One would think that this would be a time of rejoicing! The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has just completed a complicated and dangerous maneuver, placing it into a high elliptical orbit of the red planet. Over the next few months the probe will be nudged into the upper reaches of Mars atmosphere to slowly modify and circularize it into a stable orange peel-pole to pole obit which can cover the entire planet.
Even now, brilliant high definition photos are being beamed back to Earth from this probe. Soon, a resolution of objects less than three feet across will be sent back, unprecedented quality. Additionally the probe carries the Optical Navigation Camera , a the Mars Climate Sounder and several other instruments.
For some people its not a time for rejoicing, its time to bitch. For example, science writer Richard Hoagland writes on his Enterprise Mission site;
So, what is NASA planning to shoot on the Martian surface with this unprecedented NRO-quality “ at Mars
The usual:
Rocks followed by more rocks then entire fields of rocks
Lets face it — for the last three decades, NASA has effectively stonewalled the American people and the World ¦ on the greatest story in history or, more appropriately, in pre-history.
Here we go again! With utter determination and a pig headedness that the USs esteemed chief pobah would admire, Hoagalnd is going to (yet again) tell us that NASA is covering up huge, mile long artifacts on the planet Mars. That there is a giant conspiracy to hide proof that Mars once or currently harbors intelligent life.
No; NASA is not going to spend precious cotter imaging and re-imaging your damn butte. Its probably a freaking natural hill anyway, the best face pictures are still from the 1976 Viking series and those were manipulated so much I can’t tell what the hell we are looking at. All the subsequent photos of the Cydonia face look progressively more natural, not less like one might expect.
Now admittedly, I’m not an expert on satellite imagery or Planetary Geology. I can’t tell you what kind of land-forms might arise in Mar’s thin, mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere. One where it gets hundreds of degrees below zero and only a few degrees above freezing. A place where planet wide-dust storms are observed every few years and the winds can reach supersonic speeds. I have no idea what kind of natural phenomena could arise from such conditions.
You know what? Neither does Hoagland.
What’s really rich is Hoagland mentions a couple of (admittedly) strange things. Jack Kirby (the comic book artist) penciled a space exploration thriller called“Race for the Moon. This was back in 1958!
One episode was entitled “The Face On Mars” and features a humdinger of the Cydonia face as, get this, ‘ s “as big as a mountain!”
Hoagland;
Now we have found additional, even more remarkable evidence supporting this extraordinary scenario: that “someone” — decades before they went to Cydonia and found it — somehow knew what NASA in 1976 would discover as “the Face on Mars!”
Well no. It seems more reasonable that someone saw that comic as a kid, years ago. The blurry Cydonia photos resonated with Kirby’s image. People saw a similar shape to Kirby’s drawing on Mars and immediately, perhaps subconsciously made the connection. Since there are virtually an unlimited amount of land-form shapes on Mars, it’s not too big a stretch to believe something like that might happen.
Hell I think I’ve run across that series myself, and I’ve probably held the Face on Mars issue in my grubby little hands. I recognized the Cydonia face image immediately, probably because of those half-forgotten images.
The thing about this is, Kirby was admittedly an imaginative fellow. But, it’s very-very unlikely that someone from NASA (which was formed the very same year) met with him in some seedy bar and said “Kirby baby! Why don’t you slip in a story about some giant face on da planet Mars, it’d make the boys upstairs really happy!â€Â
Even if for the sake of argument NASA is a big fake. If we had had photographs of Mars back in 1958 and humans already have freaking cities on Mars, why muck it up with bogus probes and blurry photos when they could just say “sorry, no money for space shots this year.‘Heck, all they need to do is drop a booster on some unoccupied mansion in Coco Beach and the US space program could be closed up forever, by public declaration.
Which brings up my one and only beef with the US government is the US space program. It’s not that they are wasting taxpayer money like Hoagland contends.
It’s that they are wasting far too little taxpayer money.
The United States is the richest, most powerful country on the Earth. As a nation it has more of everything by some factor more than its three closest competitors. We should be “wasting” billions on space! We should have huge rotating hotels in orbit. Cities on the Moon and Mars. We should be sending manned probes to Jupiter and Saturn by now. We could be thinking seriously about sending people to the nearest star systems.
How will this stop terrorism, feed the poor or contribute to world peace? It will but that’s to rich of a subject for this little rant. Sufficient to say that guaranteeing the survival of humanity has many rewards, failing to do so has only one.
What are we doing? Sending web cams to mars on chemical bottle rockets. We have to use the Mar’S atmosphere to slow our spacecraft because we can’t afford to send up enough reaction mass.
All the while people like Hoagland, a very good and engaging writer, sits around and bitches when the cash-strapped American space program has such a magnificent success. That’s the real tragedy here. The goddamn photos that Hoagland basis his conspiracy theories on didn’t come from his camera. They didn’t come from Russia, or China or the Men in Black. They came from the self-same US government. The same one that’s covering up everything!
The thousands of hard working and underappreciated workers at the Cape and JPL were not paid by Hoagland, they work for the US government. These people are not liars or fakers. They are not part of some strange monolithic Capricorn One type conspiracy. They are simply people doing what they love. Sending explorers to another world so that humanity can find out just a little bit more about the place we live, And a lot about ourselves.
It means just looking at rocks. Rocks! Not alien cities, not mile long artifacts, not pie in the sky and not wild flights of fancy. Rocks, and ice and places we might live in a few generations. The other stuff? The ruined shopping malls or strange complexes? The weird boojum trees and mile long artifacts? They will show up, if they exist. If they don’t the people who sent that fantastic object to Mars will be very content. If they just happen to find something else besides rocks?
Why; we will probably have people there checking it out in about ten years.
How exciting would that be?
Calling Hoagland a “science writer” is a bit much. The man is an excellent salesman for, well, Richard Hoagland, but that’s about it. Any serious work on what may be on Mars is being done by better people.
Paul
Hey Paul;
Well I agree that he’s not really doing any service to science. I think he’™s a science writer insomuch that he writes about science. I think it’s pretty clear that I don’t think Hoagland is a good science writer or even understands much about science. I’ve had a couple of rather amusing conversations with Mr. Hoagland where he demonstrated his severe lack of knowledge of what he was pontificating about at the time. To his credit however, he never went completely off the deep end with me.
All this reflexive picking on NASA is really irritating. The one positive thing that the US government is funding right now and he has to portray it like something sinister. Damn it that truly bugs me.