Mars Underground
by: Randy Garsee
Lost in space. Not the old TV program but the newest label to be placed on the mission of the 10-year-old Mars Global Surveyor. It's been two weeks since Surveyor has phoned home. Maybe its interstellar free minutes simply ran out.
Uh, okay. Maybe not.
It was the oldest of five NASA foil-wrapped gizmos currently orbiting the red planet. Surveyor surveyed via high-resolution photos of the planet's surface. Now it's quiet. Certainly it was abducted by the Gwarbles, those rejects of Orion who have a fascination with shiny space things. I don't know for certain, but I was recently drilled with a root canal and given painkillers, therefore many universal mysteries now have a certain clarity, like the Hubble Telescope after a Windex attack.
The Mars Global Surveyor's mission was to map the entire Martian surface. You know, freeways, city grids, the Great Wall of, well, the Chinese Martians, stuff like that.
But an old pal of mine I haven't seen in years because he won't give me his cell phone number, Tucson author and scientist Bill Hartmann, knows more about Mars than Martians themselves.
At the moment, I fear he's weeping the demise of his eyes above the red sky, curled in a fetal position and whimpering, "Why didn't I give Randy Garsee my cell phone number?"Weep not, dear Bill, for you are still the Red Sage of the Fourth Orb.
William "Bill" Hartmann is (or was) a member of the Surveyor's imaging team. His job is (or was) to read those hi-res photos to decipher the ages of volcanoes, river channels, and the Iranian-North Korean Conspiracy to re-plant Israel in the red sand. Okay, maybe not the last thing. Hartmann, unlike me, is serious about his work. He's a senior scientist with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson and he's been fascinated by Mars since he was a boy.
Hartmann is also multi-talented. As an artist, he paints the red planet. One painting shows a stark desert-like landscape with mountains on the horizon and an igloo-shaped research station in the foreground. He paints as if he's sitting on the surface looking at the horizon.
As a writer, his acclaimed book, "Mars Underground," was compared to Arthur C. Clarke's legendary novel, "2001: A Space Odyssey."
In fact, Clarke himself read the book and wrote a blurb for it:
"Mars Underground"... "conveys...a realistic feeling about the future development of Mars." "...personally gratifying, as it seems to be like an extension of my own two books on the subject."
It's no wonder Hartmann knows his subject so well. As a scientist, he's been part of four Mars-related missions:
*** The Mars mapping mission of Mariner 9 in 1971
*** The ill-fated Mars Observer mission in 1992. (It disappeared in space after taking only one photograph which Hartmann keeps on his desk.)
*** There was also a failed Russian Mars mission in 1996.
*** And the Mars Global Surveyor. Oh, Surveyor! How little we knew ye.
To put it clearly, there is no one on planet Earth better qualified to write about planet Mars. Hartmann believes we'll have humans on Mars soon. Hopefully those pioneering astronauts will be able to fend off the Gwarbles by not wearing anything shiny. I understand the color of rust will repel those Gwarbelian scavengers, but I have no proof. Just take my drug-induced word for it, ALL RIGHT! Uh-hmm. Back to Mr. Hartmann.
"There will be this continuation of missions to Mars every couple of years," He told me before my root canal. "Gradually, they will explore different aspects of Mars with different instruments and put more and more packages down onto the surface until we understand the surface environment."
Hartmann believes we'll put people on the red planet before the end of the next decade. "I think the question is when do we get to Mars and when will we start all of that."
And before you start thinking this is all about spending billions of your tax dollars for nothing, Hartmann explains why this is really all about Mother Earth. "We go to this planet, Mars. It's frozen. It's extremely dry. It has almost no atmosphere. And yet there are dry river beds that look like the [rivers in the Arizona desert]. Nobody knows why those rivers were running. Where did the water come from? Why did the frozen water on Mars melt? I think what we're beginning to learn is planets are much less stable than we thought they were."
(A Randy Note: I didn't have the heart to tell Bill you won't find a lot of frozen river water in Arizona.)
Nevertheless, his novel "Mars Underground" is dipped so many times in projected scientific fact it's a wonder the fictional characters were able to penetrate the surface and worm their way into the storyline. Hartmann, however, is no Gwarbelian. "I think that will be a reality. The base will be something like the ones we have in Antarctica today. The environments are not that terribly different except the air is a lot thinner on Mars. Socially and scientifically, there will be bases like [the ones in the book]."
Great, I think, urban sprawl in outer space. Bill continues, "I have 5,000 people either on Mars or up on the satellite of Mars. There's a little moon of Mars called Phobos and I have Phobos University. It's a staging area for a lot of the expeditions. Some of the people are up there and some are on the surface of Mars."
(A Randy Thought: Why do I feel like if you don't pass enough Phobos University pop quizzes your Pho-bottom is plopped down on the cold red planet?) This is starting to sound Machia-gwarbelian and it's frightening me, so I cleverly change the subject to another alien force: Hollywood.
"Are you getting any nibbles from movie studios?" I ask him nonchalantly. "Will we see 'Mars Underground' as a movie?
Bill laughs, "If Martin Scorsese calls up and wants to do something, I'm willing to talk."
Martin?
Martian?
Get it?
Me either.
The Gwarbles, however, I get.
Other books by William K. Hartmann:
