12th, and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an enormous velocity toward this earth. This jet of fire had become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared it to a colossal puff of flame, suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, “as flaming gas rushes out of a gun.”

  A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day there was nothing of this in the papers, except a little note in the Daily Telegraph, and the world went in ignorance of one of the gravest dangers that ever threatened the human race. I might not have heard of the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was immensely excited at the news, and in the excess of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a scrutiny of the Red Planet….

  He was full of speculation … about the condition of Mars, and scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having inhabitants who were signaling us. His idea was that meteorites might be falling in a heavy shower upon the planet, or that a huge volcanic explosion was in progress. He pointed out to me how unlikely it was that organic evolution had taken the same direction in the two adjacent planets.

  “The chances against anything man-like on Mars are a million to one,” he said.1

  In early 1998, exactly a century after H. G. Wells wrote these words in the first chapter of The War of the Worlds, NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor probe was scheduled to begin mapping the surface of the Red Planet.

  This is not a new task—Mars has been thoroughly mapped before by both American and Russian probes. However, Global Surveyor has been designed to send back to Earth the most detailed images of the Martian surface yet taken from space.2 The possibility cannot be ignored that what it might find could irrevocably change mankind’s future and all our notions about the past.

  For against all expectations, it would seem that there is something “man-like” on Mars. A century after Ogilvy stated his odds we may be poised on the edge of a discovery beyond Wells’s wildest dreams—a discovery worthy of a Schiaparelli or a Lowell that scientists claim is an illusion, but which, if it is not, is a profundity beyond our comprehension. Moreover, to echo Lowell: “There is strong reason to believe that we are on the eve of a pretty definite discovery in the matter.”3

  The man-like something is the Face on Mars—the colossal mound that rises nearly 2,600 feet above the barren Cydonia plain, on the shoreline of a long-vanished Martian sea, a mound seemingly carved into immense humanoid features staring hauntingly up at us.

  And yet, like the “flaming gas” of Wells’s fictional tale, this mysterious object, and the many others that surround it on the Cydonian and Elysium plains—the implications of which could be, pardon the pun, astronomical—remain relatively unheard of and unstudied. This is because the majority of scientists, like Wells’s Ogilvy, remain firm in their beliefs that the chance of there ever having been man-like life on Mars is still “a million to one.”

  A century on, are our modern-day Ogilvys about to be forced to change their views in the light of new evidence? Will Mars Global Surveyor confirm that fact is indeed stranger than fiction? For it is a fact that both the principal Mars probes of the 1970s—Mariner 9 and Viking 1—photographed objects on the surface of the planet that have been claimed as evidence for the existence of intelligent life on another world.

  MAY 1971

  The 1960s proved a pioneering yet ultimately disappointing time for Mars research, with initial feelings of enthusiasm punctured by the early Mariner images of the Red Planet as a dull, lifeless, cratered hell. For some time nobody knew that the pictures taken by those early missions had completely missed the varied, wondrous geological features that make Mars such an amazing and mysterious planet.

  The end of the 1960s freed the superpowers from their ra
ce to the Moon. They promptly renewed their fervor for Mars, sending a total of five spacecraft within a 22-day period in May 1971.

  Two of the craft, Mariner 8 and 9, were American. The function of Mariner 8 was to map Martian topographical features, scanning 70 percent of the planet’s surface from a highly inclined orbit. The idea was to photograph Mars with the sun very low on the horizon, throwing long shadows. Mariner 9, on the other hand, would position itself for a high sun angle to take pictures of albedo features in the equatorial regions.4

  Mariner 8 was launched on 8 May 1971. Shortly after takeoff, due to a guidance system malfunction, the second stage of the Atlas-Centaur rocket carrying the probe separated from the primary, but failed to ignite. This probe plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, 360 kilometers north of Puerto Rico.

  It was left to Mariner 9 to make up the loss and its role was adapted to include aspects of its failed counterpart’s mission. The new plan was to place the craft in an intermediary orbit, inclined at 65 degrees to the equator, and at the minimum altitude of 1,350 kilometers.

  Mariner 9 took off from Cape Kennedy (later Canaveral) 22 days after Mariner 8’s demise. It would, however, not be going alone: Just two days after the loss of Mariner 8 a Soviet Mars orbiter had been launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. Like its American counterpart, due to a stupid mistake in the computer systems, it failed to leave the earth’s orbit. Before the end of May, however, two more Soviet craft, Mars 2 and Mars 3—each consisting of an orbiter with a detachable lander—had been launched successfully.

  So the summer of 1971 saw three interplanetary craft safely leaving Earth’s sphere of influence and heading silently toward our red neighbor.

  DUST STORM

  A few months earlier, in February 1971, an astronomer at the Lowell observatory in Flagstaff, Charles F. Capen, made a prediction concerning the weather on Mars. He thought it probable due to the position of Mars at that time—in “perihelic opposition”—that a dust storm could arise toward the end of the summer. Sure enough, on 21 September, as the three craft were approaching Mars, a small cloud developed over the Hellespontus region.

  When Mariner 9 turned on its TV camera on 10 November (having overtaken its Russian rivals to be within 800,000 kilometers of Mars), it revealed a planet whose surface was completely obscured by a violent global dust storm. Nothing could penetrate the veil of dust. And so Mariner 9 performed an operation that would secure its place in the immortal heaven of the history of space exploration. It switched off its camera and waited.

  The two Soviet craft, Mars 2 and 3, were modeled on the Venera orbiter-lander craft that the Russians had deployed on the surface of Venus in the 1960s. The Venera missions had been moderately successful, sending back information from the landers during descent, but losing communication after they reached the surface. If the lander modules on the Mars probes were equally successful then they would be a sensation and would overshadow anything achieved by Mariner 9—a dedicated orbiter with no lander module.

  Mars 2’s lander failed to make a smooth descent. On 27 November 1971 it crashed into the Martian surface at a point north of Hellas, 44.2 S, 313.2 W.

  Five days later the Mars 3 lander deployed. On the way down it transmitted blank frames for twenty seconds before all contact was lost. Having landed in the midst of a violently destructive dust storm, it is thought that its parachute was dragged by 140 meter-per-second winds and that it was smashed to bits.

  MARINER 9

  As the Mars landers were consumed in the global dust storm below, Mariner 9 drifted silently in orbit, dormant, conserving its energy.

  Meanwhile the Mars 2 and 3 orbiter modules, from which the unsuccessful landers had been deployed, snapped away at the Red Planet in a whir of irreversible, preprogrammed activity—and sent back to a devastated Russian team picture upon picture of dust clouds.

  In December 1971, as the storm subsided, Mariner 9’s systems were switched back on. Unlike its Russian counterparts, its computer was programmable after launch, and thus its mission could be altered as it went along. Such flexibility meant that this orbiter, of all the craft that had been launched that May, was the only one to succeed in its mission.

  Mariner 9 approached Mars to 1,370 kilometers and began mapping the southern hemisphere from 25 degrees to 65 degrees south. It continued with up to 25 degrees of the northern hemisphere. By the time that it ran out of fuel on 27 October 1972, it had captured 7,239 stunning images of Mars—with sufficient resolution to reveal surface features as small as a football field.

  Once again scientific concepts of our neighboring world were about to be turned on their head.

  REVELATIONS

  When the dust clouds subsided, they unveiled a Martian landscape that was a geologist’s dream. Large inexplicable dark spots that had poked through the swirling storm clouds were disclosed as immense volcanoes—the gargantuan Olympus Mons, three times the height of Everest, and its fellows, Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsia Mons on the great Tharsis Bulge.

  Scientists were awestruck by the Valles Marineris, the seven-kilometers-deep rift in the crust of Mars that stretches for a quarter of the planet’s circumference, an amazing feature. Also revealed were the colossal impact basins of Hellas, Isidis, and Argyre—clues to the death of a once inhabitable world.

  A once inhabitable world! For Mariner’s cameras were the first to bring features to light that looked like dried-up riverbeds, valleys, and other telltale signs that large quantities of surface water—the prerequisite of life—had once been present here.

  THE BECKONING PYRAMIDS OF MARS

  On 8 February 1972, two months into its mission, Mariner 9 passed over and photographed the area known as the Elysium Quadrangle. At 15 degrees north latitude and 198 degrees west longitude is a cluster of tetrahedral pyramidal forms, shown on frame MTVS 4205. This area was reimaged on 7 August, and frame MTVS 4296 showed the same area, once again with the pyramidal forms present.

  These structures were first brought to scholarly attention in Icarus in 1974, in an article entitled “Pyramidal Structures of Mars.” The authors noted that the structures cast regular shadows—showing that their tetrahedral forms are not illusions caused by albedo variations in surface soil coloration. The fact that there was more than one image taken at different sun angles further supports the view that their shape is not illusory.

  These vast “beckoning pyramids,” as Carl Sagan called them, tower a kilometer above the surrounding Elysium plain. It has been calculated that the volume of the largest is 1,000 times that of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, and that it is 10 times as high.

  Are these features, as Sagan believed, “small mountains, sandblasted for ages”? He said that they warranted “a careful look.”

  WEIRD GEOLOGY?

  There are four tetrahedral pyramids at Elysium—a larger and a smaller pair in close proximity, facing each other across the arid plain. They seem to have been set out in a definite pattern of alignment—a feature associated with pyramids on Earth—the two smaller pyramids seeming to mirror the alignment of the larger two.

  Scientists have tried to explain them as wind-faceted volcanic cones, or as the result of peculiar forms of erosion or soil accumulation. But as J. J. Hurtak and Brian Crowley state in their book, The Face on Mars:

  This simple explanation does not stand up to closer examination. Wind-tunnel tests were done in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s by NASA engineers to simulate the creation of formations similar to those photographed by Mariner 9. All this experiment proved was that soil accumulation or wind sculpting would not provide for four equally spaced tetrahedral formations. It was not possible to simulate an evenly spaced arrangement of objects in the wind tunnel to match the mathematical distances one finds in the four major and minor pyramids in this area of Elysium.5

  Other scientists have attributed these formations to glacial sculpting or eroded rotating lava blocks, but Hurtak and Crowley again disagree: “There is no evidence of glaciers [on Mars], especi
ally within the tropic area of the planet [where Elysium lies] … and no lava spillage has been clearly detected in connection with the formations.”6

  What, then, are these enigmatic formations? Perhaps scientists have not been able to replicate them by simulating known types of natural processes because they were not produced by natural processes in the first place.

  Could they be the first sign, as many independent researchers claim, that Mars is marked by the “fingerprints” of an ancient extraterrestrial civilization?

  7

  The Viking Enigma

  THE next phase of Mars exploration came in 1975 when NASA launched the twin probes Viking 1 and Viking 2. These craft were orbiter-landers like their ill-fated Soviet predecessors Mars 2 and Mars 3. But unlike the Russian craft, the Vikings were to be an overwhelming success.

  Viking 1 was the first probe to be launched, and on 20 July 1976 its lander module touched down safely on the Martian surface at Chryse Planitia, the great lowland basin lying to the north of the Valles Marineris.1 Meanwhile, 2,000 kilometers above, the cameras in the orbiter had been switched on to acquire high-resolution photographs of the planet.

  SEARCH FOR LIFE

  Inspired by the revelations from Mariner 9 that Mars could once have been habitable, NASA dedicated the Viking missions to the “search for life on Mars.” For the most part this search was carried out by means of high-resolution photographs of large areas of the planet’s surface, analysis of the structure and composition of the atmosphere, and chemical tests on soil samples gathered by the landers.