The Quest for Mars: NASA scientists and Their Search for Life Beyond Earth. Laurence Bergreen
it looks like there are no clouds over this icecap, we might be able to sneak up and come around. In the past we always went way up here and came down. I’m afraid that, unless we can throw a real sharp turn, we can’t do it. We fly at eighteen hundred feet.”
All they need is a working airplane. José’ is the mechanic responsible for maintaining the leaky P-3. He stands about five foot three or maybe four, stocky, with a scruffy, uncertain beard, and a good-natured grin. Jose’, who’s American, likes his wine, and he likes his beer. In the evenings, he’s the first to hit the strip bars of Reykjavik, such as they are. The fate of the P-3 now rests in his hands. Even as they tell me stories of his wild doings, everyone about to fly on this plane expresses confidence in him. (Frankly, I wouldn’t let him near my car.) He works slowly and methodically on the plane, and when he’s done, declares it good to go. The engines roar to life.
The white P-3, with Jim inside, taxis far out onto the tarmac and ascends to the skies over Iceland. While they’re in the air, the pilots do most of the work, for they have to maintain alignment not only with the surface of the planet below but with the Global Positioning System satellite above. This means the plane can’t wander more than six feet off course. They map the Sandur, and, weather predictions to the contrary, they do Surtsey, as well. They do their mapping with reference not to the Earth’s surface, which is always shifting, but to Earth’s center, which is about as close to an absolute, fixed point as you can get.
Mission accomplished, the P-3 returns to Keflavik after midnight. To everyone’s surprise, the aircraft has performed flawlessly that evening, laying down precise tracks over Surtsey and a glacier to the north. “We laid down fourteen lines!” Jim announces. “It was fantastic. Staggered just the way we wanted them. And the weather was great. It was sunny and clear on the island. I’ve got digital video, nose cone video. We’re going to have the best map of Surtsey ever made, no question. The flight was as tranquil as bath water. Even the leak stopped by the time we landed.”
To celebrate, Jim and Jon Sonntag and I go out for a beer. After a long day’s work in the field, no self-respecting NASA scientist thinks of anything but a beer. The drinking etiquette is to avoid brand names and even recognizable microbreweries in favor of obscure local product. Eventually, we find a little place overlooking the large bay, where they serve frosted glass tankards of Viking, an Icelandic beer. We sit in front of a picture window overlooking the steel gray expanse of Keflavik Bay. A few lights flicker across the water, but not many.
Having just spent the last five hours in geological nirvana, Jim talks on and on about what a great mission it’s been, while Jon brings up a slightly different subject: the kind of woman he’d like to meet and settle down with. He’s from Houston, but he wants to meet a different kind of girl from the ones he’s known in Texas. Maybe here, in Iceland. Maybe even in New York City. He asks me about the women in New York, where I live, and I tell him the best thing to do is visit and see for himself. He pauses and smiles shyly, contemplating the prospect. He just might do that.
This type of talk makes Jim uncomfortable. Throughout our time in Iceland, a lot of stray remarks have escaped his lips about power tools, about the power washer he was using just the other day with his son Zack (“That thing was so powerful,” he said with genuine conviction, “that it could take the paint right off a car”), about the Ford F-150 pickup truck he’d like to own, and about a Hummer (“How much do those things cost?”), but nothing about women. Which doesn’t mean that women don’t look at him. They do, indeed. His handsome dark Irish looks, his snappy NASA flight jacket, and his politeness combined with an occasional air of confusion tend to attract women.
He met his wife Cindy by accident in 1990 when she was working at NASA for a contractor. It seems there was another J.B. Garvin with whom she was doing business, and Jim kept getting e-mails intended for the other one. So he got in touch with her to clear up the confusion. He found himself talking on the phone with her, and she coaxed him gently into asking her on a date. “I often get too focused on my work. I wished I didn’t, but that’s the way it is,” he confides. Cindy was determined to change all that.
When they came face to face, Cindy already knew what he looked like; to this day, Jim is not sure how she knew. They went to a hockey game, and not long after that, moved in together. Cindy recognized that his interests were a little unusual. Here’s a Phi Beta Kappa from Brown, a Ph.D., who says his most valuable possession in the world is a complete set of Jim Bunning baseball cards. He owns practically every Bunning card ever issued, tracing his pitching career from 1954 through the 1980s. Cindy liked shopping, dining out, and other normal activities. That was fine with Jim, he wanted to be with someone normal, someone who would keep him in touch with daily life. They married in 1992. We sit drinking and talking until the sky begins to brighten almost to daytime intensity, and we return to base a little after two in the morning.
The next day, while packing to leave, Jim ponders what to do with the data he’s collected during the week in Iceland. He must get it out – in the new NASA, nothing is secret – so he will post it on various Internet sites, for starters. He will write multiple papers, some of which will appear in scientific journals. He will give lectures. He will share the information with Icelandic scientists. “It’s my job as a research scientist at NASA to publish the results in Science, Nature, and other journals. That’s my job, to disseminate.” He will have plenty to discuss, for a crowded schedule of Mars exploration lies ahead. “We’re launching again in December and sending a small probe to the south polar ice cap on Mars, which we think is all frozen carbon dioxide. It’s so cold, one hundred to two hundred and fifty degrees centigrade below zero. We’re also asking other, very fundamental questions: Did life start on Mars? If it did, is it dormant, frozen, fossilized? Is it still there? Is it all microbial? What can it tell us about extremophile life on Earth?” Jim asks, savoring each question.
“I think the potential for Mars is totally untapped, and that’s something of a surprise,” he continues. “When we first got there in the sixties with the Mariner spacecraft, we thought, ‘Oh, my God, there are going to be Martians, canals, it’s going to be great.’ But when we got there, it looked like the moon. Mars puzzled us. We returned with Viking in the mid-seventies, looking for life, and instead we found the great arctic desert of Mars. We saw frost form in the winter, and we saw snow. We saw rocks and pits that reminded us of gas bubbles in the volcanic rocks you see here in Iceland, but we didn’t see the obvious signatures of life. We’ve got to go back. We’ve got to understand this place. We’ll have a series of robotic voyages to set the stage for bringing back samples of Mars to Earth to investigate the chemistry and – maybe – signs of life. And then someday we’ll put human beings there, God and the great American economy willing.”
The taxi cab heading home from JFK Airport feels as cramped as Oscar’s co-pilot seat. I’m probably in more danger barreling along the Grand Central Parkway than I was aloft in Oscar’s little Aerospatiale. Night falls for the first time in a week; how strange the darkness seems. After experiencing Iceland’s white nights and thinking intensely about what it’s like to walk across the surface of Mars, I find that nothing on Earth looks quite the same. The initiation is over, and back home, I reflect on a whimsical passage from Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi novel, The Martian Chronicles, published in 1950:
The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, including a captain … Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men within had been battered, thrown about, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.
“Mars!” cried Navigator Lustig.
“Good old Mars!” said Samuel Hinkston, archeologist.
According to Bradbury, this landing,