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Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World
Oliver Morton
A narrative history of the men and women who have explored Mars and mapped its surface from afar, and in so doing conditioned our understanding of our nearest planetary neighbour.The maps of Mars are exquisitely detailed representations of a land as large as all the continents of the earth combined. Yet they are being drawn before any human eye has seen the wonders they contain. In this fascinating mix of science, travel and the history of scientific imagination, Oliver Morton tells the story of the men and women who are mapping a dramatic, mysterious landscape, without having once set foot on its surface. Filled with awe-inspiring detail about volcanoes twice the height of Everest, basins deeper than the Pacific, ‘Mapping Mars’ is a breathtaking account of a world opening up to the imagination.
OLIVER MORTON
Mapping Mars
SCIENCE, IMAGINATION AND
THE BIRTH OF A WORLD
Copyright (#ulink_5980f2ed-394b-5340-af93-5e8891ca2d9a)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2002
Copyright © Abq72 Ltd 2002
The right of Oliver Morton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9781841156699
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007397051
Version: 2014-09-15
Dedication (#ulink_6a407723-0b66-5ad0-8545-96aa5ec89064)
For Lieutenant Arthur Noel Morton, RNVR
Navigating officer, HMS Hargood, 1944–5 Lover of maps, lover of writing and loving father – ‘Round about here, Sir.’
Contents
Cover (#u7b10788a-bf72-528a-833a-51fff7e2d109)
Title Page (#u6baf7ad8-06ae-51de-963b-c00ee42f186f)
Copyright (#ucb39a3b8-4da0-54b8-9423-72e13d7be0c6)
Dedication (#u08949b24-3861-506d-85c0-856ac82d8eed)
Preface (#ulink_92a9f760-f22a-53e7-80b4-5de76b270342)
Introduction (#u8b56b6c7-eb12-51df-9630-1317cbb96260)
Part One – Maps (#ub108d47e-9f0d-528e-95e5-403888de9223)
Greenwich (#u6baca6f5-d8ff-56d5-9c7b-9a6abaf10123)
A Point of Warlike Light (#uc26ce39a-5dd0-5e81-82f8-365037c55f99)
Mert Davies’s Net (#u68ae7eed-2f6d-5bac-9f68-5c6ba09c0ea0)
The Polar Lander (#ued04aaff-6195-5c38-ba72-25004517ef56)
Mariner 9 (#uc2e874c3-557e-52c4-afca-8872fd59e53b)
The Art of Drawing (#u33840cb8-998b-5aa6-8126-62d9cf727e8a)
The Laser Altimeter (#uc981fd55-68c0-5f55-a703-a28d8a9f6756)
Part Two – Histories (#u5bfed289-862b-5051-b148-e3f7b0406c47)
Meteor Crater (#u2a2ccbd4-1acd-5d79-9091-8f387e7b9528)
‘A Little Daft on the Subject of the Moon’ (#u6b737bac-146d-59bc-be2e-2810e0412ef9)
An Antique Land (#litres_trial_promo)
Maps and Multiple Hypotheses (#litres_trial_promo)
The Artist’s Eye (#litres_trial_promo)
Layers (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three – Water (#litres_trial_promo)
Malham (#litres_trial_promo)
Mike Carr’s Mars (#litres_trial_promo)
Reflections (#litres_trial_promo)
Shorelines (#litres_trial_promo)
The Ocean Below (#litres_trial_promo)
‘Common Sense and Uncommon Subtlety’ (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four – Places (#litres_trial_promo)
Buffalo (#litres_trial_promo)
Putting Together a Place (#litres_trial_promo)
The Underground (#litres_trial_promo)
Bob Zubrin’s Frontier (#litres_trial_promo)
Mapping Martians (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Five – Change (#litres_trial_promo)
Symbols of the Future (#litres_trial_promo)
Gaia’s Neighbour (#litres_trial_promo)
The Undiscover’d Country (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
References, Notes and Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Preface (#ulink_fd747188-62de-546e-a53d-92331f7a7406)
‘Are you going to move our stuff?’
‘No, that’s the view. We’re in the picture.’
Exchange between William Fox and Mark Klett
in William L. Fox, View Finder
Introduction (#ulink_c7f5ff68-2ce0-56ac-bd82-e1f9d6ecde37)
There’s a world on my wall.
Mountains, canyons, plains and valleys, all a faded pinkish ochre, an even tone as plain as a colour can be without being grey. The sun is to the west – shadows fall gently to the right. There are faults and rifts, ash flows and lava fields. There are creases and stretch marks, straight lines and strange curves. There are circles and circles and circles.
No cities. No seas. No forests and no battlegrounds. No prairies. No nations. No histories and no legends. No memories. Just features, features and names. Argyre and Hellas and Isidis. Olympus and Alba and Pavonis. Schiaparelli and Antoniadi, Kasei and Nirgal. Beautiful double-rimmed Lowell. Names from one world projected on to maps of another. Maps of Mars.
The maps on my wall, painstakingly painted about fifteen years ago, show the surface of Mars from pole to pole. They show volcanoes that dwarf their earthly cousins in age and size. They show the round scars of uncountable asteroid impacts, many far more violent than the one which killed off the earth’s dinosaurs. They show a canyon so long and deep it’s as if the planet’s tight skin has swollen and split. They show featureless plains and pock-marked ones, jumbled hummocky hills and strange creases that swarm together for thousands of kilometres, like the grain in a piece of timber. They show features perfectly earthlike and features so strange the earth has no names for them. There’s a world’s worth of scientific puzzles here, some of them already tentatively answered, most still mysterious. There’s a world’s worth of possibilities. But there’s no clear place to start the story.
If people had moved across the pinkish ochre – if they had grown vines on the terraces of Olympus, or herded goats through the Labyrinths of the Night; if legends haunted Tempe and the dales of Arcadia, or if in Ares Vallis ancient grudge had broken into new mutiny – then it would be easy. But there are none of those tales to tell. No gardens of Eden, no sacred springs, nowhere to start the story of a world.
Even stripped of people, with their cities and their borders and their histories, a map of earth would not be this unyielding. Global truths and discrete units of geography would draw the eye. River catchments would tile the plains, mountain ranges would stand like the backbones of continents. There would be seas and islands, well defined. But Mars is not like that. It is continuous, seamless and sealess. Its great mountains stand alone; there are no sweeping ranges, no Rockies or Alps or Andes. The rivers are long gone. There are no continents and there are no oceans, and thus there are no shores. Given patience, provisions and a pressure suit you could walk from any point on the planet to any other. No edges guide the eye or frame the scene. Nowhere says: Start Here.
We might begin the story at one of the places that humanity has touched. In 1971 a Russian spacecraft crashed into Hellas, a vast basin in the southern hemisphere, while another landed more decorously on the other side of the planet, somewhere in or around the crater Ptolemaus. Two years later another Russian probe struck the surface somewhere near the dry valley called Samara. None sent back anything by way of a message. In 1976 America’s more sophisticated Viking landers lowered themselves gently to sites in the northern plains of Chryse and utopia, sending back panoramas of rock and rubble beneath pink-looking skies. But the Vikings eventually fell silent too, leaving Mars alone again. Preludes, not beginnings.
Twenty years later, NASA’s little Pathfinder, cocooned in airbags, bounced to a halt in the rocky fields where Ares Vallis had once spewed out its flood waters. It let loose Sojourner, the first of humanity’s creations to travel on its own across the sands of Mars. That was a new beginning, the beginning of a grand age for earth’s robots. At the time of writing there have been automatic envoys sending data back from Mars ever since. But Pathfinder’s story cannot encompass the whole vast world in front of me. Not yet.
What about beginning on earth? Some places here are very like locations there, perhaps close enough to be tied together by some sort of sympathetic story-magic. Maybe Antarctica, where the driest, coldest landscapes on earth are regularly visited by scientists wanting to get some sense of a smaller, drier, colder world. Or Iceland, where permafrost and lava fight as once they did on Mars. Or the scablands of Washington state, ripped clean by floods like those that scoured Pathfinder’s landing site. Or Hawaii’s volcanoes, near perfect miniatures of the Martian giants. Or Arizona’s Meteor Crater, where earthly geologists first came to grips with what a little bit of asteroid can do to the face of a planet, given enough speed. They are all places where one can learn about Mars, where the trained imagination can almost touch it. But none evokes the whole world.
We could cast our imaginations wider, to those who have tried to speak for all of Mars. To the astronomers looking at it with their telescopes, measuring all the qualities of light reflected from its surface, seeing seasons and imagining civilisations. Or to the writers inspired by those astronomical visions: H. G. Wells and Stanley Weinbaum, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Alexander Bogdanov and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Their imaginations took a point of light and turned it into a world of experience. But their Mars was never this one, the one which we only saw – which we could only ever see – after our envoys left the earth and went there.
Only after our spacecraft reached its orbit could we see Mars for what it is, a planet with a surface area as great as that of the earth’s continents, all of it as measurable, as real as the stones in the pavement outside your door. After millennia of talking about worlds beyond our own, of heavens and hells and the Isles of the Hesperides, humanity now has such a world fixed in its sights, solid and sure. For the moment it is a world of science, untouchable but inspectable and oddly accessible, if only through the most complex of tools. But unlike the other worlds that scientists create with their imaginations and instruments – the worlds of molecular dynamics and of inflationary cosmology and all the rest of them – this one is on the edge of being a world in the oldest, truest, sense. A world of places and views, a world that would graze your knees if you fell on it, a world with winds and sunsets and the palest of moonlight. Almost a world like ours, except for the emptiness.
This book is about how ideas from our full and complex planet are projected on to the rocks of that simpler, empty one. The ideas discussed are mostly scientific, because it is the scientists who have thought hardest and best about the realities of Mars. It is the scientists who have fathomed the ages of its rocks, measured its resemblance to the earth, searched for its missing waters and – always – wondered about the life it might be home to. The stories they tell about the planet must have pride of place. But there are artists in here too, and writers, and poets, and people whose dreams take no such articulated form, but still focus themselves on the same rocks in the sky. They illuminate Mars; Mars illuminates them.
It’s common to imagine that the human story on Mars will only start when humans actually get there, when they stand beneath its dusty sky and look around them at its oddly close horizon. I don’t know who those people will be, or when they will get there, or where on the planet they will first set their feet. But I know that for all their importance, they will not be a new story’s beginning, rather a new chapter. Their expectations and hopes are already being created on the earth today, by the people in this book; the process of making Mars into a human world has already begun. And I know that their landing site is somewhere on the map in front of me, already charted, if not yet chosen.
Back to the maps, then; in particular to the 1:15,000,000 shaded-relief map of the surface published by the United States Geological Survey, its three sheets fixed to my office wall. It represents the planet as well as any single image could. But it’s not just the representation of a planet. It’s the embodiment of a process, a process that forged links between far-off Mars and the cartographers’ drawing board point by point, feature by feature. It embodies links of reason and technology that ran through the cameras of now-dead spacecraft millions of kilometres away, and through the minds of the men who designed and controlled those cameras. Links that ran through empty space, carried by the faintest of radio waves, and through the great dishes that picked up those signals, and through the computers that wove them back into images. Links that ran through the eyes and minds and hands of the people who assembled the pictures produced by that great scientific adventure into a world they could see in their minds and draw on the paper in front of them, a world precise and publishable.
The maps themselves tell no single story. But the people who put those links together with technology and craft, mathematics and imagination – they have a story, one that lets the maps and the planet they are tied to come to life.
Where to begin to write about Mars? With the making of the maps.
Part I – Maps (#ulink_5ec4ea67-3c14-587f-b365-81672123465b)
‘Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, “When I grow up I will go there.” The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven’t been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour’s off. Other places were scattered about the Equator, and in every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and … well, we won’t talk about that. But there was one yet – the biggest, the most blank, so to speak – that I had a hankering after …’
Marlow in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Greenwich (#ulink_9ccc27b4-6c00-560b-938b-59f20182190b)
And then, as they sat looking at the ships and steamboats making their way to the sea with the tide that was running down, the lovely woman imagined all sorts of voyages for herself and Pa.
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
Maps of the earth begin a short walk from the flat where I live. Go down the High Road, up Royal Hill towards the butcher’s, left along Burney Street and then right on to Crooms Hill. At the corner, if you care for such things, you can see a blue plaque of the sort with which London marks houses where people who have made a significant contribution to human happiness once lived. In this case, it was the poet Cecil Day Lewis; as you climb the hill, you’ll pass another one marking the home of Benjamin Waugh, founder of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Near the top of the hill sits a grand (but plaqueless) bow-fronted white house, called simply the White House. Walk round the White House’s walled garden, down a little alleyway and through a gate in the high brick wall on your right, and you emerge into Greenwich Park. To your right, the beautiful semicircle of the rose garden; to your left a steep path lined by trees. And as you walk out on to the grass, London spread at your feet. As views go, it’s not particularly extensive – the horizon is nowhere more than twenty kilometres away and in many directions much closer – but it’s vast in association. The once imperial cityscape is woven from threads that stretch throughout the world.
Across the river to the east sits the squat black-glass bulk of Reuters, information from around the globe splashing into its rooftop dishes. Upstream and on the near side sit the long, low workshops where for more than a century men have made undersea cables to tie the continents together. New skyscrapers devoted to global businesses sit in the redeveloped heart of the docks that used to handle the lion’s share of the world’s sea trade. Within the park itself there are plants from every continent except Antarctica. At its foot sits the old naval college, where generations of Britannia’s officers, my late father included, learned to rule the waves.
Through it all the Thames runs softly, looping around the Isle of Dogs, a local feature leading, as Conrad says in Heart of Darkness, ‘to the uttermost ends of the earth’. Little sails down this umbilicus of empire now – but above it the new trade routes of the sky are sketched out by aircraft arriving and departing from London’s four airports, carving their way through the air we all breathe and the stratosphere we shelter under. To the west the Thames beneath them is still daytime blue; to the east it is already evening dark.
Dawn may feel like an intervention by the sun, rising above a stationary earth; sunset reveals the truth of the earth’s turning, a slipping away into night. That turning defines two unique, unmoving points on the surface of the earth: the poles, the extremes of latitude. Add one more point – just one – and you have a co-ordinate system that can describe the whole world, a basis for all the maps and charts the sailors and pilots need, a way of deciding when days start and end. And that third point is right in front of you, the strongest of all Greenwich’s links to the rest of the earth. In the middle of the park is the old Royal Observatory, a little gathering of domes perched clubbily on a ridge. Within the observatory sits a massive metal construction called a transit circle. The line passing through the poles and through that transit circle is the earth’s prime meridian: 0 degrees, 0 minutes, 0 seconds. All earthly longitudes are measured with respect to that line through Greenwich Park.
The English have taken the Greenwich meridian as the starting point for longitudes since the observatory was founded in the seventeenth century. But it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century – at a time when its home in Greenwich was under the stewardship of Sir George Airy, Astronomer Royal, the man who had that great transit circle built – that the Greenwich meridian was formally adopted by the rest of the world. With worldwide navigation a commonplace, and with telecommunications making almost instantaneous contact between continents a possibility, there was a need for a single set of co-ordinates to define the world’s places and time zones. Over the years a variety of possible markers to define this prime meridian were suggested – islands, mountains, artefacts like the Great Pyramid or the Temple in Jerusalem. But a meridian defined by an observatory seemed best. In 1884, at a conference in Washington DC, and over spirited French opposition, Greenwich was chosen. Airy’s transit circle came to define the world.
