“Welcome to the desert of the real.”
—Morpheus in The Matrix,
written by the Wachowski brothers
No there there—yet. What Pathfinder showed, even more than the Vikings, was that once you get to a landing site, no matter how generic, studying it even from a distance feels like an exploration. And the extent of that exploration in time and space gives the site something of the subjectivity of a place inhabited.
Unlike Viking, Pathfinder landed on the day it was meant to: On 4 July 1997 it bounced and rolled to a stop near the mouth of Ares Vallis. Its airbags deflated and a little mechanism pulled them to one side so that the Sojourner rover would not have to fight its way across them. The twin lenses of the spacecraft’s camera, IMP (Imager for Mars Pathfinder) sent their first images of the landscape back to JPL. Presenting them to the waiting journalists, Peter Smith, the principal investigator on IMP, waxed poetic, “The eyes of the camera are our eyes, and in that sense we are all on Mars. We are there together. You might say that the people of Earth are the soul of this robot. So for the first presentation of images, forget about the engineering and scientific aspects. They’re very important, but open your imagination to the experience and beauty of the landscape of Mars.”
IMP revealed a flat, yellow-brown plain of rubble under a sky of a similar hue. Golombek had expected the site to be rocky and suspected that the rocks would be from a variety of different sources. Field trips to the channeled scablands in eastern Washington had convinced him that if Pathfinder went to the region where Ares debouched into the lowlands of Chryse—more or less the same site as the one originally planned for Viking 1—its rover might get to sample wandering rocks from hundreds of miles upstream while only rolling a few yards across the surface. Whether the rocks it looked at did indeed come from different places is not quite clear; but the landscape certainly looked like the aftermath of some sort of devastation.
On the horizon there were various knobs and crater walls. Most prominent were a pair of little knobs immediately dubbed Twin Peaks, which were a particular delight to Peter Smith. In devising a logo for IMP he had used the M to form a double hill on the horizon; Martian nature was imitating his art. Tim Parker and Matt Golombek were happy to see the unusual double formation too—it made pinpointing the landing site in the Viking images of the area much easier. Once the Twin Peaks had been found, the position was pretty well known; as other sights on the horizon were matched up with less distinctive features in the Viking images, they were able to locate the landing site to within a hundred yards. The protoplace had a fixed location.
Closer to IMP’s eyes, the different rocks in the jumbled waste quickly took on their own characters and names. This naming process had none of the formality of the system that the IAU uses for craters, valleys, and the like; according to Dan Britt of the University of Tennessee, who coordinated what system there was, the criteria were that names should be easy to remember, that they should not be the names of real people, and that they should not be derogatory. They should also be something that Britt could spell the first time he heard it. And so there was a Half Dome and a Photometry Flats, a Zaphod and an Indiana Jones, a Soufflé and a Pop Tart, a Moe and a Stimpy, and a Scooby Doo and a Barnacle Bill. There was only one serious name. The lander itself, no longer a spacecraft, became a scientific installation: the Carl Sagan Memorial Station. Sagan had died just before the spacecraft’s launch.*
The rocks were minutely observed by the IMP team, which grew ever more sophisticated in its ability to wring out as much information as possible from images that had to be taken from a single spot. With the help of the USGS at Flagstaff, Smith and his team built up a digital model of the terrain and then draped the data from the camera over that model, a trick that allowed them to build up stereographic images like those pioneered by Carleton Watkins, the West Coast landscape photographer, a century before. It may sound like a parlor trick, but it helped the scenes make sense, especially to the untutored eye; among other things, it brought out ripples in the middle distance like the ripples in the bedrock of the channeled scablands.
Perhaps the most striking of all the Pathfinder images is another of those in which a computer model is used to reorder the data. The image in question looks down on Pathfinder from directly overhead, showing the landscape that it inhabited in the finest detail. The farther from Pathfinder you go, though, the more distorted everything becomes. Gores of ignorance appear behind rocks the camera can’t see over; oblique surfaces begin to smear out. The landscape takes on the distinctive radial blurring of a jump into hyperspace in one of the Star Wars movies.
In one of the corridors in the USGS Flagstaff campus, the Viking frame in which the Pathfinder landing site sits is blown up to wall size, its pixels square and distinct. Over nine pixels in the spot where Pathfinder must surely be found (but in which it has never been resolved) sits a contour map of the terrain generated from IMP. And in the center of that block of nine sits the synthetic overhead view of the Pathfinder site in all the glory of its rushing-toward-you blurriness. Nothing could better dramatize the contrast in scales between a planet seen from orbit and a place seen from the ground. Pathfinder is locked into a single pixel.
A place is not a place, though, if all you can do is look at it; for a place to be a place, you must also be able to move around it, to go away and look back, to see it from more than one angle. And for this the Pathfinder team had Sojourner, the first rover to be let loose on Mars. Sojourner—its full name was Sojourner Truth, after an American abolitionist—trundled from rock to rock, pressing its alpha-proton X-ray spectrometer to their surfaces to work out what the chemical elements within were. (Because the spectrometer was not very well calibrated, these measurements were not in the end all that they could have been.) It was Sojourner, more than anything else, that turned the landing site in Ares Vallis into a place. She moved through it and saw it from different angles. She discovered things in it that IMP could not see—behind the area called the Rock Garden there was a beautiful little sand dune. Her slow movements brought time to the land, and time is as necessary to a sense of place as space is.
Smith and the IMP team expended a lot of effort trying to capture time with their camera, but to little avail. They revisited spots where they thought that things might change—where the wind might move dust across a rock, for example—but never found anything. All that changed was the sky, and thus the light. Shadows crept around the rocks, clouds came and went above the horizon: In one of the few purely aesthetic touches to the mission, Smith captured a beautiful pale sunset. He thought about trying to capture the Earth, then Mars’s morning star, but it wasn’t possible: The dust in the sky meant that dawn began three hours before sunrise, making the rising Earth invisible.*
Regardless of the changes Pathfinder saw in the sky, the only change on the surface of Mars was the tracks Sojourner left in the dust. But this was enough. Sojourner put activity into the images and brought change to the changeless surface. Her tracks in the dust brought time and motion to Mars. They made the landscape a place of purposeful activity, rather than just a site for disembodied study, and that gave it a new drama. The images sent back recall the way that the presence of explorers—and indeed exploiters—became a motif in many of the classic photographs of the American West made in the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most famous is Timothy O’Sullivan’s Sand Dunes, Carson Desert, Nevada, a document from an 1860s survey undertaken by Clarence King, who later became the first director of the USGS. The photographer’s mule train waits between the dunes and his footprints lead up to the vantage point from which the picture is taken. These were not images trying to evoke an idea of the land, like the landscapes painted by the Hudson River School; they were images of engagement with new terrain.
Most images of other planets do not have this quality, but there is one great exception: the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts. The photographs they took of their landing sites are recognizably images of places where people walk and work and leave telltale traces. Rover tracks defined the moon’s dusty hills just as railway tracks defined the Columbia River landscapes of Carleton Watkins in the 1880s. The story they traced over the lunar surface added to the grandeur of the location.* Sojourner did something similar in miniature as it trundled around its rock garden.
The Apollo missions came close to defining the notion of a “media event”—something like the Olympics or a royal wedding, a happening people tell each other they must all witness and that binds an audience together for a shared moment. Pathfinder, on the other hand, was a new-media event. Even leaving aside the lack of astronauts, the Pathfinder mission did not have the focused drama of an Apollo landing—there were no pictures of the surface rushing up at you, no moments that had to be witnessed. But it had a drawn-out fascination that made it perfect for the World Wide Web, dull to watch in real time but perfect to check in on now and then. The mission’s Web site got something like half a billion hits in July 1997, which was the most any single event, or thing, or place had ever seen. It was hailed as a defining moment for the Web as a purveyor of news—it was to the new medium, suggested the New York Times, what President Kennedy’s assassination had been to television news or the Gulf War to CNN. The fact that Pathfinder’s main achievement—landing on Mars—was a reprise of something done decades earlier could have made the mission seem old hat, but the Web dimension made it seem utterly contemporary. At a time when people were discovering they could see all sorts of distant parts of the Earth through little Web cams, the ability to see somewhere beyond the Earth in just the same way was at once compellingly different and excitingly the same; it made that world part of this one. Even Pathfinder’s problems were the problems of the day, with various modem difficulties and an unreasonable need to reboot all the time.
In 1969 NASA administrator Thomas Paine said the moon landing was “the triumph of the squares . . . run by squares, for squares”; Pathfinder was run by nerds, for nerds, at a time when a nerdy love of the technological was becoming cool. The youthfulness of the team at JPL, the cartoon names for the rocks, the fact that the whole thing started over the Fourth of July weekend, and the toylike nature of the little rover all came together to make Mars feel like fun. Every place is a place of a certain sort. What sort of place was the Pathfinder landing site? It was a playground.
To navigate around the playground a team from NASA Ames produced a geometrical model of the terrain’s ups and downs and draped IMP images over it to provide a three-dimensional rendition of the ground around the lander. It was a process very similar to that in which data from orbital cameras is draped over a control net, and they called the product Marsmap. Sojourner’s controllers used the Marsmap virtual reality to plan the little robot’s moves, all of which had to be preprogrammed, since the time it took light to cross from Earth to Mars made real-time control impossible. (The original Mars mappers, Pat Bridges and Jay Inge at the USGS, had done something similar for the Viking landers, modeling the landscapes seen in their cameras to allow precise planning of the landers’ arm movements. Given the technology of the day, though, they had used polystyrene for their modeling, sculpting their materials into the shapes of rocks around the landers with hot knives and hairdryers.) As the mission went on, the Marsmap became more complex: When Sojourner took pictures they would be added to the model, not as fleshed-out parts of the three-dimensional framework, but as two-dimensional surfaces sitting among the rocks like weird trompe l’oeil billboards. The virtual reality thus took on the strange feeling of an exploded comic book, different frames here and there. It developed a beguiling cut-and-paste feel, growing at once ever more stylized and ever more useful.
The artist David Hockney holds that a simple photograph can never capture a sense of a place, because it denies the place any sense of time and the observer any sense of movement; a painting, on the other hand, reassures the eye through brushstroke and gesture that its relationship with the landscape is one that has endured, at least for a while, and its distortions of perspective introduce the idea of movement. Trying to capture that same sense of time-in-place with the tools of photography led Hockney to experiment with collages of lots of different frames—what he calls “joinups” and planetary scientists call photomosaics. The fact that the frames are separate and taken in a sequence gives Hockney’s assemblages an undeniable sense of time; the fact that they are often taken from different vantage points gives a sense of movement, too, a sense of walking around a place and seeing all its angles at once. When Peter Smith and I met at a Mars conference in Paris in early 1999, shortly after the French role in the proposed sample-return missions was announced, he urged me to head off and visit the Hockney retrospective at the Pompidou Center. It was striking to see the effects that most scientific image processing tries to get rid of in the name of objectivity—the changes in perspective and scale, the different shadows at different times—not just included but celebrated. By refusing to be a single thing, Hockney’s distorted composites give more of a sense of place than any single seamless frame ever could, breaking the constraints of perspective to spread the viewer around—and through—the scene.
The Marsmap virtual reality system, it seems to me, echoes some of what Hockney is trying to do. Its strange discovered perspectives, its billboards, its admission that some parts of the place being explored have yet to be seen, end up saying more than perfect pictures in perfect perspective ever could. This is the future of the mapping of Mars: The building up of virtual realities in which all sorts of different data sets with different flaws and omissions are layered in imaginary spaces, data sets that complement and enrich each other. Like earthly geography, the geography of Mars will move from the one-representation-at-a-time world of the map to the multifaceted universe of the geographical information system, or GIS. It’s a move as fitting as it is inevitable; after all, the Mars that is studied on Earth has been a set of digital files since the first all-digital camera took the first pictures of it back on Mariner 4. Ken Tanaka at the USGS at Flagstaff is overseeing the development of the delightfully named Pigwad (Planetary Interactive GIS-on-the Web Analyzable Database), a system that aligns data from mosaics, geological maps, MOC, and MOLA. Soon resources like this will be the primary tools in planetary geology, allowing researchers to visualize complex relationships between, say, ground ice, geological units, and topography in any way they want to.
New computer representations, like the sliding colored contours used to look at MOLA data, will change the way we perceive space and distance in this new virtual Mars rather as similar technologies are now doing on Earth. And moving from solid maps to dataspaces and virtual realities will help scientists fulfill their desire to immerse themselves as completely as possible in data from Mars. In 1976 the best technology Carl Sagan could come up with for experiencing the Viking lander sites as places was to make a large print of a Viking lander panorama, tape it into a cylinder and sit with it wrapped round his head. The successors to Marsmap and Pigwad will make much richer immersive experiences possible, both at the whole-planet level and at the level of specific sites. They will provide data from Mars with a new interiority; though in the real world Mars will still be seen entirely from the outside, in the virtual world it will be experienced from within.
New technologies will also change the perception of time. While a map has to freeze its representation in an eternal now, in a database time is just one more of the ways in which geographical data can be tagged and displayed. Processes such as the growth of a dust storm or the retreat of a polar cap can be dissected day by day. The only limit is the amount of data. At the moment, that limit is quite severe. The amount of data that can be sent back from a mission is highly constrained and so many moments that might be observed are not. Just as parts of the Pathfinder site were not seen, leaving odd blanks in the Marsmap virtual reality, so much of the time that Pathfinder passed there went unobserved and unreported. Pathfinder was not a continually observing presence; it sent back only four complete panoramas of the place it was sitting in, separated by days or weeks. The amount it missed was demonstrated by the fact that it only caught the fuzziest few glimpses of the dust devils that, other data suggest, were dancing past it throughout its stay. Pathfinder’s, meteorology instruments suggest that at least one dust devil passed right over it, its shadow felt as a drop of voltage in the spacecraft’s solar cells.
The problem is bandwidth. At the moment, each mission to Mars takes its own system for radioing data back to the great antenna at Goldstone and its siblings in Spain and Australia, and capable though those systems are, they represent a terrible bottleneck. In the future, though, this may change. There are plans to set up a system of communication satellites round Mars to ferry data back to Earth using protocols adapted from those of the Internet. The near-term reason for doing this is to remove the need for every spacecraft to carry Mars-to-Earth communications systems, thus allowing missions to the surface to be smaller and lighter; eventually such satellites might also provide guidance for rovers on the Martian surface, as GPS satellites do on Earth. But dedicated communication satellites could also increase the total data traffic between the planets. If they were eventually to use lasers, rather than radio, to link Mars to Earth they might increase the data rate by orders of magnitude, making real-time streaming video a possibility for future missions.
In the long run, this infrastructure may come to be as important in transforming the human experience of Mars as the data that come back through it. Infrastructure has a powerful symbolism: Look at the number of times that the coming of the railways is used in Westerns to mark the passing of an era. The Internet on Earth has taken on a symbolic importance independent of the network’s real capabilities. The rhetoric of connection and communication plays an ever-greater part in our discourse, just as the rhetoric of speed, power, and precision did in the wake of the introduction of the railway. An Internet that extended to Mars would be an important statement in and of itself. And its product—an increasingly rich corpus of data from which ever-more-powerful computers could produce ever-better Martian virtual realities—could bring Mars into the everyday lives of those with an interest. Pay a premium to send e-mail to a like-minded friend through a server in orbit around Mars; choose Olympus Mons as a backdrop for your video conference; fly your flight simulator along Echus Chasma; check in with the rover trundling around Hale in search of a lake bed once a day; download the whistle of a Martian wind as the ring tone for your mobile phone.
On Earth, information technologies are often criticized for reducing the importance of a sense of place, of somehow eroding geographical reality. The same charges were laid at the door of the railway revolution in the nineteenth century. There was some truth in the charge then and there is some truth now; railways, and later aircraft, clearly changed the way the world was experienced, and the Internet will do the same. But there is a difference between deforming our sense of place and demolishing it. And in the special case of Mars, an empty planet almost devoid of places, the fear will not only be false—its reverse will be true. Rich near-real-time data, a poor if improving substitute for “being there” on Earth, will be a great improvement over the status quo on Mars.
The lesson of Pathfinder is that the more accessible small parts of the surface of Mars become in cyberspace, the more placelike they will come to feel. Places need space to exist in, and time to change, and communities to give them meaning. The illusory spaces, asynchronous times, and real communities of the virtual world provide for those needs, in their way. And it is in those spaces, times and communities that, over the next years and decades, Mars will become more and more of a place.
*There was precedent for this; the Viking 1 lander was renamed the Mutch Memorial Station in honor of Thomas Mutch, a planetary geologist from Brown University who played a key role in the Viking mission and died in a mountaineering accident in 1980.
*Since Tennyson writers evoking Mars have often made much of the sight of the Earth and the moon as a double evening or morning star. Whatever symbolic power such a sight might have, though, as pure spectacle it would be distinctly underwhelming. The Earth will never be as bright in the Martian sky as Venus is in the earth’s: Venus comes closer to the Earth than the Earth comes to Mars; Venus is closer to the sun than the Earth and thus illuminated more brightly to begin with; and Venus’s even white clouds reflect more sunlight than the Earth does. Indeed, for much of the time not only is Venus as seen from the Earth brighter than the Earth as seen from Mars: Venus as seen from Mars is brighter than the Earth as seen from Mars. As for the Earth’s moon, it will be less bright as seen from Mars than Mercury is as seen from the Earth. The Earth will have one subtle but unique characteristic in the skies of Mars, though; while the other planets all change in brightness purely due to their orbits, the Earth’s brightness will change capriciously, depending on the cloudiness of the illuminated crescent. Even at these distances the Earth’s restless activity will be evident: It might be twice as bright one day as the next.
*The fact that the Apollo photographs, like O’Sullivan’s and Watkins’s, are works of art as well as technical records is brilliantly demonstrated by the San Francisco-based landscape photographer Michael Light in his 1999 book and exhibition Full Moon, which used beautifully remastered digital versions of a hundred or so photographs from the vast Apollo archive.