January 27, 2004
Eager NASA Is Bringing Mars Down to Earth
yan
Caron delivered his first status report on the second Mars rover roughly
half an hour after it landed: "We did not encounter the strong winds that
we did during Spirit's landing," he told a group of 50 assembled in a lecture
hall in Worcester, Mass., for the early morning touchdown. "We were in near-constant
communication."
No, Mr. Caron, a 19-year-old college freshman, does not work for NASA, despite his use of the first-person pronoun. But he is one of many Americans and others around the world expressing an unusual sense of ownership in the space agency's current Mars mission.
Since the rover Spirit landed on Mars three weeks ago, 32 million people have visited the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Web site, dwarfing the numbers of any other space event, including last year's space shuttle accident. The agency recorded four billion hits, one for each item called up on the site, as the visitors browsed through hundreds of pictures considering what rock to zoom in on. That was well over the number of hits recorded in the entire previous year.
Last weekend, tens of thousands of Mars fans went even further, gathering at planetariums, around television sets and in Internet chat rooms to monitor the scene inside the control room as the rover Opportunity landed.
The interest, experts say, is driven largely by the vast amount of information NASA is making available for the public. As a population acclimated to video games and cyberspace finds itself immersed in a not-so-virtual Martian reality, it is eagerly using familiar tools to explore the unknown.
Instead of merely admiring Mars, people are now interacting with it. And while the activity may be dominated by a core of self-avowed space geeks, they have been joined by novices — nurses, real estate brokers, students and teachers — drawn by the drama of the mission as well as the ease of access to it.
"When you're sitting there at your computer making choices about what angles to look at, you're not just a passive observer like you were with the moon landing," said Arthur Molella, director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution. "It's a two-way kind of connection now, it's always there and it's on-demand. You can get up in the middle of the night and check in if you want."
The flow of updates from Mars has led to a new addiction among some Americans, who find themselves checking for news dozens of times a day. In interviews, many reported feeling depression and withdrawal symptoms when the Spirit stopped communicating last week.
The portal to Mars at marsrovers.nasa.gov/home/ includes nearly 1,000 Web pages filled with computer animations, panoramics and a catalog of other images, some in 3-D, published online almost as soon as the scientists receive them. (One manufacturer of 3-D glasses said it was receiving 1,000 self-addressed, stamped envelopes a day in response to an offer to send a free pair to Mars lovers.)
And about 250,000 people have downloaded free NASA software that lets them "drive" the Spirit through a simulated landscape modeled on the real data it has collected.
The glut of Mars information is a result of the agency's decision to try to bolster support — and financing — for the space program by getting the public more involved. But the agency is also being pushed by a technically literate population increasingly equipped with high-bandwidth Internet connections.
"We get a lot of questions, `Are we seeing everything the scientists see?' " said Jeanne Holm, chief knowledge architect for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where the Mars operation is based. "They want to feel like they're there."
At a time when
"There has been an enduring idea that one day everyone would fly in space," said Howard McCurdy, author of "Space and the American Imagination" (Smithsonian, 1997). "But now young people are saying maybe we all go into space but we go mentally, virtually, electronically — we don't go with our bodies. As the technology gets better, the virtual reality could get quite profound."
In some ways, it already is. As NASA scientists tried to pinpoint the landing location of the Spirit by matching the pictures it sent back to satellite images of the terrain, Tim McCollum's eighth-grade science students in Charleston, Ill., did the same. After making their own guess, they came in every day wondering if NASA had released the answer. They are repeating the exercise this week with the Opportunity, which landed on the opposite side of the planet.
"In a virtual way the students are literally walking across the surface of Mars through the eyes of the rover," Mr. McCollum said. "It's near-real-time exploration of another world, and that's incredible."
Even so, not everyone is content to simply observe. Some hope to contribute to the mission, however remotely. One Mars fan in San Jose, Calif., has colorized hundreds of the raw images from the NASA Web site. Students from Idaho to India have sent local rocks to scientists who will compare them with Mars rocks and post the results on the Internet. Mark Carey, a graphic designer in Toronto, is writing a Web log from the rovers' points of view.
"Don't worry about me," Mr. Carey's blog read on Saturday after scientists said they had figured out why the Spirit went silent. "I am going to get better and start rolling around."
The emotional response that some people had to the Spirit's malfunction may help explain the public's connection to the mission. Humans, psychologists say, tend to see machines that are charged with acting in our stead as close to being alive.
"In a certain sense they become our second selves, our stand-ins," said Sherry Turkle, director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Euan Blackman, 31, of Irving, Tex., had become accustomed to checking Mars news on the Web once an hour when the Spirit stopped communicating with its Earth-bound audience. He said he felt as if the rover were an orphaned child.
"My mood was definitely a little down," Mr. Blackman said. "You think of the poor little guy up there sitting by himself, nobody talking to him anymore, and it's not a happy thought."
Critics, however, argue that Mars money should be spent to improve life on Earth. On "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central, the host, Jon Stewart, said that the Spirit was silent because it could not bear to say "this is a rock" one more time.
But for Nate Bloom, 8, who wants to be an astronaut, the posting of pictures from the Opportunity minutes after it landed was a happy return to normalcy. Nate and his parents watched the rover's landing live late on Saturday night at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
The event, which drew an overflow crowd of 1,400, among them infants and the elderly, travel agents and engineers, seemed to appeal to a broader audience than the usual space buffs. One woman brought her knitting, pausing to watch the screen when she heard something interesting. People meandered through the museum before and after the landing, eating cookies and drinking hot chocolate as they discussed outer space.
As the Opportunity was settling into its new landscape yesterday, Mr. Caron, the college student, issued his second status report:
"Remarkably smooth, and a very fascinating outcropping of rocks in front of, slightly to the left, of the rover! Chances are that we'll go off in that direction."