2003 looks set to be a good year for Mars buffs. On 27 August, the great desert in the sky will be closer to Earth than it has been for the past 70,000 years, a spectacular, ruddy evening star to which five spacecraft from three continents should be travelling. Three will be planning to land: Beagle 2 from Britain and two American rovers currently bearing the working titles Mars Exploration Rover A and B. The other two, Europe’s Mars Express and Japan’s Nozomi, will be going into orbit alongside Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey, the two American probes already there.
If, that is, everything goes to plan. The odds are that it won’t. The last two American missions to the planet failed, and Nozomi has had serious problems en route; if it hadn’t it would have been there years ago. Mars Express represents Europe’s first mission to another planet, and Beagle 2 is a brave attempt to build a useful mission on a comparative shoestring by a team that has never attempted such a thing before. So expect a lot of dramas and a few failures, partial or complete.
Some failures may be culpable. Losing missions because the engineers are not all using the same units for their measurements, or because computer code has not been checked properly, as happened in 1999, is a poor show. But failure of some sort, at some time, has a death-and-taxes inevitability. Almost two out of three Earth to Mars missions have failed so far.
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This is why Steven Squyres, the scientist responsible for NASA’s two new rovers, insists that his colleagues need to be able to find value in their efforts even if the missions eventually fail: “If you’re only in it for the pot of data at the end then you’re in the wrong line of business”. These missions are adventures – they are expeditions to another planet, dammit! – and anyone who doesn’t get a kick out of the struggle to get them going, even if the struggle bears no fruit, is missing the big picture. It’s not just a matter of better mineralogy from better spectrometers and new measurements of the cryosphere, wonderful though these may be. It’s about being part of something far larger than a single experiment, and also, crucially, far more drawn out.
Planetary exploration, like particle physics and genome sequencing, is “Big Science”. Budgets run to tens or hundreds of millions, or more, and the team may number hundreds. But planetary exploration is also “Long Science”—an endeavour that takes more than a research lifetime. The project of understanding Mars – of knowing what forces shaped its varied landscapes over the ages, and what life, if any, it has harboured—will take generations, just as the project of understanding the Earth is doing. Planets are big, old, complex and constantly changing. Their secrets can’t be unravelled in a rush.
Especially if you are not even on the planet you are studying. From a distance, even the paltry 55,758,000 or so kilometres of next 27 August, it is all but impossible to get to grips with a planet’s history. Despite this, the study of Mars has made remarkable progress. But brave as this three-decade beginning has been, it is only a beginning. The end is not yet in sight. The return of the first samples will just be another milestone on the road, as will the first footprints on the surface, a generation or more from now.
So it’s a fair assumption that everyone now studying Mars will die ignorant of the answers to at least some, and probably many, of their questions. If you think that makes Mars exploration seems futile, then Long Science is not for you. And it may turn out not to be something funding agencies are too keen on, either.
At the moment, every mission to Mars tries to promise that it will clear up basic mysteries: was there life? where’s the water? and so on. As time goes by, such sales pitches will lose their charm, and the case for slow, steady Long Science will have to be made. It may be a hard case to sell. Most funding agencies would rather deal with foreseeable results than open-ended exploration. But such attitudes can change. Who would have thought, when Big Science was getting going before the Second World War, that mechanisms for funding single experiments costing a billion dollars would eventually be developed?
The truth is, we need Long Science. If intellectual exploration is restricted to problems that can be solved in a fraction of a lifetime, it is not just those studying other planets who will be the poorer. The study of global change on this planet is Long Science, too, a problem complex and multifaceted enough to need persistent study not for years, but for decades or even centuries.
The recent American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco had a session on issues still outstanding from the International Geophysical Year in 1957, and it was not a short session. To make progress on such problems takes patience, persistence and time. And it requires a willingness to be part of a grand creation to which you may contribute but whose final shape you will never see.