Mars attacks

Mars ain8217;t the kind of place to raise your ki-ds,8221; crooned Elton John in the 1970s when clusters of colonies in outer space were being enthusiastically planned, 8220;in fact it8217;s cold as hell.8221; And for parents with a sadistic bent, he may have me-ntioned that it also has a hellish range of temperatures that could make acclimatisation a nightmare, a wild variation that might well have played havoc with NASA8217;s string of mishaps on the red planet. Almost two-and-a-half years after the Mars Pathfinder completed its 119-million-mile journey and sent back spectacular three-dimensional pictures of vast rocky landscapes, instantaneously voiced hopes of finding evidence of life on Mars and of planning a human la-nding have dimmed somewhat. This has been a bad year for space exploration. The 165 million Mars Po-lar lander8217;s failure to announce a successful landing by radioing back to earth last week, that too just two months after NASA lost its Mars Climate Observer, has put a question mark on ambitious plans to launcha mission every 26 months when earth8217;s neighbour is optimally located.

Missions to Mars will no doubt be re-evaluated, especially NASA8217;s quot;faster, better, cheaperquot; motto, but the latest debacle has only further fuelled popular interest. Indeed, except for a brief interregnum after Neil Armstrong8217;s giant leap for mankind when pros-pects of human habitation on the moon became a glo-bal preoccupation and it was taken for granted that ea-rthlings would have dachas on the satellite by 1997, pe- rhaps no other heavenly body has enthralled the human race as much as Mars has. Ancient Indians, Ro-mans, Greeks, Chinese, they were all forever speculat-ing on its astrological manoeuvres. In more recent ti-mes, it has animated science fiction writers and eccen-trics with vivid imaginations. From Percival Lowell, a wealthy American obsessed with proving that Mars was criss-crossed with channels dug by intelligent lifeforms after misinterpreting an Italian astronomer8217;s observations, to the much misunderstood cinematicparody Mars Attacks, popular culture has propelled scientific inquiry.

But life this time around has inverted art. If H.G. Wells8217; The War of the Worlds dwelt on an invasion of earth by Martians in search of water, space research a hundred years later is driven by the prospect of finding the liquid on Mars. In fact, the Pathfinder8217;s wideangle photographs have convinced scientists that water, thought to be a prerequisite for life to have existed on Mars, did once sweeten existence on that planet. Vis-tas of windblown dune forms and rocks shaped by the wind indicate the presence at some point of airborne sand, which cannot be possible without some H2O.

And signs of recent volcanic activity indicate the requisite geothermal energy for the creation of life. And even as the clues so far point to life in the past, not the present, on the planet, a Martian attack still cannot be ruled out. With plans to bring back one kilogramme of rocks from Mars by 2008, the quaintly titled Planetary Protection Officer has hiswork cut out. Given the possibility of potentially deadly microbes embedded on these rock forms, the scientific community is keen to rule out an invasion from these footsoldiers of the little green men of the imagination.