The Earthlings Have LandedWhere would you stake your claim on the great desert planet? Oliver Morton, author of the new book Mapping Mars, asks the experts.
Choosing a place to land on Mars should be easy. The planet's surface area is as great as that of all Earth's continents combined, and thanks to 30 years of space missions, it has been mapped in bewitching detail. Unfortunately, spacecraft are delicate constructions, and finding a safe spot to land them on rocky ground is a colossal headache. NASA researchers have been nursing that headache for years as they analyze hundreds of sites, trying to decide where a pair of rovers should arrive for a Mars mission in early 2004. Just as they were to make their final choices this spring, new wind modeling data sent the scientists back to their databases.
But what if you weren't constrained by engineering and treacherous terrain? What if you didn't have to worry about rocks that would gut your lander's belly, or slopes it would roll down, or those pesky winds? What if you could simply choose any one of the 1,470 places on Mars that now have a name — or the countless more that don't? And what if the lander was not a robot, but you?
Would you perch yourself on the edge of Echus Chasma, a cliff far taller than any on Earth? Land at the bottom of Olympus Mons, the solar system's tallest volcano, ropes and crampons at the ready? Would you walk through Deuteronilus, searching for the shorelines of an ancient ocean that may once have lapped the sands? Or hunt for dew in the depths of Hellas? Would you look for life? Where?
Here's a map to help you decide — and the choices of some scientists and enthusiasts who have given the matter some thought.
WEST CANDOR CHASMA RIM
Baerbel Lucchitta (scientist, US Geological Survey)
"The view across about 150 kilometers of the Valles Marineris trough would be stunning. At your feet would be mountainous chutes descending several kilometers to the trough floor. The landslide scar nearby would be dizzying to look at — it would make a tremendous ski run! Farther out, a mesa rises from the canyon floor, and I'd want to know the nature of the layered deposits there. Are they lake-bed sediments, yielding fossils from some wetter epoch? Are they volcanoes that grew in an ice-covered lake once filling the canyon? Are they volcanic ash produced in tremendous explosions? We must go find out!"
EDGE OF NOTHERN ICE CAP
William Shatner (actor, Star Trek)
"This spot would afford me water to drink, and the ability to practice my hockey. And I'd be really alone. No Starbucks, no Albertsons, and no emergency service for the cuts and bruises I'd get when I jumped into the air and didn't descend for 5.4 minutes."
KOROLEV CRATER
Jim Garvin (chief scientist, Mars Program, NASA)
"It's a staggering bit of real estate: one of the youngest big craters on Mars, made by an impact similar in magnitude to the one that may have killed off the dinosaurs on Earth. It has rim mountains 2 to 3 kilometers high and a stacked central plug of icy deposits that may preserve a wonderful record of the advances and retreats of the north polar ice cap over time. In the past, it may have held lakes. In my Martian wet dreams, I'd send our 2009 Mars Smart Lander there, and I'd love to go myself."
THE NORTHERNWESTERN RIM OF THE HELLAS IMPACT BASIN
Kim Stanley Robinson (author, Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars)
"Here, you would get both real mountains and a prospect out over the basin down below, the lowest place on Mars. This is where I put the city of Odessa in my novels — a city that eventually became a beach resort as terraformers filled Hellas up with water. It would be good to see the emptiness before the waters start to rise."
ELYSIUM PLANITIA
Michael Carroll (astronomical artist)
"A wilderness of deserts and mesas, volcanoes and sand dunes — it's the kind of place where people like Elijah and Jesus would have pondered the great things of life."
ELYSIUM MONS
Moby (musician, "We Are All Made of Stars")
"I can only assume that the view would be spectacular. Apart from that, it sounds nice — 'Elysium Mons' — like the name of a futuristic porn star or an extraterrestrial resort in a book by Arthur C. Clarke."
SOMEWHERE IN NOACHIS TERRA
William K. Hartmann (scientist, Planetary Science Institute; artist)
"It's probably a fairly anonymous-looking spot, but I'd love to go to where the first human artifact reached the planet — the Soviet lander, Mars 2, which crashed for unknown reasons. I'd love to find the lander's remains, try to reconstruct what went wrong, and get a sense of that historic event."
NOACHIS PIT CRATER
Ken Edgett (staff scientist, Malin Space Science Systems)
"I'm fond of a region in northern Terra Meridiani, with buttes and mesas and spires, that looks like Monument Valley, which I find a very moving, almost spiritual place. But I think I'd take the Noachis Pit Crater. It has incredible layering, including an overhang under which you could walk for some distance into deep, dark shadow. Spooky. What would you find in there? Cliff dwellings? Cave paintings? Probably just more rocks and dirt — but how cool it would be to go in there."
OPHIR PLANUM
Robert Zubrin (president, Mars Society) "It's just to the north of the Coprates Chasma and Capri Chasma junction, at the end of the Valles Marineris and within driving range of Ganges Chasma. You could also get to Maja Valles from there, and to some other runoff channels south of Chryse Planitia, down which vast floods once ran. It's an area with varied geology and dramatic topography, which is why I set my novel, First Landing, there."
NEWTON CRATER
Carol Stoker (research scientist, NASA Ames Research Center) "A favorite place to do fieldwork, it's near Mars' magnetic stripes, which means this crust formed very early. It also has fresh gullies cut into its slopes. The sediments in those gullies would be a good place to look for organic deposits or other evidence of a biosphere."
OLYMPUS MONS
Buzz Aldrin (former astronaut; coauthor, Encounter With Tiber)
"And if you couldn't find a good landing spot on that mountainous terrain, then I'd choose Korolev Crater, where there's a lot of ice and caves to protect you from radiation."
