Views of Mars...

Everyone who knows me knows how mad I am about space in general, and Mars in particular. Fair enough, hands up, I admit it, I’m a genuine “Mars nut”, devouring each and every picture I can find of the Red Planet. My poor trusty computer’s hard drive creaks under the weight of images taken by spaceprobes that have landed on or circled Mars. It puts its head in its hands and groans “Oh no…” everytime the word “phoenix” is mentioned near it, as it imagines how many more images it will have to store after the Phoenix probe lands in the martian arctic at the end of May.

But if it thought it had a couple of months’ rest before then it was sadly mistaken, because last week, finally, FINALLY, after all these years of struggling with the online technology of The Old Ones, I stepped through the stargate and into the internet of the 21st century. I got broadband. And my view of Mars has been transformed.

How come? I hear you ask. Why should being on broadband make a difference? Now you can just download the same pictures as before, only quicker, right? Well, that’s true; I can now download a 12Mb MER panorama or a “Planetary Radio” program in a few seconds, instead of setting it downloading while I go out to do some shopping. Or go on holiday. But that’s not how the transformation has occurred. You see, being on broadband means I can now, finally, access what is possibly one of the most innovative, most useful and most addictive resources available online since the birth of the internet: the HiRISE IAS viewer.

Put simply, I can now see Mars as HiRISE sees it, boulder by boulder, stone by stone, dune by dune. Until I got broadband I could only see HiRISE images as they appeared on the screen. Impressive enough, but I wasn’t able to see them at their highest, crispest resolution. Now tho, thanks to the Java platform IAS viewer, I can literally zoom in on martian craters, scarps, dunes and valleys like the 6 Million Dollar Man, picking out fine details that were hidden from me before. Just five minutes ago I was following the tracks of a boulder that had bounced and boinged down the inner slope of acrater, which doesn’t sound that magical but somehow it is. It’s like flying over Mars in a hang-glider…

Using IAS Viewer has made me realise how much my own view of Mars has changed during my lifetime. Over the years, my personal exploration of Mars has become more and more – well, personal; each new orbiter or lander has returned better pictures than the one before, allowing me to put myself on Mars in my imagination just a little more convincingly.

My fascination with space, and Mars, started when I started school. What lit the fuse? I don’t know. Maybe it was the fact that the Apollo missions were reaching thir climax at the time, and like every other kid I was made to sit in front of The Big TV to watch the astronauts bounding across the Moon because It Was Important, but then again every kid who watched that coverage around me didn’t turn into a space geek, so I don’t know. Maybe it’s because there was a good selection of space books and encyclopedia in the tiny library room where I used to hide away at breaktimes, leaving the others to run around the playground screaming and kicking footballs or twirling skipping ropes, I don’t know. But for some reason when I left that little school I was officially a Space Cadet. I was “into space”, and the future course of my life was set.

In those days, “my Mars” was nothing more than artwork of a garishly-coloured orange-brown globe on the pages of those library books.

Because most of the books in the library pre-dated the first close-up photos of Mars, the most detailed pieces of artwork showed vague areas of greeny-grey on the rusty martian disc, and an ice cap too. Mars was little more than a vague idea to me, a whispered word, a romantic place.

Then, at some point, tho I can’t pin down the year, my view of Mars was transformed - for the first of many times. A tea company began giving away free cards with its packets of tea, telling the story of space exploration. Of course, by 1975ish that story was still only a short one, dominated by the still warm memory of Mercury, Geminiand Apollo, with lots and lots of satellites keeping them company. Mars was a planet for the future, and the final card in the collection showed an incredible vision of that future – a manned mission to Mars! I was fascinated! When would that happen?!?! I checked the card: “By 1981” it confidently predicted.

Wow, 1981… that was a lifetime away to a ten year old… I’d be 16 by then, an old man! But it was still a heart-stopping prospect. People on Mars. Imagine that…

By the time 1981 rolled around, I was all grown up, or so I thought, and our exploration of space had stalled, or so it seemed to me. I went mad over the first flight of Columbia, sitting by the TV all day waiting for blast off, and leaping to my feet with delight when that great white swan finally cleared the tower and ushered in its new era of space travel, but there was a voice in the back of my mind telling me “Hmmm, it’s beautiful, but remember the card… we should be on Mars by now…” I had been looking forward to seeing martian panoramas as seen by astronauts, but had to make do with the pictures returned by the Viking landers, half a decade earlier.

Somehow, and I don’t know how, I managed to miss the Viking landings, I can’t remember them at all, eve though they must have been on every TV and newspaper at the time. I had to“catch up” later, at secondary school, when my space DNA was woken up by a chance but close encounter with an old and by then rather tatty copy of a NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC from1977, a “Mars special” crammed full of Viking images and artwork. I found it on a worktop, in a pile of other, similarly-mistreated magazines, in the art room, and soon I had forgotten all about the sliced cabbage or locust or bowl of fruit I was supposed to be painting and was drooling over the images of Chryse and Utopia Planitia. Those huge boulders, those dust dunes, that blue sunset… I fell in love with Mars that morning, I can remember it vividly. I confess: I took that magazine home, sneaking it out of school in my bag so I could look at its pictures again and again again. I was hooked. Infatuated. My soul hadbeen stolen by Barsoom. Game over.

But there was a bit of a pause then, until Pathfinder landed, and the internet began to take over from magazines like NAT GEO – and newspapers, and TV – as the main source of “space” images. By the time Pathfinder bounced to its historic landing on the rubble-strewn floor of Ares Valles I had left school, and home, and was living in a house of my own, running my town’s astronomical society and writing books about space for kids, so I considered my “space apprenticeship” to have been served. I was a fully qualified Space Nut. But something was missing.

Pathfinder, history records, was the first real “web space mission”, the first one that had a real presence on the internet and a website that could be visited by ordinary people who wanted to see the pictures taken by the spaceprobe. Soon after landing, tens of thousands of people were looking at and downloading those now famous images every day.

But I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t online yet. Couldn’t afford it. Wasn’t confident enough about computers to even think about it. So, instead of seeing those pictures myself I had to rely on friends and fellow astronomical society members to get them for me. This basically involved sitting upstairs in my study – okay, spare room – tapping away at my computer, waiting for the sound of my letterbox flapping from downstairs and then rushing down those stairs to find a sheaf or A4 sheets behind the front door, each one covered with the latest images downloaded from the Pathfinder website. How I devoured those pictures! They were hypnotising. And the idea of seeing images like them on a computer, well, that was science fiction! Bladerunner come to life!

But my main source of images was still the printed page, so every month I went out and bought ALL the astronomy magazines, and any others that contained space images, and loved each and every one of them. Then one day I found a National Geographic special - with 3D images taken by Pathfinder!!

What a revelation! I must have sat there wearing those stoopid blue and red 3D glasses gazing at those pages, imagining myself there, on Mars, reaching out to touch those rocks...

I didn’t really catch up with the modern world until the early 2000s, when I finally went online, and the world shifted beneath and around me. Soon I wassending emails, surfing, hanging around in smoky chat rooms and littering my conversations with “smiley icons” with the best of them. At around the same time, Mars exploration shifted up a gear with the despatch of Beagle 2 and the twin Mars rovers to the Red Planet, and I joined several web forums to allow me to follow their missions in more depth and detail than simply following them in newspapers and magazines would allow. But it was when I joined Doug Ellison’s Beagle forum, which eventually evolved into the world-respected and hugely popular Unmannedspaceflight.com, that my life was literally transformed. I felt like Neo in The Matrix, after swallowing the red pill – suddenly I became aware that there was a whole world of people like me “out there”, I wasn’t a freak of nature for being “Into space”. There were people leik me all over the UK, all over the world! And I could talk to them as an equal, through my computer!

Whoaahh…. I knew king fu….

Of course, Beagle 2 failed, and on that godawful Chriatmas Day morning it felt like the Matrix, briefly, came crashing down. After all the build-up, all the anticipation, there were no images to see, just repeated email- and website-checking to see if there was any good news, or any news at all, from Mars. On that Christmas Day – to the silent despair of my ever-understanding mum, who was trying to organise dinner for half a dozen people - I must have checked my email and space news sites every half hour, hoping to hear that contact had been established, but nothing. And weeks later, like Rose saying goodbye to Jack at the end of Titanic, we had to, reluctantly, let Beagle 2 go…

But then the MERs landed, and everything changed. Again. Thanks to the internet I had a front row seat for an historic event happening a hundred million miles away. And I sat there, at my computer, staring at a tiny RealPlayer screen on my monitor, the images juddering and shuddering as the dial-up connection continually faltered and failed under the strain of having such a huge audience, watching each rover landing on Mars and the scientists and engineers and techs behind them cheering and whooping with joy. I cried, I admit it, it was such a moving and emotional experience, and although I have relived those mornings via YouTube countless times, every time I feel myself choking up again with the sheer drama and emotion of the landings.

After the landings, of course, I was able to get new images of Mars daily, thanks to the wonderful decision to post “raw” images online almost as soon as they were taken, almost “live”. My daily routine began with switching on my computer, going online and heading straight over to the MER raw images to see what had “Come down” overnight. And that’s been my routine ever since. Sometimes I still have a hard time believing it. New images from Mars. Every day. EVERY DAY. FOR FREE. And every day I get to talk to people who share my passion for Mars, swap images with them, ask advice, and more. I’m happier than a dog in a lamp-post factory.

How things have changed since that fateful day in the art room, when an old copy of National Geographic changed my life forever.

Since the MERs landed my love affairs with Mars and the internet have run parallel. There have been rocky patches in the relationships, of course; I felt – and still feel – badly betrayed and cheated by what I call “The Rosetta Thing” (to cut a long story short, not all the images taken by the European ROSETTA probe as it flew past Mars were released, and to this day it both sticks in my craw and makes me spitting mad that somewhere, hidden away on a computer within the bowels of the European Space Agency HQ, there are images of Mars that I helped pay for but haven’t been allowed to see, including an image of Mars seen as a crescent by the departing probe. That’s Just Wrong. But no-one at ESA seems to care. Not happy!) but on the whole we’ve got along very well, and thanks to the internet I’ve been able to follow the missions of Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Express and all the others.

And then came the arrival of Mars Reconaissance Orbiter – MRO – at Mars, carrying HiRISE, the “People’s Camera”. And everything changed. Again.

MRO is basically a spy satellite orbiting Mars, and its HiRISE camera is simply the best camera ever to photograph the red planet. It can take images with such high resolution that individual boulders can be seen, and their shadows. It is the best thing we’ll have to flying over Mars in an aeroplane, or lander, until someone actually does that for real. And again, in a wonderful commitment to Outreach, NASA releases a new batch of HiRISE images every week, for free, for all of us out here to enjoy.

But there’s a problem. HiRISE is actually TOO amazing. Its images are so huge, and of such high resolution, that the versions that appear on the website are “watered down” versions of the real thing. They’re still fantastically detailed compared to the pictures taken by every spaceprobe that came before, but at sizes of up to 300Mb a time they can’t be enjoyed at their maximum resolution there and then. And even the watered down 12Mb versions takean eternity to download on dial-up, so MRO and HiRISE are potentially as frustrating as they are revolutionary.

Of course, NASA thought of that, didn’t they? They came up with a way of viewing the full resolution images online, and letting you crop or cut out areas that are particularly interesting to you. The way they came up with is a special program called the “IAS Viewer”, a Java application that, once downloaded onto your PC via the HiRISE site, allows you to open up the full resolution images and wander around them at your leisure, looking at Mars in literally all its glory. The only problem with the IAS Viewer is that it really needs a good broadband connection to see the images at their best.. and I wasn’t on broadband until recently, so I had to rely on my good friends at UMSF to post their crops of ISA-viewed HiRISE images for me to enjoy, or even ask them to zoom in on certain landmarks and areas for me.

It was frustrating, but hardly the end of the world. After all, for years, dial-up was good enough to let me see and enjoy MER images, toenjoy looking at the daily “raws” from the MERs and Cassini and other space missions, and stitch them together and/or colourise them, making new images to show on UMSF anduse in my Outreach work in schools and the community; dial-up was good enough to allow me to virtually walk alongside Spirit and Opportunity as they explored Mars; good enough to keep me feeling madly in love with Mars… but not good enough to let me see Mars as it is now possible to see it, almost one stone at a time.

But finally, ah finally, I’ve joined the 21st century. I signed up to broadband last week, and I feel like that ape in 2001 that found a whole new use for a thigh bone. Now MER images download in seconds. NASA TV is like a crystal clear TV channel playing on my computer, instead of a migraine-inducing, fractured snow-storm of pixels that occasionally allows me glimpses of a shuttle take off ora NASA conference. And Mars..?

I downloaded the IAS viewer – finally, after reinstalling Java – and opened up my first image of a martian crater. It looked like… well, a crater, still, no great shakes in fact. Oh, I thought. Is that it..? Then I noticed the magnifying glass icon on the tool bar at the top, clicked on that to, I assumed, zoom in on the crater slope where it looked a bit mottled –

OH MY GOD!!! Boulders! Lots of boulders! Another image opened – look at that! Individual dust dunes rippling across another crater floor! Another image opened – jeez! Layers of sediment on the floor of a canyon, piled up like the pages of a book. Another image opened – good grief, I could see cracks in the ice at the north pole…

That’s when it hit me, just how far we’ve come, in so short a time. When I was at school, 30 years ago, I couldn’t just “get” pictures from Mars, I had to… borrow, long term… a magazine from my school to look at images taken a year before. Twenty years ago I relied on the monthly astronomy magazines to supply me with the latest images from the Voyagers, Galileo and Hubble. Ten years ago images began to appear quickly on the internet, but they were few and of not exactly brilliant quality. Now, today, as I sit here, I can open up an image of Mars taken by a rover literally a matter of hours ago. Or I can go to the HiRISE site, select a picture from the gallery, open it up with the IAS Viewer and literally look down upon single dust-covered boulders, stones and rocks, as if I was being flown over the cratered plains by Peter Pan or Superman.

That’s pretty amazing, don’t you think?

Mankind is a species of stark and baffling contrasts. We are fascinated by the prospect of finding life on other worlds, yet value it so cheaply on our own. We spend years designing, building and then operating these fragile metal butterflies to allow us to explore alien environments, yet are apathetic about protecting our own. We can create beautiful music, art, poetry and literature, yet slaughter each other with machetes, bombs and hijacked aircraft. Any aliens looking down upon us from their camouflaged spaceships in Earth orbit must be scratching their heads with utter confusion, disbelief and despair.

In just a couple of months’ time, the next step of Mankind’s – and my own personal - exploration of Mars will begin, when Phoenix lands on Mars. And like before, I’ll sit here, watching events unfold on my new improved NASA TV channel, witnessing the dawn of a whole new era of martian exploration and discovery. Within a few hours Phoenix should have sent back its first panoramic images of a whole new martian landscape, a landscape never seen by human eyes before, and those clever people at NASA will use those first images to pin-down the lander’s exact location on Mars, and then direct MRO to point HiRISE at it, to take a portrait of the new arrival sitting on the surface of Mars. How cool will that be?

Sometimes I’m ashamed of our species, I really am. But whenever I open up a HiRISE image now,I know that, for just a fleeting moment, I’ll think back to how I used to sit in that tiny library room as a shy 7 year old kid, staring at the drawings of Mars on the pages of its already out of date books, and feel a surge of pride that we, and I, have come so far.

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In memory of Arthur C Clarke

Written by stuartatk Blog about this entry

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