A mighty wind

Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech

For months now we’ve been looking for escape, a release from the relentless psychodrama that has been the pandemic. And yesterday, we caught a glimpse of freedom. No, not Boris Johnson’s “roadmap” out of lockdown, but a ten-second audio recording of a few puffs of celestial wind. Actual pops of noise created by a force of nature on another planet: Mars. Mind actually blown. 

The timing of NASA’s Perseverance mission to the red planet has been uncanny: when it was first conceived, no one could have imagined where the world would be in February 2021 - and will be for a few months to come. Since its rover landed on the Martian surface the other day, Perseverance has given the world something to properly marvel at, a true 'moment' in the expansion of human knowledge. 

We’ve understandably long held fascination for our planetary neighbours, ever since the ancient Egyptians and Chinese first plotted the sky at night. But Mars, that tiny but distinctive red dot amongst the brighter white lights, has been of particular interest, generating its own rich mythology. This was long before scientists theorised that this relative near-neighbour ('just' 253 million miles from Earth, give or take the waning of its solar orbit) might potentially be a cousin, a product of the same event, 3.8 billion years ago, that sent our worlds spinning into orbits they occupy today. 

Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Mars has been an obsession for our kind for centuries. The Sumerians and ancient Greeks were the first to track its movements, then appearing to the naked eye as a little different to the others. But it wasn’t until Galileo Galilei conducted the first telescopic viewing of Mars in 1610 that interest really kicked into gear. Before long, astronomers were noting the planet’s features and by the Victorian era, it had become the subject of fanciful notions of harbouring life - and, possibly, hostile life. Quite what foundation authors like H.G. Wells had for assuming that little green men were looking back this way with nefarious intent is not really known, but as astronomer Carl Sagan wrote: “Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears”. The planet’s depiction as the Roman God of War was even interpreted by composer Gustav Holst in the foreboding Mars The Bringer Of War, the opening movement of The Planets suite. 

Theories about Mars as a planetary body have been equally as intoxicating: through the telescope’s optics, fascination has grown exponentially deeper, as its surface revealed topography and geology so tantalisingly similar to the deserts of our own world, its volcanoes (including Olympus Mons, the largest known in the solar system) and ice-covered polar regions. Several years ago, scientists found minerals in Australia that were a likely close match to the geochemistry first explorations of Mars had discovered. Even its seasons draw vague parallels to our own. The idea that we might share geological DNA is mind-bogglingly incredible.

Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Perseverance may not be the first time something from here has landed up there (or down there, or over there, or wherever Mars is, geographically speaking), but in these COVID-impacted times, NASA has brilliantly distracted us with vivid, colourful sight of another world, albeit one without many striking features so far, but at least we haven’t yet seen anyone wearing a face mask, scurrying about at two metres distance from anyone else.

Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech

There are seven billion people on this world, but to the best of anyone’s knowledge, no one on Mars. As one scientist on Sky News this morning said, the idea that we might find someone up there is a notion now long gone. Not that I really care: we’ve been exposed to preposterous depictions of alien life via science fiction for decades - centuries even (Ezekiel's Wheel, anyone?). That Perserverence is, in drilling into the Jezero crater on Mars, looking for evidence of past microbial life, is no less awe-inspiring. Think about it: something made on Earth is currently on Mars, controlled remotely from Mission Control in Pasadena, digging into another planet to see if, once, organisms may have existed in much the same way as primitive life emerged here. As The Fast Show's 'Brilliant Kid' would say, "Aren't planetary probes amazing?!".

I’m no expert, and wouldn’t pretend to be, but having spent plenty of time exploring the rocky, arid landscape of California’s Mojave Desert, the high-resolution video images of the Martian surface coming from the Perserverence rover’s onboard cameras have only made the $2.7 billion NASA mission more impressive. Yes, there’s plenty money like that could be spent on, here on Earth, but the idea that human endeavour has landed a vehicle on Mars, with technical and aeronautical understanding that I’ll never begin to understand allowing a precision drop in that manic, seven-minute descent through the thin Martian atmosphere, is worth every penny in the pursuit of greater understanding of our own origins.

The Space Race in the 1960s eventually led to us becoming somewhat blasé about things beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Once Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on the Moon, and subsequent Apollo missions appeared, briefly, to be routine, appeared to have been reached. In the 1980s, we grew used to the Space Shuttle missions - even in spite of the Challenger disaster - as the idea of a crewed reusable vehicle popping out to little more than Earth's front drive came across as the limit of endeavour. And then the excitement seemed to fade. Even astronauts squeezing onto to the International Space Station has become something of a mundanity. I would beg to differ: anything we do beyond Earth's gravity is a feat of staggering science, mathematics and engineering, both sending it up and bringing it back down again. I would still place the Apollo 11 mission, and the landing of men on the moon, as one of the greatest things mankind has ever done, along with developing language, inventing the wheel, medicine and air travel. 

Perseverance is not far off any of these. “I feel like we took a big leap of humanity,” Thomas Zurbuchen, Nasa’s associate administrator for science, concluded about the mission. Last night’s video and - crucially - audio, added a fantastic new dimension. “All of us here on Earth [now] know what it’s like to see and hear on Mars and explore other worlds. This is as close as we can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit.”

In remarkable, clear pictures, we found ourselves looking on an alien world, as vivid as any terrestrial travel documentary. “It really is the surface of an alien world,” one of the Perseverance team said. They were not, of course, the first images of Mars we’d ever seen, but they were certainly the most staggering. Past missions had sent back pictures that, indeed, could so easily have been taken with a Polaroid camera out in the deserts beyond the Los Angeles city limits.

At some point we learned that Mars once featured vast liquid oceans, running water flowing across its geography in much the same way as it does here. The very juice of life. This has made Mars - perhaps more than any other body in the solar system - utterly compelling. And that’s what makes Zurbuchen’s statement so true and not hyperbole at all. 

Hearing Martian wind for the first time, caught by a microphone on the landing vehicle, compounded the marvel. Coupled with the rover’s myriad cameras, relaying back to us the rocky testures and actual colour of the ‘red planet’, we have been given access to the most unique tourist’s Instagram account ever. No wonder everyone at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena was “overjoyed, giddy” and “like kids in a candy store,” according to one project manager when Perserverence made its textbook landing the other night. They have a right to be. The team at Mission Control, plus thousands more working from home during lockdown, have pulled off another giant leap for mankind.