New Mars

On July 20th 2001, it was the 25th anniversary of the touchdown of the Viking 1 lander on Mars. Stuart Atkinson reminisces over the opportunities that we have passed by since we were able to see the first pictures of the landscape of Mars.

July 20th, 2001, was a very special day. No, not because it’s another anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon, though it was that too. I was thinking rather of an anniversary of something which happened slightly further away than the Moon: July 20th, 2001, was the 25th anniversary of the successful touch-down of Viking 1 on Mars.

I know, it’s hard to believe it’s just over 25 years since we gasped in amazement at those first pictures of Mars’ orange and tan, boulder-strewn landscape, but it is. And in this modern age, when kids can see flashy, hi-definition, digital quality images taken by the sparkling CCD eyes of Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor just by opening the pages of any book or magazine, or by clicking on a link to call up one of a thousand websites, it’s hard to recall the “Mars Fever” which swept the world back in 1976. The planet seemed to hold its breath as Viking’s periscope-like cameras panned across the frosty fields of Chryse Planitia, revealing, for the first time, just how alien, and yet at the same time how familiar, Mars was.

By any measures, Viking was a triumph, an outstanding scientific success. Its pictures still retain a haunting quality, and its instruments - crude by today’s standards, perhaps - returned data which kept a generation of planetary scientists hunched over desks and charts for decades. Some still insist that Viking’s in-built biological laboratory found evidence of native Martian life in the samples of soil it gathered up with its little scoop, but with no definitive proof that’s a can of worms which looks set to continue to leak rather than open completely for many years to come.

In a sense, Viking gave us Mars back; after the crushing disappointment of learning, from those grainy black and white Mariner pictures, that Mars was as sterile and as crater-blasted as our own Moon, Viking brought the planet back to life in a veritable explosion of colour. Suddenly the future was exciting again! Mars was a place we could go to, explore in person, a real world with mountains, volcanoes and valleys big enough to put Earth’s greatest to shame. Surely, we all thought, gazing at Viking’s pictures, it won’t be too long before people are bounding across that plain, waving cheerfully at a resurrected Viking’s cameras, sending us crackly greetings from across a hundred million miles of space..?

But it didn’t turn out that way. Astronauts have still been no farther than the Moon, forsaking our satellite after a mere handful of missions, and, for now, the human race is quarantined, through its own choice, in low Earth orbit. So, on its 25th anniversary, Viking 1 faced the sunrise abandoned and alone, a dust-covered relic of an over-optimistic age when we believed that the Solar System was ours for the taking. Its eyes are dimmed, sand-blasted into cataracts by the hissing, grainy winds of Mars. Its bold paintwork and designs have faded in the harsh sunlight and UV, leaving it looking like the dried-out, orange husk of some huge insect.

Yet it could all have been so different. It should have been different. If we’d dared to keep following our instincts to explore and see what is over the next horizon, we could have made it to Mars years ago. There would have been people on Mars, today, celebrating the anniversary of the landing on our behalf - and those people would have been able to stand around the probe and see the most amazing, most spectacular sight in the Martian dawn sky…

Really? Yes, really, and if you have a planetarium program which allows you to place yourself on the surface of Mars, you can see this amazing dawn for yourself Enter the date - July 20th, 2001 - and put yourself at the co-ordinates of the Viking 1 lander, and tweak the time until the eastern sky is just beginning to brighten with the approach of sunrise…

Now look. Just look at that.

Oh my…

I have an image in my mind, as clear as day. Somehow, somewhere along the line, history took a different turn, and we reached Mars in 1986, ten years after Viking 1 settled its circular feet onto the Red Planet’s fine-covered surface. And as the dawn of “Viking Day” approaches a group of white-suited colonists is trekking across the star-lit sands towards the lander, which, like all the other man-made artefacts on Mars, has been restored and preserved by hard-working members of “Mars Heritage”, a volunteer group set-up to protect and preserve both the planet’s human history and its natural environment. There are a dozen or so in the group; almost half the colony’s population have made the journey from the wagon-train like circle of Habs to watch the sunrise, knowing that no-one, not even their far descendants, would ever see its like again.

One of the figures crunching towards the lander is a mother, carrying in her arms a small child who has slept most of the way. Of the three children on Mars, her daughter is the youngest, naturally the one they all adore, and as the party reaches the lander they all, one by one, anxiously check on how the young girl has fared during the long hike from the rover. As the girl wakes, yawning and stretching inside her over-sized suit, the smiling colonists arrange themselves into a line, then turn, as one, to face the east.

The eastern sky is glowing, the ebony blackness of the Martian night shot through with flushes of violet, rose and umber as sunrise approaches. To the south-east, the stars of Orion shine like jewels, but Orion himself is tipped over at an unnatural angle, proof, if proof were needed, that they are on a different world. Mars’ twin moons, Phobos and Deimos, blaze high above the toppled figure of the Hunter, each one as brilliant as a lantern. Helmet HUD’s tell the colonists that Phobos is shining at magnitude -7.5, making it easily the brightest object in the sky…

But this morning Phobos is a sideshow, a mere distraction. This morning the colonists’ attention is drawn towards the sky just above the eastern horizon, where Nature has chosen to reward their determination, bravery and spirit by putting on the sky show to end them all.

Just above the horizon, two bright stars are blazing close together, one almost on top of the other. But these “stars” are in fact planets, and they are not alone; three more are shining above them. Standing there, the first men and women of Mars can see five of Mars’ sister worlds flashing and blazing in an area of sky no larger than their outstretched hands.

Closest to the horizon lies Mercury, a silvery magnitude -1.5 spark. Less than a finger’s width above it shines Jupiter, just as bright. A zoomed-in HUD image shows the planet’s cloud belts aligned perpendicularly to the horizon, and three of its four largest moons close by too. As one of the colonists near her laughs in surprise at the view, the young girl asks to be lowered to the ground, and nods in satisfaction as she feels her boots sinking into the tinkling duricrust.

Higher in the sky, two much brighter stars are shining side by side, and yet another bright star can be seen glinting above them and to their right, close to ruddy Aldebaran and the stars of the Hyades, forming a sharp triangle of lights in the brightening sky. The highest of the three has a warm, golden hue, which on its own is enough to betray its real identity, and the silence of the still Martian dawn is briefly broken by a dozen soft whirrs, as the colonists use their visors to zoom in on Saturn and gaze in awe at the beauty of its rings…

Beneath Saturn, Venus is a yellow-white beacon, just as bright in Mars as it is appears Earth. A zoomed-in HUD view transforms the “star” into a beautiful gibbous disc, tinged slightly orange by the dust in Mars’ atmosphere.

Then a voice breaks the silence.

“Which star did you come from, mommy?” the young girl asks, leaning back sleepily against her mother’s legs. The woman crouches down, gathers her daughter to her, and raises her finger towards the east.

“That one honey, the bright blue one over there…”

Following her mother’s directions the girl looks at the sky and sees, beside Venus, just a short distance to its left, a brilliant azure-hued star. It looks like a sapphire glinting in the starlight, the most perfect, cleanest, glacial blue the young girl has ever seen. It reminds her of a crystal, or a tiny drop of water, glistening in and reflecting Phobos-light…

“Did you really come from there?” the young girl asks suspiciously. The star, as beautiful as it is, looks very small. And very far away. Her mother nods. Yes, she did, she says, but it was a long time ago. A long time ago. “Will I have to go there, when I’m older?” the woman’s daughter asks hesitantly. No, her mother reassures her, not if you don’t want to. There are lots of people there who would like to see you, but no-one will make you go.

The girl smiles with relief, cheered by the news; if the “star” really is the “Urth” her mother and the other grown-ups talk about, a strange place with a weird-coloured sky, a too-big world where you feel much too heavy, and water actually falls on you from above, then she is in no rush to go there.

The colonists stand in silence, linking arms, holding hands, leaning against each other as the sky brightens and brightens, until one by one the five planets fade from view. Then, still in silence, they turn away from the dawn and start the long walk back to the rover. But one by one, as they pass, each lovingly presses a gloved hand to the frost-coated “Thomas A. Mutch Memorial Station” dedication plaque they brought with them from Earth all those years ago, and offers up a silent “Thank you” to the men and women who came before them. Who made it possible for them to be there…

Well, that’s how it could have been, how it should have been, on this year’s anniversary. But that spectacular sunrise will only be witnessed by frustrated computer users like myself, and by those of you sufficiently moved or intrigued by this article to check it out for yourselves. That incredible scene will be there, in Mars’ sky, on that morning, but no-one will see it because somewhere along the line we stopped dreaming. Yes, the missions of Pathfinder and MGS have been amazing successes, have taught us more about Mars than we thought possible, maybe even dared to believe possible, but so far we have only sent machines to Mars, and as efficient as they are they can’t see, they can’t feel. They can’t experience Mars.

We won’t truly know Mars until one of us has stood on it and looked around, and then looked back, and seen Earth shining in the sky, reduced to a welding-arc blue spark by the great gulf of interplanetary space. Then, and only then, will Mars become real. Until we can put a person on Mars - until we can put a heart on Mars - it will remain a place without a soul.

I am sure we will reach Mars eventually, and like all of you I will rejoice on that day, shed more than a few tears. But it saddens me that we’ll never have the chance to see another such amazing dawn. Colonists who stand beside Viking 1 on the 50th anniversary, in 2026, will see nothing out of the ordinary at sunrise, and at sunset hours later Earth will shine alone in the west, without any blazing companions. Even on the 100th anniversary of Viking’s landing, Martian settlers will witness only a double conjunction at dawn, as Venus and Earth climb into the brightening sky together, as far apart as Castor and Pollux.

No, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and no human eyes will see it. We should all feel saddened, perhaps even ashamed, at that.

But we haven’t lost Mars completely. There are still some dreamers, some visionaries who hear the Red Planet calling, and who will not rest until someone sees a dawn from its boulder-littered plains. I’m one of them, and so, on the day of the anniversary, I pulled on my jacket, found a quiet corner of a quiet field, and looked up at Mars shining in my dawn sky, and offered my thanks to the probe that gave us back Mars, 25 years ago.

Filed under: Fiction on September 23rd, 2001