The Rock From Mars (52 page)

Within two months
• Author interviews with Dan Goldin; letter, Feb. 6, 1997, from Senator Mikulski, original instigator of the summit, to the vice president saying a final meeting was not necessary and expressing satisfaction at Clinton’s budget for fiscal year 1998, which proposed a five-year funding level that would be “stable and sustainable.” See also another perspective on the summit in NASA Watch online: http://www.nasawatch.com/nss/10.29.97.nss.summit.htm.

Years later, in an interview with the author, Goldin would revise his glowing assessment of the summit process, expressing regret in hindsight that its participants had not taken a more practical, hard-nosed approach to the options. See also John Logsdon, written introduction to report on George Washington University Symposium, Nov. 22, 1996, “Life in the Universe: What Can the Martian Fossil Tell Us?” Logsdon said the summit was canceled not only because the anticipated budget cuts were abandoned but also “largely as a result of the public excitement over the Mars meteorite findings and NASA’s putting forward a powerful strategy for the space science centered around the theme of exploring the origins of the solar system and the universe, and of life beyond earth. Key to this policy and budgetary decision was [the] early December 1996 meeting between Vice President Gore and a group of NASA officials, space scientists and other representatives of the public.”

And in the realm of
• Author interview with NASA science official Edward Weiler. He said the impetus for the budget turnaround was clearly boosted by the McKay team’s 1996 claims. But given the long lead time in the budget-preparation process, the momentum had already been building, because of the flow of discoveries from the repaired Hubble Space Telescope, data from the injured but functioning Galileo spacecraft at Jupiter, and the payoff from other science investments of the 1980s.

But far from being
• Author interviews with Goldin, Huntress, Weiler, and others at NASA. In November 1996, NASA announced the new Ancient Martian Meteorite Research Program, with funding of at least $1.5 million over two years for studies of the twelve known Martian meteorites.

Buoyed by public excitement
• Dick and Strick,
Living Universe,
p. 179; author interviews with Goldin and Huntress. In 1998, the president approved and Congress funded the NASA Astrobiology Institute, a consortium of almost a dozen NASA-selected academic and research institutions.

Pathfinder’s assignment was
• Astrogeophysicist Chris McKay, March 31, 1999, lecture to Toronto Mars Society chapter.

Data flowing from
• Images from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, released in 2000, for example, revealed signs of relatively recent (less than a million years old) fluid flows in dozens of cliff walls and escarpments of craters, mesas, and troughs—sinuous channels in patterns that resembled spring-fed water-drainage areas on Earth, something like gully washes. This mystified scientists. For one thing, conditions on chill, arid modern Mars were such that any water reaching the surface supposedly could not remain liquid for very long.

In 1997, in the
• Author interviews with Rummel.

After the McKay team’s
• Author interviews with Goldin; letter from MIT president Charles Vest to Goldin, Aug. 14, 1996. Vest suggested as one response to the Mars rock claims that NASA enlist U.S. research universities in studies of the potential for extraterrestrial life, possibly through the establishment of “centers of excellence” in needed research specialties. See also Goldin speech, Dec. 10, 1996, to the American Society for Cell Biology convention, in San Francisco; Goldin remarks to press following December 11, 1996, vice president’s meeting, from author’s notes; Goldin speech to the American Astronomical Society, Washington, D.C., Jan. 7, 1998.

Goldin would also soon
• In November 1996, NASA announced its new meteorite research program. Also during this period, NASA and the National Science Foundation (which provided $1.3 million for the Mars Rock Special Research Opportunity) formed an edgy partnership on such projects as the Antarctic meteorite search and a campaign to investigate Earth’s extremophile microbe populations. Ralph Harvey, the Case Western geologist and McKay critic, was surprised, he told the author, to find his threatened Antarctic search program saved, in effect, by new funding from NASA.

In early 1997
• The Space Studies Board’s report for the National Research Council, “Mars Sample Return: Issues and Recommendations” (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997). See also National Research Council reports, “The Quarantine and Certification of Martian Samples,” May 29, 2001; “Signs of Life,” based on the April 2000 Workshop on life-detection techniques.

If scientists hoped to ever bring back extraterrestrial rocks, they realized, they would have to prepare what one called “the mother of all Environmental Impact Statements.” See also Ron Cowen, “Scooping Up a Chunk of Mars,”
Science News
(Apr. 25, 1998): pp. 265–67. Bill Schopf is quoted as saying, “I would be loath to have the public think that NASA was going to handle the Martian samples in the way that the lunar samples were handled. . . . NASA’s feet have to be held to the fire.” For other ongoing criticism of NASA as taking the issue too lightly, see Barry E. DiGregorio, “Rethinking Mars Sample Return,”
Space News
(Feb. 22, 1999); Gilbert Levin, “Shed Light, Not Heat, on Mars,”
Space News
(May 10, 1999).

The anti-contamination people
• Nobody knew enough. NASA’s anti-contamination specialists lacked experience in high-level biological containment. Other organizations, such as the army’s infectious disease experts, had expertise in biological containment but not in “the biology of nonpathogenic microbes” and such. And nobody had ever built a facility that could simultaneously keep microbes from getting in from outside and out from inside.

A central question for
• “The ALH84001 meteorite illustrated the need to distinguish between biotic and abiotic mechanisms at the nanometer scale,” according to the National Research Council Space Studies Board’s Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration (COMPLEX), in its report “On NASA Mars Sample-Return Mission Options,” based on a meeting held October 16–18, 1996.

The group said they were “pleased that NASA has taken the opportunity provided by the increased attention to Mars exploration resulting from the McKay et al. paper . . . to accelerate planning of a program of Mars sample-return missions.” However, they cautioned that the findings were “only suggestive” and that “COMPLEX believes it is inappropriate to predicate an important aspect of future martian studies on the unconfirmed results described in a single scientific paper,” and that along with the meteorite findings NASA should include in its thinking “the new findings on microbial life in extreme terrestrial environments, . . . current understanding of the evolution of the martian and other planetary environments and recent findings about the existence of planets around other stars.”

And beyond the
• Michael Meyer interview with Steven Dick, NASA archives.

The losses, eventually
• Report of the Mars Program Independent Assessment Team, headed by Tom Young, and Report of the Loss of the Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 Missions, by the JPL Special Review Board, March 14, 2000.

Investigators concluded that the Mars Climate Orbiter probably burned up in the Martian atmosphere on September 23, 1999, because engineers famously mixed up imperial and metric units when calculating the craft’s trajectory. Three months later, the Polar Lander, also carrying two surface microprobes, disappeared. Investigators found that a software error probably caused it to crash into the surface. The losses totaled about $360 million.

Huntress, for one, was
• E-mail from Huntress to author, April 8, 2005.

NASA officials pushed
• Just a few months earlier, in May 1999, David McKay had spoken optimistically of the possibility that a Mars sample return mission might be launched as early as 2005, saying, “If it all works out, we’ll have roughly half a kilogram from one location, collected in 2003, and another half kilogram from another location, collected in 2005.” (See McKay interview in
OE
[
Optical Engineering
], Report No. 185, May 1999.) Separate robots were to accumulate a trove of the samples for pickup by a return-to-Earth spacecraft.

CHAPTER TWELVE:
at daggers drawn

On August 7, 1996,
• Author interviews with Andrew Steele.

In mid-September 1996
• Andrew Lawler, “Planetary Science: Mars Meteorite Quest Goes Global,”
Science
(Sept. 20, 1996): pp. 1653–54.

After several more attempts
• Author interviews with Steele and McKay.

One chilly day in
• Author interviews with Steele.

By measuring the beam’s
• The group had to overcome a limitation in the instrument in order to study the meteorite sample, Steele told the author. The device was designed for the study of relatively flat surfaces, so the “needle could only move up and down a limited amount without special maneuvering.” When it ran into a “mountain” instead of a gentle hill, the result could be either a false reading or a stuck arm. Steele’s Portsmouth group was the first to work out the methods required to use the atomic force microscope on cells and other rough surfaces where the needle had to accommodate mountain peaks. For the Mars rock study, they used a combination of several instruments and techniques.

Now he had a
• See A. Steele, D. T. Goddard, I. B. Beech, R. C. Tapper, D. Stapleton, and J. R. Smith, “Atomic Force Microscopy Imaging of Fragments from the Martian Meteorite ALH94001,”
Journal of Microscopy
, vol. 189 (1998): pp. 2-7.

The meeting, held in
• Author interviews with Steele, Gibson, and other participants; Allan Treiman, “Life on Mars Vigorously Debated at Conference,”
Eos
(June 3, 1997). The meeting was the twenty-eighth Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, March 17–21, 1997.

In the frenetic and stomach-churning
• Author interviews with David McKay and Mary Fae McKay.

Gibson was energized
• Author interviews with Gibson. The account of debate highlights at the conference is based on author interviews with Gibson, Steele, Treiman, and other participants; also various press accounts, including Richard Kerr, “Life on Mars: Martian ‘Microbes’ Cover Their Tracks,”
Science
(Apr. 4, 1997): pp. 30–31, and J. Kelly Beatty, “Messenger from Mars,”
Sky and Telescope
(July 1997): pp. 36–39.

Over at the Gilruth Center
• Gibson and other members of the McKay group would defend their claims later that year: see Everett K. Gibson, Jr., David S. McKay, Kathie Thomas-Keprta, and Christopher S. Romanek, “The Case for Relic Life on Mars,”
Scientific American,
vol. 277 (December 1997): pp. 58–65.

But models developed by
• Ralph Harvey, of Case Western Reserve University, and Harry Y. McSween Jr., of the University of Tennessee, provided one of the strongest assaults on the low-temp argument. See Ralph Harvey and Harry Y. McSween Jr., “A Possible High-Temperature Origin for the Carbonates in the Martian Meteorite ALH84001,”
Nature,
vol. 382 (July 4, 1996): pp. 49–51. They suggested the carbonates were formed by a rapid reaction between rock and boiling water during an impact on Mars by an asteroid or comet.

Joseph L. Kirschvink
• Joseph L. Kirschvink et al., “Paleomagnetic Evidence of a Low-Temperature Origin of Carbonate in the Martian Meteorite ALH84001,”
Science
(Mar. 14, 1997): pp. 1629–33.

Within four years
• J. E. P. Connerny et al., “The Global Magnetic Field of Mars and Implications for Crustal Evolution,”
Geophysical Research Letters
(Nov. 1, 2001): pp. 4015–18.

“One thing is clear,”
• White paper by the McKay group, presented at the meeting.

Science
magazine would
• Richard Kerr, “Life on Mars: Martian Rocks Tell Divergent Stories,”
Science
(Nov. 8, 1992): p. 918.

As for the
• Steven J. Dick and James E. Strick,
Living Universe
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004): p. 196.

Simon Clemett, of Zarelab
• Simon J. Clemett et al., “Evidence for the Extraterrestrial Origin of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in the Martian Meteorite ALH84001,”
Faraday Discussions
(
of the Chemical Society
) 109 (1998): pp. 417–36. Harvey told the author, “We found that, yes, indeed, there were these little wormy-looking shapes there, but they were a very small subset of a larger continuum of things that went from wormy little things to plates to mineral faces.”

See also A. J. T. Jull et al., “Isotopic Composition of Carbonates in the SNC Meteorites Allan Hills 84001 and Nakhla,”
Meteoritics,
vol. 30 (1995): pp. 311–18. Tim Jull, of the University of Arizona, and his colleagues had reported evidence that the carbonate globules—with which the PAHs were closely associated—contained terrestrial contamination. Their research showed much more carbon 14 than should have been present, given that the isotope is radioactive and decays quickly. Something must have replaced it recently. The team’s explanation was that terrestrial carbon penetrated and replenished the depleted supply of carbon 14, and this meant that terrestrial oxygen might have followed the same path.

Others argued that
• J. P. Bradley, R. P. Harvey, and H. Y. McSween Jr., “No ‘Nanofossils’ in Martian Meteorite,”
Nature
(Dec. 4, 1997): p. 454. Richard Zare, Clemett’s boss at Zarelab, would also issue a statement (
Stanford News,
Jan. 14, 1998) noting that the Bada research had focused on amino acids in the meteorite, not PAHs. Because amino acids are water soluble, water saturation “provides a potential mechanism for carrying contaminated material into the meteorite’s interior. Therefore, I do not find it all that surprising that these compounds may be terrestrial in origin.” But, he went on, “Because the PAHs are highly insoluble, however, I do not feel that the Bada study can be extrapolated to them. Therefore, I conclude that this work does not shed any important new light on the origin of the PAHs in ALH84001.”