Exploring Mars
Scholar to search for clues in analysis of soil
Science is the damnedest thing. Most of us are solid on the euro and Dale Earnhardt Jr., but ask us what a light year is, and we implode, rather like my daughter when I once asked her what a gerund is.
It is scandalous that people can skate through good schools and colleges without a clue about the natural sciences. Take the Observer. The totality of my collegiate science experience consisted of one course in geology, widely known as "Rocks For Jocks." I still react like a vampire to garlic at the mere mention of physics.
It was with some trepidation, then, that I entered the office of Sam Kounaves last week. Kounaves is the Tufts University chemistry professor who will be leading the chemical analysis of soil from Mars that will be captured on NASA's latest mission to Mars, launched yesterday, with the robotic Phoenix Mars Lander aboard. The Lander is scheduled to land next May and, with luck, provide Kounaves with the data to answer the question, once and for all, on whether microbial life exists or has existed there.
But don't we already know that? I mean, there's all that ice, so doesn't that tell us the mystery is over? No. Wrong.
"We have no solid evidence there is life on Mars," he says. "If we find a fossil, that answers the question of past life there. Even if we just find organisms, that means life is feasible. We'll also find out if the soil is compatible for life as we know it. It could be like Clorox bleach."
I know earthlings are eventually going to have to pack their Louis Vuittons and hit the celestial highway, but why Mars? I consumed Ray Bradbury's classic "The Martian Chronicles" with the rest of the herd, and at 3 a.m. spewed fatuous pap with roommates in altered states about parallel universes. We thought that pretty much covered it. No. Wrong.
"Mars is the only game in town," says Kounaves, 59. "It is the only place in our solar system that is anywhere near Earth in terms of life conditions," he adds, "And they're horrible."
There are places here just as bad -- the Dry Valleys of Antarctica and the Atacama desert in Chile, for starters. The weird microbes living in appalling cold and heat in these places are called "extremophiles." (My new favorite word.)
Kounaves hopes to find these guys on Mars. The Phoenix robot will dig into the soil and deposit some of it into what is essentially a wet chemistry lab, where the dirt will be mixed with water and analyzed by 20 sensors.
The data will be collected in computers onboard and beamed back to Earth via Mars orbiters.
What about the moon? We've already been there, after all: "The moon is easy to get to but has no atmosphere at all," says Kounaves.
Stars? Alpha Centauri is the nearest one in our galaxy that is similar to our sun with the possibility of planets like Earth circling it. The problem is, it's 4.3 light years away. That's over four years at the speed of light, a brisk 186,000 miles per second. Our current pedal-to-the-metal space speed is 17,000 miles per hour. You do the math.
Kounaves and his team will hit Antarctica in December, using copies of the Phoenix instruments to plumb the chemical properties of soil in the Dry Valleys and compare them with Mars. The winter temperature in Antartica averages 120 degrees below zero, by the way, and summer afternoons on Mars actually get above freezing for a few weeks.
"The record of what happened to Mars is recorded in the soil," says Kounaves. "Why is it so cold? What happened there can give us an idea how fast things could happen on Earth."
Unlike many players in the scientific clubhouse, Kounaves actually converses in English. Scientists are, as a rule, abysmal translators to the great unwashed of what they do. They intimidate us with their jargon, their equations, their unspoken sense of superiority.
This is uncommonly dumb given their need of our support for government funding of their projects. The true smarties in any profession use words and images we can grasp. Exhibit A: In a stunning pedagogical triumph, Dr. Jerry Groopman successfully explained T-cells to me some years ago.
I just had to ask Kounaves about the dance of religion and science. I've always assumed that most scientists are secular investigators. He replies that it depends on how you define religion.
"There are two definitions in the dictionary," he says. "The first is the worship of a deity. The second is the assigning of an ultimate meaning to existence. In the end, life is an intrinsic property of the universe, connected to the rest of the universe. It's very spiritual."
Raised in a Greek Orthodox family, Kounaves concluded long ago there was no evidence of a supernatural being, yet has never dubbed himself an atheist because he embraces the second definition.
So for all the marbles, Sam Kounaves, are we alone in the universe?
"If there are 100 million suns in our galaxy, and, say, half of them have planets like we do, and there are another 100 million galaxies in the universe, it's impossible for me to believe we're the only ones," he says. "We're not an accident. Life is an emergent of the universe."
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com. 