One of the many maps handed out to students in Christine Rodrigue’s “The Geography of Mars” course at CSULB. Image courtesy of Dr. Christine Rodrigue
Today is the day where the entire nation gathers to honor one of its most cherished traditions: the exploration of Mars.
That’s right. Today marks not just Thanksgiving, but also Red Planet Day, celebrating the anniversary of the first successful mission to Mars through the Spacecraft Mariner 4 back on this day in 1964.
And this widely unknown “alternative” holiday is one that even Mars-obsessed CSULB geography professor Christine Rodrigue—who teaches a course entitled “The Geography of Mars,” the first of its kind anywhere—didn’t know about. The lack of knowledge about this odd day dedicated to all things Martian, however, does not equate to a lack of passion for one of Earth’s closest neighbors.
“Mars is gorgeous and it’s a place—an actual place, not just a pink dot in the sky,” Rodrigue said. “And it’s interesting because we sent all kinds of new missions to Mars in the late ’90s and 2000s. And these missions have provided a more subtle look of the planet: it once upon a time has a denser atmosphere that allowed it to have liquid water on the surface, that it may have had oceans, and it is quite possible that life did start there.”
This has, in return, introduced a whole new perspective on not only why pushing forward in more Martian research—particularly the perpetually delayed Mars Sample Return mission—is scientifically essential, but also imaginatively reinvigorating for those who had lost the dreams that previous authors have built up.
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Those previous authors—such as Ray Bradbury with The Martian Chronicles or Edgar Rice Burroughs’s character of John Carter, what Rodrigue calls the “romanticizing of a dying civilization on Mars”—were largely influenced by the image projected onto the planet by astrologers. As telescopes became more and more powerful in the 19th Century, what they were seeing in telescopes were combined with people doing very meticulous cartography. One of those who was most persistently using the eye of telescopes was Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who believed he saw water channels on the planet.
As Schiaparelli’s work was translated into English, the word for channels in Italian, canali, was translated as “canal,” thereby insinuating artificial construction. Percival Lowell, founder of the famed Lowell Observatory in Arizona, then studied these intricate drawings, and popularized what soon became a common belief: that Mars sustained intelligent life.
However, the mission marking cause for the creation of Red Planet Day—Mariner 4, along with Mariner 6, 7, and 9—failed to capture any images of these supposed waterways.
“Basically people were projecting their own fantasies onto Mars,” Rodrigue said. “And the idea of alien life is focused on Mars throughout the 20th Century, especially in science fiction. And science fiction is very important because it actually inspires kids to take up science.”
The importance of our imagination and its seemingly inherent connection to an objective interest such as science was solidified for Rodrigue during her work at a jet propulsion lab in the 1970s.
“I was really struck how there was Star Trek stuff all over the lab,” Rodrigue laughed. “I even knew some of the scientists there were responsible for the animation system that created the light sabers in Star Wars. So you have all kinds of scientists who were inspired to take on the rather grueling math talents of science by exposure to science fiction—especially Mars scientists.”
Yet, despite the overwhelming influence of Mars, the planet is overshadowed by a lack of funding and little support for further missions.
The aforementioned Mars Sample Return (MSR) [concept rendering pictured] mission—the highest priority Flagship Mission proposed for NASA by the Planetary Decadal Survey 2013-2022: The Future of Planetary Science—has seen a roller coaster ride of a history. Despite the overwhelming scientific return-on-investment of bringing rock and dust samples from Mars back to Earth, none of these proposed missions have ever made it past the planning stages.
In fact, the hazards that MSR has faced mimic Rodrigue’s initial research interest, which was not Mars but natural and technological hazards. In the late ’90s, she studied the massive influence—for one of the first times—the Internet had in becoming a skeptical voice for assessing risk in the Cassini-Huygens mission. Since the spacecraft was using plutonium, vilified by Ralph Nader as the most toxic substance ever known, as its main source of power, theories about the craft possibly colliding into Earth due to its planned trajectory raised massive public outcry.
“NASA got wind of how I studied new media overriding traditional media,” Rodrigue said. “They were interested in assessing risk communication, since they were anticipating a worse controversy over the MSR lander.”
That controversy NASA was anticipating was two-fold: the mission somewhat echoed concerns brought up in the Huygens mission criticism with plutonium’s involvement—how do we protect ourselves from the returning craft releasing plutonium?—while additionally, Andromeda Strain-like fears that the sample to be returned from Mars could possibly return “Martian microbes” that have still somehow survived on the planet would also survive the return to Earth and be released into the Earth’s environment to reek possible havoc.
“These concerns hold what NASA calls vanishingly-small-but-not-zero probability,” Rodrigue said.
Despite the many failures at MSR becoming a reality, this initial dive into Martian topics fueled Rodrigue’s intrigue—leading to this day and the creation of her one-of-a-kind class.
“Mars’ history—the fact that it could have harbored life and even life evolved from it—is one of the largest scientific keys we hold,” Rodrigue said. “NASA tends to justify and drive a lot of its [Mars] missions on the quest for water and the other conditions of life… If we find these things, it could shed light on life on this planet. And if we have two planets that have had independently evolved life, that very well could mean that it’s common in the universe. The philosophical implications are endless.”
Rodrigue’s “The Geography of Mars,” a four-unit upper-division course, is again being offered during the upcoming spring semester at CSULB.