Art Cane walked up to the lectern, slow and dignified and very impressive, and he gave a short speech about the commitment of his company to the bid, and referred to their tradition and values.
Then Lee strolled to the front of the room, smiling and nodding, and exchanged a brief formal handshake with Cane. He stood at the lectern and called for his first slide.
The room lights dimmed, and the slide came up, right on cue.
Thursday, September 24, 1981
Phil Stone and Adam Bleeker watched her steadily.
The three of them were in a small conference room that had been turned over to the Ares landing site selection committee. The walls were covered with images of Mars: Mariner orbiter photographs, U.S. Geological Survey maps, false-color stratigraphic profiles, geological surveys. The long tables which ran in rows down the walls of the room were covered by more charts and pictures and ring-bound folders.
York unrolled a chart and pinned it up on a wall, covering maps and photos. It was a bright, simple, block-color map, with little flags scattered over it.
“Mars,” she said. “In as much detail as you need to understand it for now. Know your enemy, right? This is a geological map of the planet, drawn from Mariner data.” Actually that wasn’t true; the map was kiddie stuff, too simple to be anything but an operational guide. Useful if you were planning to bomb Mars rather than study it. “Now. What’s the first thing you notice?”
Stone grinned. “I see seven little Stars and Stripes, and seven little Hammer and Sickles, all with labels beside them.”
“We’ll come to the flags. Think about the geology first. Just describe what you see.”
Bleeker shrugged and said, willingly enough, “North and south are different. The top half of your map is pink, the bottom yellow. More or less.”
“Right. The logical basis of geology is that no solid planet is either a homogeneous blob, or a disorganized jumble. They’re all made up of pieces — called geologic units. Each unit was formed in a certain way at a certain time; each has depth as well as breadth and width, and when we do geology we’re always trying to look beneath the surface, to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure that is hidden from direct view. The relations between the units show their age relations, something about the processes that formed them, and something about how far beneath the surface they extend…”
Stone, surreptitiously, was checking his watch.
“Do I have your full attention, gentlemen?”
Stone and Bleeker glanced at each other like guilty children.
“I’m sure you’re just doing your job, Natalie,” Bleeker said languidly, “and we’re glad you’re running the site selection committee—”
“I’m not running it. I’m just on it.”
“Whatever. But we’d have a year en route to Mars with nothing much else to do but study this stuff. Can’t this wait until then?” As usual, Bleeker sounded calm, rational, reasonable, colorless.
A year? Yes, but I won’t be there to hold your hands, or make you think. I’ll be light-minutes away…
And this guy was likely to be designated the Ares mission specialist. My God.
Phil Stone waved Bleeker quiet. “Go on, Natalie. We’re committed to the science. You’ve got us.”
“All right. Now,” she plowed on, “the probes have shown us that in the case of Mars we have two main types of landscape. The yellow stuff in the south is heavily cratered, and looks ancient. And this pink stuff, to the north, is made up of smooth, young plains. The planet bulges out below the equator; most of the south is above the mean altitude, and most of the north is below.”
“You say ‘ancient’ and ‘young,’ ” Stone said. “Meaning?”
“ ‘Young’ is maybe half a billion years old. The plains are volcanic — frozen lava fields. And the ancient cratered stuff is three to four billion years old. That’s almost as old as the planet itself…”
Bleeker said, “So let’s get back to the flags. I guess those seven Hammer and Sickles are the sites the Soviets have identified as prime interest.”
“Yes. You can see—”
“So screw that,” Stone said easily. “Let’s look at the good old American selections. Those two white stripes at the top and bottom of your chart — I guess we’re looking at the polar caps.”
“Yeah.”
“I see no flags up there.”
“No. We have to rule out high latitudes for the first mission.” Spacecraft arriving from Earth would naturally settle into a parking orbit around Mars with not much inclination to the equator; changing the orbit to reach the poles would take a lot of extra energy. “But it’s a shame; the poles are interesting.”
“What are the caps? Water ice?”
“Maybe. The orbit of Mars is more elliptical than Earth’s. And that distorts the seasons. In the south you get a short, hot summer, but a long, cool winter. And the makeup of the caps seems to differ as well. We think the cap in the north is water ice, yes. But the southern cap is probably carbon dioxide — dry ice.
“There are a lot of puzzles about the poles.” She walked across the room to a blowup photograph; it showed a thick band of layering in brownish terrain.
“What the hell’s that?” Bleeker asked. “It looks like melted chocolate.”
“These are bands of thick-layered deposits, thirty or forty feet thick, that surround the poles for hundreds of miles; they are made up of dust and ice, mixed up, laid down by the Martian winds. The bands tell us that the deposition process must vary, over the years. Or the millennia, anyhow. But what caused the variation? We’ve got three possible mechanisms. First, maybe the eccentricity of Mars’s orbit changes.”
“Why should it?” Stone asked.
“Mars is a lot closer to Jupiter than we are; Jupiter’s mass is capable of a lot of perturbation. Or maybe the tilt of the planet’s axis changes.”
“I can see how that would happen,” Stone said. “That bottom-heavy southern hemisphere would make a hell of a difference to Mars’s moment of inertia. The whole damn thing must wobble like a spinning top.”
She smiled. “On geological time scales, yes.”
“And what’s your third mechanism?”
“That the heat output of the sun changes, in some way we don’t understand.”
Bleeker frowned. “But that would change the Earth’s climate.”
“That’s right. And that’s why the layering is a good reason for going to the poles someday. Mars is like a dusty mirror, Phil, Adam; every time we look into it, we learn something about the Earth.”
They were silent for a moment, digesting that.
York felt pleased with herself. Even if they learned nothing else, if she could puncture their complacency, make them think about the significance of the flight they were likely to take, she’d have achieved something.
She glanced again at her polar blowup. It was actually of much lower quality than the images taken by later generations of probes, which had concentrated on equatorial landing-site mapping. Because of the Mars landing program, paradoxically, much less was known about the planet as a whole than might otherwise be possible.
And it was in the hands of guys like these to make it all worthwhile.
Adam Bleeker said, “I’d guess the high-latitude problems would also rule out the site you’ve marked far to the south there, Natalie.”
“I guess. But it’s another interesting site. That’s the Amphitrites Patera: an ancient volcano, much older than the volcanic plains in the northern hemisphere. We don’t fully understand how it was formed. Maybe the vulcanism there was sparked off by the huge impacts which created the massive impact craters in the south. You see these mustard yellow spots in the center of the southern fields: that’s Argyre and Hellas — huge, ancient impact basins, more than three billion years old. Hellas is bigger than anything we’ve found on the Moon — bigger even than the Mare Imbrium, for example. Hellas is where the Soviets put down Mars 9.”