New Mars

The public’s perception of space exploration and astronomy is almost as important as the events themselves. One of the most prominent figures in shaping that perception in Britain is astronomer, author and television presenter Heather Couper. New Mars conducted an extensive interview with Heather on her current projects and her thoughts about the future of space exploration, both around the world and in Britain.

	Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest

Astronomer and broadcaster Heather Couper is now a familiar face on our TV screens; whenever space is in the news for some reason - good or bad - it’s usually a pretty safe bet that Heather will be the expert brought into the studio to explain what’s going on to the viewers. But as well as being a broadcaster, Heather is also a prolific author, and has had many books on astronomy and spaceflight published, the most recent of which, MARS, is a timely and comprehensive guide to our current understanding of the Red Planet. With fellow astronomer and author Nigel Henbest, Heather founded Pioneer Productions, a TV program-making company specialising in popular science documentaries. Pioneer’s latest series, “EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE”, is running on Britain’s Channel 4 on Monday evening at 9.00pm.

New Mars recently talked to Heather about her interest in, and love of Mars.

New Mars: Heather, how did you get started in astronomy? And how old were you?

Heather Couper: I saw a green shooting star when I was scanning the sky for airplanes (my father was a pilot). My parents didn’t believe me, but the meteor featured in the national press next day. From then on there was no stopping me - I must have been about eight.

NM: What were your particular fields of interest when you were studying astronomy? Were you ‘into’ Mars even then?

HC: The field I chose for my Ph.D (at Oxford) was ‘The Morphology of Giant Clusters of Galaxies’. Mars was too small, and too close!

NM: It’s obvious, reading MARS, that you now have a deep personal fascination with Mars - why? What was it that triggered that interest?

HC: To be honest, I only had a mild interest in Mars when Nigel Henbest (my co-author) and I started researching the book. But once we started talking to the Mars experts - over 60 of them from all around the world - their passion and devotion to the Red Planet swept us up completely. They told us things that we had never heard before. They opened up to us because they knew that, as well as being writers, we were also qualified scientists. We felt so entrusted with what they told us that we wanted to bring out their personalities, as well as the personality of Mars. The net result is that we have become out-and-out Mars fans!

NM: Being a writer and broadcaster, you’ve followed - and covered - all the major Mars missions. Which ones excited you the most? What are your most special memories?

HC: It’s a sad memory, but it was being at JPL when they lost the Mars Observer in 1993. We were doing some initial filming for a TV documentary on the probe, and I felt very involved with the teams as they came to terms with their loss. To see their crushing disappointment as they were forced to wipe out years of their lives spent with a probe they had loved … it was awful.

In fact, we have a chapter in the book called ‘The Curse of Mars’, which investigates why so many Mars probes have failed. We talked to Roald Sagdeev - once head of unmanned space exploration for the Soviet Union - about how he “inherited” four doomed Mars probe launches two weeks into his new job! We discovered extra insights into the failures of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander in an unexpected way (by finding ourselves - coincidentally - next to the Lockheed Martin engineer in charge on a flight from Denver to Washington). And we had a great time with Jim Oberg discussing the final resting-place of Russia’s Mars 96 - and it’s not in the Pacific Ocean.

Happiest memory? Seeing Sojourner trundling around the surface and nuzzling up to a rock!

NM: Okay, be honest - the first time you saw it, did you raise an eyebrow when you saw that Viking photo of the so-called “Face On Mars”? ;-)

HC: No way! It was obviously something like a mesa. And the same goes for the “glass tunnel” and “forest” that Arthur C. Clarke claims to see in the MGS data. They’re just dune formations.

NM: After writing books on aliens, the Milky Way, the Big Bang and general astronomy, what made you decide to focus specifically on the planet Mars this time, especially as there are now so many Mars books on the shelves already..?

HC: It was something as parochial as our publishers persuading us. We offered them life in the Universe or Mars (the latter because we had suspicions that the true stories hadn’t come out yet), and they plumped for Mars. We hadn’t realised what an adventure it was going to become.

However, the most galling thing is that - so far - the book is only published in the UK. Although Headline is a top UK publisher, they haven’t been able to sell MARS into the international markets. We are especially keen to get a US publisher, but they all think Lawrence Bergreen has got Mars all sewn up. Not true!! His book is NASA- focused; he didn’t get access to half of our great interviewees; and he has no science background. Any help appreciated …

NM: You travelled the world during the writing of the book - what was it like to actually get to meet, face to face, all those famous Mars experts we have all seen on TV and in the astronomy magazines? What levels of passion did you find amongst them?

HC: It was an amazing experience. I have never found a community of scientists so articulate, and so keen to set their contributions amongst the wider context of human culture and exploration (the SETI community has a similar perspective - and, of course, the two overlap). We were also privileged to be granted interviews with scientists who seldom talk to journalists, like Mike Malin and Ken Edgett, and Gil Levin.

The passion was extreme. The ALH 84001 guys were fantastic, as was the team in NASA’s Exploration Office (human spaceflight) in Houston. When they discovered that our interview request had been brushed aside by an incompetent junior PR assistant, 12 of them organised a telephone conference for us when we got back to the UK. When will humans get to Mars?, I asked them. “Within our lifetimes and within our careers”, asserted one of the team. “You know, this is the frustrating part about working on this, because I think all of us in this room believe that we could begin sensibly in the next few years. Within a decade, we could do the job. The reason humans aren’t going to Mars doesn’t have much to do with engineering. It has more to do with politics.”

Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest at a book talk in Borders, Cambridge, for the book of their series on Channel 4, Extreme Universe (the audience was informed that their preferred title, Edge of the Universe was not ‘attractive’ enough - resulting in the book of the series having a different, but ‘proper’, name).

NM: Reading MARS it’s very obvious you feel a deep personal “pull” towards Mars. So what was it like to actually hold a piece of Mars - a Martian meteorite - in your hand?

HC: You feel you’re reaching out and touching Mars. When I think back to those fuzzy, blurred images of Mars I saw through my little telescope as a kid, it was a much more profound experience - it made the planet real. And it will be the closest I’ll get to being there.

NM: The book, of course, describes the furore over the ALH84001 Mars meteorite which some experts are claiming contains the fossilised remains of ancient Martians. What’s your opinion on that? And do you think there could still be life on Mars today?

HC: As I said, the JSC ALH 84001 team were great. We weren’t granted an interview with them because of the PR problems at Houston, so we dragged them across the road to our hotel bar instead. At the time of the interview, they were just about to publish their paper on magnetite crystals around the “bugs” in the meteorite. They were convinced that the magnetites could only be a result of biological activity. Now, I know another paper has recently come out refuting this - so much depends on how closely the shape of the magnetite crystals resemble earthly ones and whether non-biological processes can produce them - but I’ll stick with the JSC guys.

Critics have also said that the “bugs” are too small to have ever been alive; too small, even to contain DNA. Well, Finnish researchers have been investigating tiny ‘nanobacteria’ on Earth. And who says the fossil “bugs” couldn’t be broken-off bits of larger entities? Even Bruce Murray - who led the Viking missions in the 1970s, and is notoriously sceptical about life on Mars - puts the chances of the crystals being produced by bacteria at “20 to 25 percent”.

Life on Mars today? Yes. This was one of our most exciting findings. We have always been intrigued by the interpretation of the Viking experiments, and wanted to check things out for ourselves. We managed to meet up with Gil Levin (of the Labelled-Release experiment - the only one of four Viking experiments that tested positive for life on Mars) after a bit of persuading. He was deeply suspicious of the media, having been on a TV show the previous week along with various nutters, when he had been promised a fair hearing. But when he heard about our mission - and the fact that we both had science backgrounds - he was keen to help, and showed us the results of his experiment.

The bottom line for us is that his data look exactly like the controls he was running on Earth. When he heated his Mars sample slightly, some of the activity died down - implying that some of the bugs had been killed off. When he heated it to 160C, he got a flat control line. All the bugs were dead.

Although some scientists dismiss Levin as a “sanitary engineer”, you have to realise that he made his fortune detecting bacteria in air-conditioning systems - so he knows what he’s doing. And think how far we’ve come in 25 years in our appreciation of the environments where life can exist. Back in those days, we had no idea about extremophiles living in nuclear power plants, in rocks in Antarctica, in hot springs - even on pallets free-floating in space. Now we know that life, once established, can tolerate most things the Universe can throw at it.

NASA claims that the crucial experiment on Viking was the GCMS - which searched for carbon atoms in the Martian soil and found none. No carbon = no life. But we talked to the guys at the Scripps Institution, who are building a new, much more sensitive version of the GCMS. “We estimate that the GCMS on Viking would have missed on the order of 30 million bacteria cells per gramme of soil”, they told us. “So there could have been cells in the soil, but Viking wouldn’t have seen them”.

NM: If we discovered life on Mars, what implications do you think that would have for the future exploration of Mars? Or on us, psychologically and philosophically, as a species?

HC: In purely practical terms, NASA has already drawn up a protocol for the first sample return mission, in case there is primitive life on the planet. The worry is that a biological sample could - like Ebola virus or anthrax - cause disease in humans, although the risk is very small. But no-one is taking chances. John Rummel, NASA’s wonderfully-named ‘Planetary Protection Officer’, will make sure that the sample is held in a super-secure safe facility.

Implications for future exploration of Mars? If there is life, then we have a responsibility not to contaminate it with our own bugs. As John Rummel says, “green slime has rights too”.

Philosophically and psychologically, I think people want there to be life on Mars - remember the explosion of optimistic newspaper headlines after ALH 840001? I think it would be even more amazing if life on Mars could be proved to have a different origin, showing that life can start independently on two neighbour-worlds in space. That would have incredible implications for the wider question of life in the Universe. But I suspect - as many of the Mars experts are also thinking - that life started on Mars when it was cooler and more stable than Earth, and eventually seeded our own planet.

NM: The book features some truly beautiful artists impressions of how a far-future terraformed Mars might look. Are you for or against that? And why?

HC: I’m against terraforming. Even Chris McKay’s argument that we are only restoring abundant life to a world that’s had a bit of a bad deal with its climate doesn’t wash with me. I think Mars is a beautiful wilderness. We wouldn’t terraform Antarctica, so why terraform Mars?

But that doesn’t rule out colonising Mars. We may have to. As the dinosaurs discovered to their cost, we’re bound to be hit by another 10km-diameter asteroid some day. Living on two planets gives you an insurance policy.

NM: As a broadcaster and TV program maker, what do you think of the ways Mars has been shown in various TV shows and films so far?

HC: I have to confess that I haven’t seen many … as an antidote to a career promoting space and astronomy, I spend my leisure time exploring the English countryside!

NM: Have you any plans to make a Pioneer programme about Mars? Perhaps a series to go with the book?

HC: It’s a great idea. The problem is that you can’t just decide to make a TV programme - they are decided upon by ‘commissioning editors’, who often have little idea of what the public want to see. The wackier the idea, the better, unfortunately - it helps the commissioning editor’s career. I have also recently left Pioneer to concentrate on freelance presenting - I was getting bogged down in development work!

However, I am hoping to make a radio series. Most of the interviews are recorded on broadcast-quality tape, and it would be a crime if they were never aired.

NM: In MARS you acknowledge the impact science fiction writers and their stories have had on the people working on Mars missions today. Have any particular authors or books inspired you?

HC: H.G. Wells - I love everything he wrote. But because I was always much more into science fact than science fiction when I was a child, I owe an enormous debt to Patrick Moore. I can’t remember the number of times I borrowed ‘Guide to Mars’ from the library. And it said that the dark markings might be mosses or lichens - wow!

NM: Looking ahead, when MARS is reprinted in 2011, what updates do you think it will contain? What do you expect to happen in the field of Mars exploration, between now and then?

HC: I really hope Britain’s Beagle 2 mission is successful. It’ll be a great Christmas present in December 2003 if it arrives there and definitively ’sniffs out’ life (I hope they’ll give Gil Levin the credit, though). I’m looking forward to new technologies being used on Mars, both in terms of rovers and other equipment - I was very disappointed that the Kitty Hawk Mars-plane was scrapped. But by 2011, I hope that I’ll be writing about the early stages of the first human mission to Mars.

NM: Lastly - assuming you wanted to go, of course! - what would be your own “perfect moment” on Mars? i.e. if you could snap your fingers and go to anywhere on Mars, and at any date and time, where and “when” would you be?

HC: Standing on the edge of the Valles Marineris, watching the Sun go down. Is it like a sunset at the Grand Canyon? Do you get those incredible purple and orange colours? And is Bill Hartmann right when he says that Mars’ pink sky turns blue at sunset? Oh - and I’d love to see Olympus Mons erupting, although this may require a journey into the past (or maybe not…).

Selected interview questions by Adrian Hon:

Heather at a book signing session

NM: In general, what do you think the level of interest in space is in Britain, compared to, say, America?

HC: That’s interesting. I actually think that the level of knowledge about space is about the same in the two countries, if you have a look at the questionnaires and other sources. I do have the feeling that though that it’s more cool to be interested in space in America than it is in this country. It’s only in the last couple of years that I think that the average person in Britain is taking a real interest in space. It’s a very recent thing. But in America, people are a lot more up front about this interest; it’s do to with their space program, the space station, missions to other planets, things like that and I think we (in Britain) haven’t had that kind of focus until now - just with the National Space Centre at Leicester and having the British Beagle 2 probe to Mars, that’s going to make a fantastic difference.

NM: The Beagle 2 probe does seem to be attracting quite a lot of attention.

HC: Yes, it is, it’s great. I think Colin Pillinger has managed to do extremely well by getting - not that I agree with his choice of people, but I think it’s really cool to have people like Blur and Damien Hirst involved. I wouldn’t have done it like that myself but I think that Colin has got the ear of the people, and good luck to him.

NM: While Beagle 2 is doing well, it didn’t receive much funding from the government. We know that the government has already said that they don’t support the human exploration of space, but even robotic exploration isn’t getting much funding either.

HC: I think they really had to search for funding; I know they did. There was one guy who I interviewed for the Mars book, Charlie Cockell, who’s at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge looking into research on extremophiles. He actually stood against John Major in 1990 in the General Elections, and deliberately challenged him on his policy about Mars. It’s the same with all British governments, they’re perfectly happy to fund things like Earth Monitoring Satellites but not really anything else. I think we have to educate politicians in a major way because I think they would get the vote of the people if they were to start a space initiative. One MP who has done this is Lembit Opik at Montgomeryshire whose started an initiative to get funding for observatories to look for Near Earth Asteroids. That’s a great step in the right direction.

More to follow…

This interview was conducted by Stuart Atkinson and Adrian Hon. All photos are copyright Adrian Hon.

Filed under: Interviews on March 21st, 2002