Live From Mars

The folks in mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ate a lot of peanuts in the minutes leading up to the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars. Peanuts have been the order of the day at JPL when a spacecraft is preparing to land ever since July 31, 1964, when the Ranger 7 probe was making its final approach to the moon. The Ranger’s job was a simple one: to crash-land on the lunar surface, on the way down snapping a few thousand pictures to beam back home. Still, six Rangers before it had failed, and the JPL engineers knew they were about out of chances. Ranger 7 at last broke that losing streak, and as it happened, someone was nibbling peanuts during the landing. That, the missile men of JPL figured, must have been a good-luck charm–and no one’s dared defy it since.

But it would take more than luck and peanuts to get Curiosity safely to the surface of Mars. At 1:25 a.m. E.T. on Aug. 6, the SUV-size rover, sealed inside a blunt-bottomed capsule, would slam into the Martian atmosphere at a blazing 13,000 m.p.h. (20,920 km/h). Seven miles (11.3 km) above the surface, when the thin air had slowed the ship to 900 m.p.h. (1,450 km/h), its heat shield would pop away, and it would deploy a billowing parachute. Its retrorockets would then bring the rover and its housing to a near hover just two stories above the surface, where it would be lowered to the ground by wire cables–a $2.5 billion extraterrestrial marionette, settling its wheels gently into the red soil.

In Chicago, the Adler Planetarium held a late-night pajama party so families could follow the landing live. In New York City, crowds gathered in Times Square to watch on a giant screen that usually shows only ads. NASA live-streamed the event, and the traffic was so great–with up to 23 million people watching in the four hours immediately surrounding the landing–that the servers crashed.

What the people watching the live feed saw was not a spacecraft approaching Mars but a roomful of controllers in matching blue shirts, muttering about data acquisition and imager activation and drogue deployment and more. While much of that was incomprehensible, it was clear that something good was building. And then flight-dynamics engineer Allen Chen called, “Stand by for sky crane,” and the room fell silent. Less than a minute later, he announced, “Touchdown confirmed! We’re safe on Mars!” And with that, the silence was broken–explosively. “That rocked!” exclaimed deputy project manager Richard Cook as he took the stage at the celebratory press conference that followed. “Seriously, was that cool or what?

It was cool indeed, but it was much more too. In an era in which the grind and gridlock of Washington have made citizens wary of anything the government touches, this was a reminder of what the country can still do. The scene in mission control was what smart looks like. It was what vision looks like. Retrorockets could have eased Curiosity straight down to the surface, but that would have stirred up too much dust, perhaps fouling its works before it even got started. So the engineers chose the hard and creative and dangerous solution for the simple reason that it was also the best one.

A country that can’t get its roads and bridges fixed at home actually has infrastructure on Mars. Two NASA orbiters–Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey–helped relay Curiosity’s transmissions to Earth and wave their newcoming sister in for her landing. And even as Curiosity settles down to work, no fewer than eight other NASA probes are ranging through the solar system, exploring–or on their way to explore–the moon, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, the asteroid Ceres and the interstellar void beyond the planets.

It’s Curiosity, however, that may be the state of the exploratory art. With 10 instruments weighing a collective 15 times more than those aboard the earlier golf-cart-size rovers Spirit and Opportunity, it will study the geology, chemistry and possible biology of Mars, looking for signs of carbon, methane and other organic fingerprints on a world that a few billion years ago was warm and fairly sloshing with water. The previous rovers and landers have strongly made the case that Martian life–either extant or ancient–is possible, teeing Curiosity up to seal the deal. “We all feel a sense of pressure to do something profound,” says geologist and project scientist John Grotzinger.

In some ways, they’ve already done that, by framing an unavoidable question: If we can do this exceedingly hard thing so well, why do we make such a hash of the challenges at home, the inventing and investing that 21st century progress demands? Help answer that one, and Curiosity could achieve great things on two worlds at once.

Follow the Water

Mars may be a meteor-blasted desert today, but it was once a very different place. Its surface is marked with dry riverbeds, empty sea basins and even dusty oceans. Strip away 99% of Earth’s atmosphere and boil off all its water and it would look a lot like its desiccated cousin. Mars was wet for at most a billion of its 4.5 billion years, but as the early Earth proved, that could be enough time to cook up life.

As the generation of Mars ships that began flying in the late 1990s discovered, the surface chemistry of Mars is consistent with a once waterlogged planet. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers used scrapers, drills and abrasion tools to uncover a wealth of minerals that form only or mostly in the presence of water–including salts, gypsum, calcium sulfate and a material known as hematite. The Mars Reconnaissance orbiter found seasonal streaks forming and disappearing on a Martian slope–a sign of underground deposits of existing water that thaw and flow in the Martian spring and freeze and contract in the winter.

Curiosity’s landing site is a formation known as Gale Crater, 96 miles (155 km) wide. Located in the southern Martian hemisphere, it is thought to be up to 3.8 billion years old–well within Mars’ likely wet period and thus once a large lake. A 3-mile-high (4.8 km) peak known as Mount Sharp rises in its center, with exposed strata layer-caked down its sides. Channels that appear to have been carved by water run down both the crater walls and the mountain base, and an alluvial fan–the radiating channels that define earthly deltas–is stamped into the soil near the prime landing site. All this is irresistible to geologists searching for the basic conditions for life. “We’re hoping to find materials that interacted with water,” says Grotzinger. Previous landers, he says, did some soil analysis, “but this time we’ll find the actual chemicals.”

Curiosity will conduct that search in a lot of ways. The rover’s arm will scoop up samples of soil and deliver them to an onboard analysis chamber, where they will be studied by a gas chromatograph, a mass spectrometer and a laser spectrometer, looking for telltale isotopes, gases and elements. Chemical sniffers will sample the Martian air for carbon compounds–especially methane–which are the building blocks and by-products of life. Martian geology will be studied with a long-distance laser that can blast a million-watt beam at rocks up to 23 ft. (7 m) away, vaporizing them and allowing a spectrometer to analyze the chemistry of the residue. An onboard X-ray spectrometer will do similar work on rocks near the rover. “With X-ray diffraction, we can really nail down what kind of mineral is there and how those rocks have formed,” says deputy project scientist Joy Crisp.

Most appealing for the folks back home will be the 17 cameras arrayed around Curiosity. They will have the visual acuity to resolve an object the size of a golf ball 27 yd. (24.7 m) away and the resolution to capture one-megapixel color images from multiple perspectives. The sharpest of these imagers is mounted atop the rover’s vertical mast, which, now extended, rises 7 ft. (2.1 m) above ground. “You could not look this thing in the eye unless you were an NBA player,” says mission systems manager Mike Watkins.

Though Curiosity will soon become a rolling, multiarmed, 17-eyed science lab, for now–after only a handful of days on the surface–it’s still just opening its eyes and powering up. “We first have to make up a plan for where we are and how we’re going to operate,” says Watkins. “Then we’ll start handing over the keys to the science team.”

The Space Card

The impulse to sentimentalize Curiosity–to treat it almost like a human astronaut–is hard to resist. “The rover is getting ready to wake up for its first day in a new place,” said mission manager Jennifer Trosper at an early postlanding news conference. Describing what the science team’s work schedule will be like, Watkins says, “The rover’s day ends on Mars around 3 or 4 p.m. The rover tells us what she did today, and that … lets us plan her day tomorrow.”

Such anthropomorphizing has always been the case with space in a way it isn’t with other scientific endeavors. The confirmation of the Higgs boson earlier this summer was a much bigger development than the Curiosity landing, but few people–outside the physics community, at least–sentimentalized it too much. Nobody calls a particle she.

President Obama–like every President from Kennedy through the second Bush–was quick to make hay out of good news from space. “Tonight, on the planet Mars, the United States of America made history,” he said in an official statement. “It proves that even the longest odds are no match for our unique blend of ingenuity and determination.” And NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr.–like every NASA chief who preceded him–was quick to give props to the President who appointed him. “President Obama has laid out a bold vision for sending humans to Mars in the mid-2030s,” he said, “and today’s landing marks a significant step in achieving this goal.”

Expect to hear more of this inspirational talk from both Bolden and Obama in the months ahead, particularly with an election coming and the space-industry state of Florida very much in play. But Obama’s record on space has been mixed. The idea of privatizing the business of getting cargo and astronauts to low-earth orbit raised a lot of eyebrows at first, but the move has been looking a lot smarter since Elon Musk’s SpaceX Corp. flew a successful resupply mission to the International Space Station in May. SpaceX and a handful of other companies are in line for a lot of paying work flying both manned and unmanned missions for NASA, but it’s hard to say how private that effort has really been so far. NASA has shared some of the R&D costs with its candidate companies and signed lucrative contracts with them before they even proved they were up to the job–to the tune of more than $4 billion covered by taxpayers.

The President’s plan gets less clear–and less credible–when it comes to manned travel to deep space. NASA is developing a new crew vehicle called Orion–essentially a souped-up Apollo spacecraft–and a new heavy-lift booster dubbed the Space Launch System (SLS), similar to the venerable Saturn V. Returning to the old model of the expendable booster with the crew vehicle perched on top is a safe and smart decision after the disasters of the shuttle era, but that old model was well funded. The first Saturn V was launched in 1967, the 13th and last in 1973, and nine of those rockets took people to the moon.

The SLS, which in one form or another has been in the planning stage since 2004, is not scheduled for its first unmanned flight until 2017 or its first manned one until 2021. After that, it would fly every other year–at best. It’s not clear what its destination would be–perhaps an asteroid, perhaps Mars, perhaps somewhere else. “This is a pace that doesn’t make any sense,” says John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “When Kennedy said he’d get to the moon by the end of the decade, he actually meant 1967, and he thought he’d still be President.”

Kennedy, of course, wasn’t hamstrung by budget issues, and Obama’s space team is quick to point that out. “I would be thrilled if we could land on Mars in the 2030s, and I truly believe that is within the capability of this country,” says John Grunsfeld, head of the NASA science directorate and a five-time shuttle astronaut. “I don’t believe it is necessarily within the capability of this country with a flat budget.”

For the unmanned program, a flat budget would actually be an improvement. Funding for Mars missions is set to fall from $587 million in 2012–that’s million, with an m–to $360.8 million in 2013, causing the U.S. to drop out of a planned collaboration with the European Space Agency for two missions, one of which would have returned a sample from the Martian surface. Already in the pipeline is a new NASA orbiter that will launch in 2013, but after that, no missions are scheduled until 2018 and 2020–maybe. Says Grunsfeld: “We can just barely afford those missions.”

What any nation can afford, of course, is at least partly a function of what it chooses to afford, even in straitened circumstances. The genius of Kennedy’s commitment to a lunar landing before 1970 was its simplicity–a single goal and a deadline. The current plan–with ever changing destinations and dates–has none of that New Frontier clarity.

Kennedy, however, had the help of other Presidents and a cooperative Congress. The space push spanned four Administrations–counting that of Eisenhower, who created NASA–and six Congresses. And while they often scrapped over the budget, they agreed on the goal. A legislature that can barely keep the FAA funded is not an easy partner for any White House with grand ambitions. Space isn’t free, but with NASA’s budget hovering in the vicinity of just $15 billion per year, or 0.47% of the total federal budget, it’s hardly a bank breaker either. The Department of Defense, by contrast, gets $716 billion, or 18.9%. What’s more, as with Defense, NASA research pays dividends. The Curiosity program has employed 7,000 high-tech workers in most of the 50 states. And as Grunsfeld points out, the rover’s chemical sniffers–sensitive to individual organic molecules–could have national-security applications at ports and airports.

But the extraordinary success of the Mars Curiosity rover masks a far greater truth about space exploration: it requires monomaniacal commitment and an exceedingly high tolerance for failure. In their own way, the JPL peanuts are a reminder of that fact. It’s unimaginable in today’s attention-deficit political climate that there ever would have been a Ranger 7 after the repeated failures of Rangers 1 through 6. But it took mastering unmanned crash landings before we could master unmanned soft landings. And it took mastering unmanned soft landings before Neil Armstrong–five years almost to the day after Ranger 7 made its suicide plunge into the moon’s Sea of Clouds–could set his boot onto the Sea of Tranquility. That’s the way science progresses: incrementally, patiently and ultimately spectacularly. Some of America’s grandest moments have come when we’ve trusted that fact.

FOR MORE PICTURES OF THE CURIOSITY PROJECT, GO TO time.com/curiosity