Martian Photography

As I was passing in between the range of NPR in New York and Philadelphia on the NJ Turnpike a few days back, I struggled to hear a brief interview with Jim Bell, geologist at Cornell and researcher on the Mars Rovers. I was only able to hear chopped up words interspersed with the “thats the way, I like it” song. Luckily, the interview can be found here.

Despite the report’s several bogus or grandiose claims–that landscape images of Mars are “becoming part of our collective visual vocabulary,” that one day poets will travel to Mars and be able to give us better interpretations than these photographs, that much like the way Eskimos apparently have 50 words for snow future colonists will have the same gradations for red–there was one point I liked. In the description of the interviewer’s experience of viewing a Martian landscape, she says, “Actually there’s nothing in this picture that isn’t rock and shadow; and because there are no trees or anything else connected to life, I have no idea how big or far away anything is. The sense of scale is a complete mystery.”

Space, spatiality, and distance continue even here to be critical in discussions of Mars. Looking at some of these photographs here and here, it’s as if the images challenge us to construct our own sense of scale, to imagine a place in or experience of not only the image but the spatiality that Mars provokes.

“Mars is under attack!”

About a month ago, the commerce, justice, and science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee announced in a press release the drafting of a bill that would put NASA’s annual budget $290 million above the President’s request for the FY 2008. However, they also announced that the bill to be put before the appropriations committee would contain language that forbids “funding any research, development or demonstration activity related exclusively to Human Exploration of Mars. NASA has too much on its plate already, and the President is welcome to include adequate funding for the Human Mars Initiative in a budget amendment or subsequent year funding requests.”

In response, The Mars Society, led by Robert Zubrin (outspoken advocate for Martian exploration and designer of a direct human mission), began a fax and phone blitz, calling on members and interested people to contact their local representatives. The slightly ridiculous campaign announcement reads: MARS IS UNDER ATTACK!

The appropriations committee met yesterday, and approved the commerce, justice, and science spending bill. The bill does not appear to contain any of the threatened anti-Mars language.

It makes me uncomfortable that the highest placed push for a human expedition to Mars has always seemed a mere (or FINAL!) stepping stone in the Bush Family policy, with Bush Sr. promising a return to the Moon and to Mars in 1989, and Jr.’s Vision for Space Exploration in 2004.

It makes me even more uncomfortable that the number of accounts from credible scientists and politicians who say that the human exploration of Mars is simply unnecessary is always tempered by the incredible amount of positive Mars-related press that NASA receives. In the rhetoric for and against human missions, the quality of data we have been receiving from robotic missions is simply too good to ignore.

So while the debate continues, something strange is happening to the red planet. The response by one reader of the Space Politics blog to this post gives me pause. “[...]we have maps of Mars that are an order of magnitude better then those of the Moon. In fact Mars is better mapped then most of the Earth.”

The map currently being developed by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter is available online. The map ranges from a global perspective to a resolution the width of a beach ball.

What is so interesting to me about this discussion on the future of Martian exploration is that even while it goes on right now, a material tangibility is being married with evocations of some fantastical, dreamlike existence on both sides of the debate. While I can’t go very far with this right now, it seems fitting to quote the opening of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy: “Because we are still those animals who survived the Ice Age, and looked up in the night sky, and told stories. And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from the very beginning–a great sign, a great symbol, a great power. And so we came here. It had been a power; now it became a place.”