The Rock From Mars (41 page)

In the persistence of researchers—on all sides—to press their own interpretations of the evidence, even through storms of vitriol, the drama exposed what one science historian called “the sociology of science at work” and the ways that “money, ambition and politics” can come into play when the stakes are so high. It had demonstrated vividly how one person’s obsession can be another’s high calling.

Like a living thing, the rock had altered its adopted habitat in mischievous and interesting ways. Like a Siren, it lured its discoverers irresistibly toward its treacherous and baffling source. Like a teacher, it instructed us in our ignorance and in the wondrous possibility forged by human audacity.

Still, and always, for McKay there were the meteorites. On some far-off day when NASA’s sample-retrieval mission finally got under way, if it ever did, he knew the robots could bring back at best only a small fraction of the mass of Martian material that had already fallen to Earth as a gift. Despite the unsorted natural chaos the meteorites embodied, he found it remarkable that more people weren’t studying this precious rubble.

The new explorations on Mars prompted McKay to take another look at the SNC called Nakhla, the chunk of Mars that had rained pieces around a village in Egypt one June morning in 1911. Because Nakhla had apparently formed as lava, crystallized within a few feet of the Martian surface, he thought, it should show some effects (such as the formation of sulfates) similar to those being seen right now by Opportunity on Mars.

But he would get back to that tomorrow. This afternoon, McKay was still exploring the oldest chunk of planet in captivity. As he stared into the monitor screen in the darkened lab, McKay used his left hand to tweak knobs, or sometimes to move the mouse, to navigate his peculiar brand of flying machine over the alien terrain.

McKay was soaring above the flat, hatch-marked plain that was actually the highly magnified brass mount that held the sample, hunting for one of the irregularly shaped fragments of the meteorite. A shadow appeared on the monitor—the sign he was looking for. It was the dark puddle of epoxy he had used to fix the sample in place. The Martian terrain rose suddenly into view from the brass flatland like a range of mountains, and he was cruising above pitted badlands, with crevasses and cliffs, twisted gullies and billowing pillow formations.

At “altitude,” this newest sample of Robbie Score’s rock from Allan Hills looked for all the world like the state of Texas, with a couple of other smaller states—possibly Kansas and Oklahoma—lying above it like pieces escaped from a jigsaw puzzle. Actually, it was the major portion of one of the carbonate pancakes that Kathie Thomas-Keprta had tapped from the meteorite. As McKay zoomed in on “Texas,” Thomas-Keprta walked into the lab and whooped with delight. “Look at that texture. That is a thing of beauty!” Referring to the tedious, painstaking process of knocking out these chosen bits, she noted, “I worked a long time on that.”

She and McKay traced on the screen what appeared to be the shadow of a ridge, which they judged to be the black-and-white Oreo rim of the carbonate in cross section. It seemed to intersect the rim of another one, as if two of the carbonate blebs had been welded together.

McKay, staring into the screen, said, “I need to figure out what that is . . . but it’s cool.”

He lined up one patch of sample after another, snapping photographs and accumulating those prairie-grass graphs of the chemical composition to be sent to the lab in Austin. He moved over a segment of Oreo rim.
Click.
He went to the compo setting to see where the iron-rich areas were.
Click.
He was still awed by the fact that these were supposedly patterns of nature’s work on another planet almost four billion years ago—right there in front of him like ancient runes.

“Did you know that a face is the thing most people readily see in cloud shapes?” he mused. Then he added with a slight smile, “Usually when I start seeing faces, it’s time to go home.”

He left Building 31, climbed into his old Chevy van, and headed down the highway in the direction of the setting sun, toward Mary Fae and the sanctuary of a glass house on a floodplain in the piney thicket.

EPILOGUE

O
N AN AUSTRAL
summer day in late 2001, Robbie Score stepped out of a helicopter that had touched down on the bottom of the Earth near a ridge composed of ferrar dolerite, in the Meteorite Hills region of the Darwin Mountains. Ferrar dolerite is a crystalline volcanic rock that researchers were studying as a stand-in for Martian surface geology, based on what they had learned from the growing collection of Martian meteorites. The official purpose of the chopper’s stop here was to deliver a fresh crew of meteorite hunters.

Almost twenty years had passed since Score fell in love with the ice on that first visit. In 1996, after eighteen years as a meteorite curator in Building 31 at Johnson Space Center—and just as the public furor erupted around the igneous lump she had bagged that first season—she had left Houston and NASA to devote herself to Antarctica.

As far as that rock was concerned, she had tried to keep an open mind, a professional detachment. She had to admit she was thrilled that it had caused such a stir. But she had other preoccupations these days. She managed a research program that included labs at McMurdo Station, at Palmer Station, and at remote field camps. She was responsible for the planning and support of more than 120 research groups working in the world’s most forbidding—some would say its most otherworldly—landscape.

But Robbie Score had not traveled to this desolate location just to swap out the team. She had a more personal reason to take in the scenery. In honor of her association with the most famous Martian meteorite and her contributions to Antarctic research, the authorities had renamed the spot: Score Ridge.

She paused there, looking from her own booted feet out toward the horizon. The ice was moving somewhere below, she knew, carrying dark nuggets toward the brutal light.

NOTES

CHAPTER ONE:
score

In this stretch of
• The description of the meteorite hunt and discovery of the rock on this day is based primarily on the author’s multiple communications with participants, particularly telephone interviews and e-mail exchanges with Robbie Score, John Schutt, Ralph Harvey, and William A. Cassidy. Cassidy’s
Meteorites, Ice, and Antarctica
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Harvey’s online Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) site provided much of the history and context. The ANSMET site is at: http://geology.cwru.edu/~ansmet/.

They were working
• According to the National Science Foundation, the Allan Hills were named for Professor R. S. Allan of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

In places, the
• Cassidy,
Meteorites,
p. 60.

She arrived on the
• “Highest” in the sense that the continent averages 1.5 miles in height above sea level, making it almost a mile higher than the global average land height, according to “Glacier,” a Web site developed by the National Science Foundation, the Education Development Center, and Rice University, at www.glacier.rice.edu/.

The society of
• The discovery of the first known Antarctic meteorite, in Adélie Land in 1912, became a minor reference buried in one of the most harrowing tales of heroic survival ever to unfold on the Antarctic frontier. It is recorded in Douglas Mawson’s
Home of the Blizzard
(London: W. Heinemann, 1915), vol. 2, p. 11: “To avoid crevasses, we steered first of all to the southwest on the morning of the 5th, which was clear and bright. After six miles, the sastrugi [dunes of stiff snow] became hard and compact so the course was changed to due west. Shortly afterwards, a piece of rock which we took to be a meteorite was found on the surface of the snow. It was approximately 5 by 3 by 31⁄2 inches and was covered in black scale, which in places had blistered. Most of the surface was rounded. . . . There was nothing to indicate there had been a violent impact.” The finder was a member of the grim Antarctic expedition led by the author, Australian geologist Douglas Mawson.

And then there is
• John S. Lewis,
Rai+n of Iron and Ice
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), p. 175.

Because people had
• Cassidy,
Meteorites,
p. 2.

Then a few alert
• Ibid., pp. 1–2 and chapters 2 and 3.

In December 1969
• Ibid., pp 16–21. Japanese glaciologist Renji Naruse picked up and recognized the first meteorite in the area. The Japanese team found eight more the same day, in an ice field five by ten kilometers.

These facts led
• Ibid., p. 17. The Japanese (M. Yoshida et al.), in a 1971 paper, were the first to write about the possible concentrating mechanism.

In 1973, at a meeting
• Ibid., p. 16. The 1973 event attended by Cassidy was the thirty-sixth annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society, in late August, in Davos. There, Japanese chemists who had analyzed the stones described the discovery.

After bouts of rejection
• Ibid., pp. 17–21, 29, and 55.

Sending teams to hunt
• The inflation-adjusted figure for the total cost of the Apollo program was provided to the author by Richard Obermann, professional staff member of the House Science Committee’s subcommittee on space and aeronautics, based on an analysis by the Congressional Research Service which says: “The $25 billion is from a 1975 NASA fact sheet on the costs of ‘manned’ space programs.” The figure was determined using the gross domestic product “chained price index” from the latest Office of Management and Budget historical tables: the analyst divided 25 by .2563 × 1.1045.

The astronauts brought home
• Don E. Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), p. 355: “Almost 382 kg of rock, soil, and core samples—38% of a metric tonne and 42% of an English short ton—were returned from the moon, given 2,196 sample numbers, and cut up (so far) into 80,000 pieces.”

Once those flights
• Cassidy,
Meteorites,
p. 228.

Like dashboard clocks
• Ibid., p. 228.

One of Cassidy’s first
• Ibid., p. 35. In the early days, the meteorite hunters were regarded as “intruders” in the small society of Antarctic research. And resources were severely limited. Because there were no snowmobiles, the searches were conducted on foot.

Some of the rocks
• Ralph Harvey, meteorite search leader, on Web site: http://www.cwru.edu/1785680/affil/ansmet/faqs.htm.

For the preceding six
• Author interview with Score.

Having passed
• Cassidy,
Meteorites,
p. 15.

The sun was up
• Ibid., p. 8.

However, it had also
• Ibid., p. 14. For more on temperatures at select Antarctic sites, see: http://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/antarctica%20environment/climate_graph/vostok_south_pole_mcmurdo.htm#McMurdo.

Knowledge of the whole
• “Of the world’s 61,000 nonfiction papers and books published about the Antarctic since the earliest papers dating from the 1600s, 91 percent have been published since 1951,” the National Science Foundation has noted. (See
The United States in Antarctica: Report of the U.S. Antarctic Program External Panel
[Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation, 1997], p. 17.) A commercial ship made the first discovery south of the Antarctic Convergence (where polar waters meet temperate ones) in the 1670s. Sailors first spotted the Antarctic landmass itself sometime in the early 1820s, but historians disagree as to which nationality—a British, Russian, or U.S. ship—could claim the honor. Norwegians were the first to document the sighting. As the twentieth century arrived, a wave of exploratory expeditions tackled the forbidding ice desert, the most famous of them led by Roald Amundsen of Norway and Robert F. Scott of England. Amundsen beat Scott by a few weeks to become the first to reach the geographic South Pole. The United States got into the fray with the privately financed expeditions of Richard E. Byrd in the 1920s and ’30s.

Later, Cold War military
• The U.S. Operation Highjump in 1946–47 was “the largest single expedition ever to explore Antarctica, involving 13 ships, numerous airplanes, and more than 4,700 men,” according to the National Science Foundation (see “U.S. Antarctic Program Participant Guide, 1998–2000 Edition, NSF 98–117, Arlington, Va., 1998 p. 2). Its mapping operations paved the way for the International Geophysical Year. Then came the navy’s Operation Windmill, which used ship-based helicopters. A six-nation race was touched off briefly by reports of uranium deposits.

His reputation had grown
• Cassidy,
Meteorites,
p. 85.

The sledge broke
• The 1912 expedition led by Mawson encountered unexpectedly vile conditions even for the Antarctic, with hurricane-force winds and fierce blizzards. One party, trying to cross a treacherous, snow-covered crevasse, lost a man, a sledge, and six dogs. Peering into the gaping rift, the survivors could see only a ridge some 150 feet below where one of the dogs lay whining, its back apparently broken. Beyond that they glimpsed the abyss. For more than three hours, the two survivors yelled into the hidden depths. Gone along with the sledge was their tent, most of their food, their spare clothing, and most of the other supplies. They were 315 miles from the main base. In order to survive, they ultimately began to kill and eat their remaining dogs, stewing even the paws. These and other ordeals are recounted in Mawson’s
Home of the Blizzard.

It would advance
• Cassidy,
Meteorites,
p. 317.

Under certain circumstances
• Ibid., p. 44. One night after dinner, Cassidy writes, two field team members disposed of some hot water by pouring it into the snow at the edge of the canvas floor inside the dark, opaque-walled utility tent. “Suddenly a beam of lovely blue light dimly illuminated the interior of the tent! . . . The light was streaming upward from the melt-hole in the snow.” The team realized that sunlight was penetrating the exposed ice surface. Because the ice was so clear and many meters thick, the visible light, composed of all the colors of the rainbow, had “a long path length before being reflected back toward the surface. When it emerges it is predominantly blue because the ice has preferentially scattered and absorbed the other colors.”

This progression gradually
• The meteorite hunters dubbed these shifting, changing regions “stranding surfaces.” An area no bigger than a tennis court might yield as many as 250 meteorite specimens, according to the National Science Foundation.

In places along the
• E-mail to author from meteorologist Matthew Lazzara of the University of Wisconsin’s Antarctic Meteorological Research Center (September 2, 2005). The record wind speed measured by the program’s Automatic Weather Stations (funded by the National Science Foundation) was a maximum of almost 130 miles per hour (58 meters per second), at Cape Denison on August 24, 1995. The monthly mean wind speed for that location is 55 miles per hour. The McMurdo area recorded 143 mile-per-hour winds during a storm in May 2004. As for the historical record, Lazzara and coworker Linda Keller noted, the intrepid Australian explorer Mawson in 1912 reported days of sustained 80 and 90 mile-per-hour blasts at his Cape Denison hut (not far from what is today the location of the Research Center’s weather instrument cited above). Then he wrote: “Having failed to demolish us by dogged persistence, the hurricane tried new tactics on the evening of May 24, in the form of a series of Herculean gusts. As we learned afterwards from the puffometer, an instrument for determining the velocity of gusts, the momentary velocity of these was of the order of two hundred miles per hour.”

For a report on the May, 2004, storm at McMurdo, see http://www.southpolestation.com/mcm/storm.htm. For current surface weather conditions in Antarctica, see http://uwamrc.ssec.wisc.edu/realsfc.htm.

Early Antarctic explorers
• Mawson,
Home of the Blizzard,
vol. 1, pp. 116ff. Cited in Cassidy, p. 46.

The ones big enough
• Cassidy,
Meteorites,
pp. 325–26. In addition to the meteorites, searchers have found smaller stuff: tiny extraterrestrial grains in fine sediments in water and surface debris. One group separated thousands of micrometeorites and other cosmic microdetritus from Antarctic ice by melting tons of it and filtering the meltwater.

Meteorite collection in such places as the northern Sahara is not as scientifically useful, Harvey told the author, in part because profiteers pick the most commercially valuable specimens in order to sell them on the black market and leave behind the “ordinary” meteorites. Thus, in those settings, scientists are deprived of the Antarctic-style systematic approach.

One consequence was that
•
The Old Farmer’s Almanac
estimates that a typical shower uses 15 to 30 gallons (see http://www.almanac.com/edpicks.0698/waterused.htm).

In the worst
• Although some people assumed they would find the solitude great for thinking “big thoughts,” this was not necessarily the case. Some of the men, in particular, would pass the time in endless speculation about what aspect of being in Antarctica caused the fart rate to shoot up. They toyed with such theories as chaotic effects associated with the polar magnetic field, according to geochemist E. Julius Dasch, “The View from the Crevasses,”
Ad Astra,
(Nov.–Dec. 1994): p. 49.

Score shared
• Author interview with Schutt.

Over the years
• Author interview with Ralph Harvey, and Cassidy,
Meteorites,
pp. 89–90.

And older hunters
• Cassidy,
Meteorites,
p. 83.

Cassidy would sit
• Ibid., p. 48.

Therefore, when venturing
• Author interviews with Harvey, Scott Borg, and Curt Suplee of the National Science Foundation. Visitors were sometimes prohibited from leaving anything behind in the ice that could jeopardize the ecology. As a consequence, the hunting teams were supposed to carry with them significant detritus from their bodily functions. The transport planes might fly a season’s worth of poop, also known as “used food,” back to civilization in cold storage, along with ice cores and other research trophies.

At “night,”
• Author interview with Suplee.

The field notes
• C. Meyer, “NASA Mars Meteorite Compendium,” NASA/JSC, online at http://www-curator.jsc.nasa.gov/curator/antmet/mmc/84001.pdf. As for the “Yowza,” Score recalls in an e-mail to the author that “Scott Sandford and I were trying to spice up the field notes. I think Scott [was] the instigator of the wording for that entry.”

The team had already bagged
• Author interviews with Score and Schutt.

After the season’s haul
• Author interviews with Carlton Allen, Cecilia Satterwhite, and others at NASA’s Johnson Space Center meteorite laboratory.

CHAPTER TWO:
moon dust

It reminded him
• Kathy Sawyer, “Armstrong’s Code,”
Washington Post Magazine,
July 11, 1999, p. W10; Armstrong’s accounts, at University of Cincinnati and NASA Apollo archives; and Andrew Chaikin,
A Man on the Moon
(New York: Viking, 1994) pp. 208–11.

The events unfolding
• Chaikin,
Man on the Moon,
p. 190; Gene Kranz,
Failure Is Not an Option
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 288. The events of the
Apollo 11
mission described in this chapter are also reported in NASA’s extensive Apollo mission records, and in the
Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal,
available online at http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/a11.launch.htm.