The Rock From Mars (7 page)

The last Apollo astronauts would come home on December 19, 1972, just three and a half years after David McKay watched Armstrong scoop up that first bag of moon dust. The six landing parties on the lunar surface would collectively haul back a total of 842 pounds of moon stuff. It would be enough to keep a few people, including McKay, gainfully employed for decades.

The formerly supercharged Houston space complex aged through the 1980s, developing the outward ambience of a quiet, rural college campus, where the outrageous swamp climate and the surreal routines of human space flight were gentled with a landscaping of duck ponds and shade trees.

Out along the approach road reclined the symbol of NASA’s faded glory: a giant Saturn moon rocket dismantled into pieces for tourists to inspect, like lengths of fossilized bone from a mythic biotech dragon. Rimming the campus were strip malls, waterfront boating attractions, and tidy residential neighborhoods with in-ground swimming pools galore. A nearby McDonald’s sported a supersized, fiberglass astronaut thirteen feet tall, whose outstretched left arm beckoned with an order of fries. A new kid-oriented, space-lite tourist attraction was taking shape just west of the government complex. Along NASA Road 1, which linked the space center to the interstate, the ratio of vacant lots and shuttered buildings to funky space-souvenir shops, light industry, motels, and restaurants rose and fell with the economic tides.

By 1993, David and Mary Fae McKay had raised three daughters, two of them already independent young adults. David McKay’s dark mane had thinned and turned white, making his dark brown eyes appear more prominent behind his glasses. Approaching sixty, he was coping with a bad heart, a trait inherited from his father. Barely visible in his ear was a hearing aid.

McKay had now spent so much time at his scanning electron microscope that he was acutely allergic to the Polaroid coating used on the films. He’d gotten that way from using a squeegee countless times over the years to smooth out the photos (before digital technology came along and eliminated that step). If he so much as touched a photograph, blisters would pop up on his fingers.

He had become a master of the scanning electron microscope, having developed a deep understanding of how the software talked to the hardware and an almost uncanny feel for the physical nature of electron bombardment. This understanding was valuable if one was to extract maximum information from the instrument. Some who worked with McKay thought there must be few, if any, better at the technique—or, rather, the art—and certainly no one better in NASA. Once, in the early 1990s, McKay and a coworker were frustrated with the images, not able to get the quality they wanted. The colleague, much impressed, would remember years later how McKay decided to fetch the engineering drawings that had come with the manuals, traced the problem back to its cause, and tweaked the microscope accordingly.

McKay’s natural bent was to go beyond the measurement and analysis of his microscopic samples and try to reproduce those results by conducting an experiment, if possible. He wanted to show how the items under the microscope had come to be made in nature. Among other things, this led him to design experiments that helped show how future explorers might use the moon’s natural resources to manufacture oxygen on the lunar surface.

Inside Building 31, as the cracks in the linoleum spread and the direness of money struggles rose, McKay’s little corner of the world took on the musty ambience of a backwater. But within this domain, he had risen to senior status and accumulated professional honors. His office wall was covered with award plaques and certificates. He had accepted the vicissitudes of office politics good-naturedly, always the good soldier, passionate about his work but unobtrusive.

By now, McKay had written a couple of hundred papers on lunar topsoil alone, including the major breakthroughs published in the early 1970s. In a sense, you could say that McKay had spent most of his adulthood on the lifeless surface of the moon.

His reputation for taking excruciating care in his work was as persistent as bedrock—but maddening, at times, to friends. Wendell Mendell, a space physicist and lunar specialist down the hall, occasionally found himself gritting his teeth at McKay’s infernal caution. But he also admired McKay’s focused and principled approach to his work. One day in the late 1980s, the two of them were walking to lunch while discussing some big policy controversy the physicist had gotten himself involved in. McKay rebuked him.

“You’ve got to stop this. You’ve got to get back to writing proposals and doing research or else you’ll never be competitive. You’ll never get back into the competition against other scientists because you’ll lose your edge, you’ll lose your expertise, you’ll lose your knowledge.” McKay’s overriding message was “Stop diddling with all this hand-wringing stuff and get back to good, hard, honest work doing science.”

Mary Fae, with a Ph.D. in English, worked as a technical writer and editor at the space center, and was known to be an aggressive (some said “difficult”) advocate of her point of view. Since 1980, McKay’s brother Gordon, also blessed with the geology gene, had worked in the same building. Gordon was nine years younger than David, and some of their coworkers perceived at least the ordinary level of sibling rivalry there.

David and Mary Fae had moved the family and their cats into a three-story modern glass-and-cedar sanctuary hidden away in a cul-de-sac. They’d bought three acres of woodland, dense with oak and southern pine trees, which backed up to Clear Creek, a tributary of Galveston Bay. They deliberately left the lot wild. It had been affordable on their government salaries because it was part of a hundred-year floodplain. Their architect, a friend, told them it was the most modest home he had ever worked on. He designed it to withstand the one flood they thought they might get during an anticipated thirty-year tenure in the house. They relegated the ground floor to serve as a kind of basement, with a shop and laundry room.

In July 1979, two months after they moved in, they played host to a five-hundred-year storm. A record rain sent eight feet of water surging through the property. That same summer, they had a second flood that crested at four feet. Having learned their lesson, they removed the carpeting from the wood stairs and converted them to tile-covered steel. They made a few other adjustments and settled in, with the expectation that every so often tons of water would course through their quotidian underpinnings.

Once, they found a family of armadillos living under the front porch. They caught glimpses of opossums and other creatures in their woods. And one time, a large pileated woodpecker attacked the cedar house, pecking through a wall and wreaking considerable damage.

Their second floor, at a safe altitude, held the living and dining rooms, with a soaring cathedral ceiling over a low fireplace, and a gourmet kitchen where they liked to entertain. They covered the floors with muted Oriental rugs. Walls of glass on two levels made the thickets of trees part of the decor. A corner of one other house, barely visible at some distance through the foliage, was the only sign of neighbors. A Houston magazine did an article on the place.

The house abounded with evidence of the McKays’ ongoing romance with Japan. On the walls of the staircases hung brilliant Japanese wedding kimonos; a shelf next to the kitchen held trompe l’oeil plates of pasta and other artificial foods manufactured in Japan. On the flood-prone ground level, they had installed a Japanese-style hot tub. And central to the main level was a tatami room (named after the straw matting that covered the floor), a clever conception the McKays had learned to appreciate. On a raised platform that could be closed off by sliding wooden doors (
fusuma
), the room held several low tables and stacks of floor cushions and backrests. According to the need, it could be a family TV room where the kids could sprawl or it could provide relaxed dining for six to eight guests. Many an evening, the house in the woods bustled with the McKays’ guests, chatting and sipping margaritas or beer.

Johnson Space Center, like any closed society, had its share of jungle rivalries and cliques. Civil servants, for instance, were in a loftier caste than contract employees, and the former did not invite the latter to their Christmas parties, and vice versa. Newcomers considered the Apollo-era crowd quite the old-boy clique.

At the same time, the atmosphere was one of intellectual curiosity and collegiality. On Fridays, a group of planetary scientists from Building 31 would meet at a small Vietnamese restaurant up the road from the space center. As they shared entrées, they would also trade far-out ideas and indulge in freewheeling “what-iffing,” about scientific possibilities, the potential for surprises in nature, and the like. In this setting, they could let their hair down. As one occasional participant put it, “they would pluck ideas up like Clean Wipes”—tissues widely used in laboratories—“and throw them away.”

The McKays became good friends with a sunny young woman named Robbie Score—not only through their work in Building 31 but also on the party circuit. By the early 1990s, Score had gained considerable influence in the archives up on the second floor, where the growing Antarctic meteorite collection—the bounty of the “poor man’s space program”—was housed. Well versed in the rocks, she was also famously generous in assisting those who wanted to study them—her “dudes and dudettes,” as she sometimes called them.

The desperate dyspepsia in the space program had grown so deep that NASA had almost nowhere to go but up. In 1986, the
Challenger
tragedy, besides killing seven astronauts, exposed flaws and fissures that branched throughout the agency. The staggering fallout of that event—emotional, political, technical, and otherwise—finally obliterated the flickering halo of infallibility that had lingered from the Apollo triumphs. The thrust into space had long since metamorphosed from a national security imperative to a discretionary budget item, competing for money head-to-head with war veterans and cancer research. And NASA was racking up a record of failed projects, delays, and enormous cost overruns.

The space shuttle program was plagued with technical glitches and delays. Congress seemed on course to cancel the presumed centerpiece of the agency’s future—the costly project to build a space station to serve as a laboratory complex in low Earth orbit. NASA engineers had launched the long-awaited, “revolutionary” Hubble space telescope into orbit with a devastating flaw in its lens, making the project an object of derision. A megamission arriving at Mars was lost to another human error. And in 1989, when the first President Bush proposed that the United States revive the exploration of the moon and Mars, NASA and its private contractors responded with a plan so expensive, self-interested, and unimaginative that the initiative sank like a rock.

A fed-up White House had recently fired the NASA chief and brought in a new one, who vowed to reform the agency, shake it out of its defensive crouch, and inject it with new energy—no matter how many enemies he might earn.

There had been times, especially during the 1980s, when McKay and his coworkers wondered whether the whole agency would be shut down. He kept up his contacts with universities, on the theory that he might have to go job hunting.

But McKay preferred working for the government. The pay was reasonable. The benefits were good. And his senior status gave him job security, as long as the agency itself survived. He had money for the research he enjoyed, and he didn’t particularly want to teach. Besides, he had friends at universities who’d convinced him that the politics of academe were even more horrific than those in the NASA sandboxes. McKay once remarked, “I always go along to get along, then I do what I want to do.”

By the early 1990s, McKay had concluded that, in more than one sense, the moon was deader than Elvis. McKay’s work had earned him a reputation as one of the world’s masters on his chosen subject, and he had published some two hundred papers, but he had become increasingly aware that his was a narrow audience—maybe a couple of dozen people who read his work carefully.

It was important to him that his achievements be known and respected within the tribe. He was doing the “good, hard, honest work” of science. But he was getting tired of doing research so far out of mainstream geology. In the perpetual battles for funding, more alluring celestial bodies and rival NASA groups had wrested away much of the money and attention.

In short, McKay felt he had been on the same dusty path too long. As he would remark one day, “I’ve studied agglutinates until I’m sick of them.”

McKay was expanding into new territory: He had taken up meteorites and, well, yes, more dust. But it was a different kind of dust
—cosmic
dust, the dust that rains through space. He had been casting about for something unprecedented, something fresh to restoke his cooling fires.

Very soon, a couple of the guys down the hall would come to him with just the thing.

CHAPTER THREE

ODD DUCKS

“S
HERGOTTY
, N
AKHLA
,
AND
Chassigny. Shergotty, Nakhla, and Chassigny.” The names rang in the brain like some incantation from the netherworld. For David “Duck” Mittlefehldt, the words provided the essential key that would loft Robbie Score’s rock out of obscurity and expose its special gifts.

The year was 1993, and another muggy Houston summer was yielding to fall. Building 31 was so quiet you could almost hear the roaches ticking along behind the walls. Just about everybody wore crepe-soled shoes or sneakers, so there was no echo of footfall; only the white noise of humming machinery. People here often worked behind doors with combination locks and multiple warning signs:
DANGER
:
HIGH VOLTAGE
and
DANGER
:
POISON GAS
. Exposed wire bundles were routed high around the walls, and in some places dust bunnies collected in the corners behind space-age machinery on well-worn linoleum floors.

In one of these quiet labs, Mittlefehldt, a wiry guy with a beard, a receding hairline, and a resemblance to the actor Michael Keaton, sat and stared at his problem. Mittlefehldt was in the middle of one of those pivotal moments when a human mind, revved on a combination of its own accumulated knowledge, frustration, learned skills, instinct, competitive drive, anxiety, and imagination, finally uncoiled for a leap of insight that would send ripples through the world.

Or maybe, as he would say with a shrug, if he hadn’t thought of it, somebody else would have, and besides, it had taken him long enough.

Either way, Mittlefehldt’s train of logic would lead to the unmasking of the mother of all planetary rocks. The leap would change the lives of David McKay and several other people working, unawares, in this building and in other places thousands of miles away. It would trigger no end of public fuss. And, as so often happens in these matters, this wasn’t at all what Mittlefehldt had set out to do—which could help explain why it had taken him so long.

He had acquired the nickname Duck in college, and it had stuck. Scattered around his small office in Building 31, Mittlefehldt kept a collection of duck magnets, plastic ducks, duck pictures, and duck postcards, including a depiction of fat, feathery duck bottoms sticking out of water. There was a stained-glass wall hanging with a couple of ducks taking wing. Friends noted with amusement that he would refer in a published geology paper to “duck-shaped” features.

Flanked by his feathered support group, Mittlefehldt pondered the infernal microscope images of tiny grains from a meteorite. They had vexed him off and on for some years now, and here he was again. They were odd; they didn’t fit in. They had threatened to mess up his major project. He was a stuck duck.

A geochemist, Mittlefehldt had gravitated to meteorite studies on a whim back in 1973, as a graduate student at UCLA. It was at about that time that he became friends with a younger geology student named Robbie Score. Now both of them were in Houston and she was on the staff of the Antarctic meteorite lab that supplied his rock samples. They both worked here in the cloistered preserves of Building 31, staring at minuscule, pedestrian crumbs of what seemed the humblest matter. But their shared preoccupation was with vast sweeps of time and space.

Mittlefehldt believed firmly that humans should explore space, not only to enrich human understanding of nature but as a matter of sheer survival, in case the species should need a second world to live on. (Remember the dinosaurs!) He had been at work for several years on what he hoped would be a valuable contribution to the emerging picture of what was “out there” around Earth, and how it had gotten there. It was a major project to decipher the hidden record carried inside certain asteroids, odd-shaped, beat-up rocks that swarmed along an orbital track concentrated between Mars and Jupiter.

In 1988, in pursuit of that goal, Mittlefehldt had applied to the meteorite curators down the hall for a sample of a resoundingly ordinary family of meteorites that had most likely been knocked off the asteroid 4 Vesta in a series of collisions. Vesta’s diameter of more than three hundred miles (almost five hundred kilometers) made it one of the largest known asteroids and a rich source of the space debris that rained steadily down on Earth.

The rocks that were widely presumed to be spawn of Vesta had been subjected to such intense heat early in their existence that they had started to melt. Mittlefehldt hoped to learn what had produced this prodigious heat in the embryonic solar system. Happily, the Antarctic had coughed up a number of new specimens in this family, and Mittlefehldt intended to study as many as he could get his hands on. His goal was to produce the first systematic study of its kind.

One of the supposedly plain-vanilla meteorite samples that Robbie Score’s lab sent Mittlefehldt was actually from the odd rock that Score had picked up in 1984. The world knows now that it did
not
come from Vesta. But to find that out, Mittlefehldt was building on a whole history of little advances by other people who were intensely fascinated by rocks.

On Earth, rock is the cool skin that insulates life on the surface from the inferno deep inside the planet; it is the foundation upon which civilizations were built, the universal benchmark of stability. Rock distinguishes the inner planets. Except for the little oddball Pluto, the outer planets are big gas balls with no defined surface.

In the minerals that make up rock—natural crystalline assemblies of chemical elements—geologists can read the chronicle of Earth’s history. And in the years leading up to Mittlefehldt’s epiphany that summer day, scientists had begun to see in the rocks that fell from space, as one put it, useful “keys that can unlock the vaults of cosmic memory.”

If Mittlefehldt’s timing had been a little off, his efforts might not have triggered such a remarkable train of events. But his unmasking of the rock happened to fit nicely with changes in the portrait of nature that had only recently begun to surface. So, thanks to his aggravated—but unhurried—curiosity, the rock’s days of obscurity were numbered.

Once launched, however, the investigation into the rock’s hidden past would be as unguided as the rock’s own journey had been. The quest would turn into a kind of sporadic human relay race with no starting gun, no master, no one who knew where the finish line was or what it would look like. You might say it took on a life of its own.

But first, Mittlefehldt had to figure out the salient fact: somebody had misidentified this sample.

After Robbie Score’s hunting team shipped the rock home from Antarctica, it arrived in Houston (along with the other frozen samples in the 1984–85 season’s haul) in a big shipping container. Each specimen was sealed in its own sanitized bag and wound like a mummy with tape. The specimen then joined the growing ranks of space rocks on the second floor of the Building 31 complex.

The meteorite suite featured a Class 10,000 clean room designed to minimize contamination. It had a special air-filtration system, and the rules required that anyone entering take off all metal jewelry, don a surgical-type cap, gown, and shoe covers, and pass through an air shower.

The complex had a culinary air about it, with its bright lights, pristine tables, cabinets like industrial refrigerators, and ovens. Some of the samples in their plastic wrap rested in metal containers that resembled lasagna pans. But then there were the arms. Disembodied black-rubber arms, with hands, waved and swayed organically in the moving air currents as if beckoning—or cautioning. The lab technicians would put their own arms inside, reversing the gloves to the inside of the chambers, in order to work on the rocks without breaching the sterile environment.

Here, the curators weighed the rock from Allan Hills and recorded a deliberately superficial description. A technician equipped with a small silver hammer and a rock saw, operating inside the rubber arms, attacked the rock from the angular, “hackly” end (as opposed to the smooth, blocky end) and split off one-half gram for dispatch to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where it was to be analyzed and classified in more detail. The mother rock stayed in Houston, in the archives, usually put away in a nitrogen cabinet and sealed in a nylon bag.

In late spring of 1985, the chip from the Allan Hills rock—resting in a tiny box like an engagement ring—arrived at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Upstairs from the exhibitions and down some long pastel-drab corridors that resembled those of Building 31 in Houston was an office and laboratory complex off-limits to tourists.

There, the task of classifying the Allan Hills rock fell to a young meteorite curator named Glenn MacPherson, a relative newcomer to the job whose boss was away on a sabbatical. With Robbie Score’s rock, which was not designated as a high priority, he did the same thing he would do with some six hundred such samples flowing through his lab that season. In due course, a techician sliced, ground, and polished the sample into sections so thin they were transparent (thinner than a piece of paper). These sections could be used over and over by different researchers, like a library book.

After the usual prep work, MacPherson examined the shard through an electron microprobe that showed its chemical composition. After about half an hour, he decided the rock was a piece of an ordinary asteroid. His finding appeared in the August 1985
Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter,
a description of the season’s haul circulated to those who might be interested in requesting samples for research.

The newsletter first presented Roberta Score’s eyeball assessment: “Eighty percent of this rectangular-shaped [meteorite] is covered with dull black fusion crust. . . . Areas not covered by fusion crust have a greenish-gray color and a blocky texture. Cleavage planes are obvious on some large crystal faces and the stone has a shocked appearance.” She had noted small areas of oxidation and abundant small black grains scattered throughout, adding, “Small fractures are numerous.” She had judged it to be an achondrite, a rare kind of stony meteorite.

Following that paragraph was MacPherson’s microscopic analysis, classifying the rock as a “diogenite” (i.e., a common igneous rock from an asteroid, most likely 4 Vesta). He got the basics right: “The meteorite consists of orthopyroxene . . . that forms a polygonal-granular mosaic. . . . Veins of intensely granulated pyroxene cross cut the section. . . . Other phases include minor chromite and irregular patches of a featureless and isotropic maskelynite. The section . . . does contain patches of brown, Fe-rich [iron-rich] carbonate.” He attributed this odd rusty character—odd for this type of meteorite—to weathering that had occurred on Earth.

The rock had fooled him, true. But this was in part because MacPherson felt honor-bound under the ground rules laid down by meteorite investigators
not
to learn too much about the meteorite. It was standard practice for the person classifying a new sample to do the minimum necessary. This prevented him or anyone else in the curator’s lab from skimming off the cream of information on incoming specimens, thereby robbing all the hungry investigators out there of the prizes that had lured them to study such rocks in the first place—the unprecedented insights that led to published papers and enhanced reputations.

Years later, despite his conviction that he had done his job properly, MacPherson could not help feeling a touch of chagrin when this unremarked event, this routine encounter with one little wafer among the many, became a footnote in a very public and ferocious feud.

The meteorite curators in Houston had based their selection of Duck Mittlefehldt’s sample on this initial misidentification. At first, Mittlefehldt accepted the assessment written on the label. To be sure, he noted that the “asteroid” sample included some weird signs and portents, considering its humble parentage. (There were a lot of carbonates, for instance, which were previously unknown in this ordinary family of meteorite.) But Mittlefehldt, like the few others who had studied pieces of it at this point, at first assumed that these were the result of weathering during the rock’s long sojourn in Antarctic ice. Otherwise, his initial bulk analysis of the chip’s chemical composition showed no significant conflict with a relatively ordinary origin on Vesta.

Finding himself with traces of the Allan Hills rock left over after these studies, Mittlefehldt glued the remnant grains—only a few times larger than the period at the end of this sentence (about a square millimeter)—to a glass slide and polished them flat. In the spring of 1990, he put the grains under an electron microprobe, which fired a narrow stream of electrons at them. (Their atoms would give off X-rays with an energy signature unique to whatever element was in the target item, and with an intensity that indicated the amount of that element.)

“This can’t be right,” he thought. The results indicated properties and interactions that seemed impossible on the parent asteroid.

Growing up in Jamestown, New York, Mittlefehldt had discovered as early as third grade that he had a natural affinity for science, even though there was no familial goad in that direction. His mother worked for an insurance company, and his dad was employed by the local bank. But he somehow always knew more about scientific subjects—anything at all to do with science—than the other kids.

But now his confidence in his own instincts wavered. He was still assuming that the curator back in Washington had been correct, and therefore his analysis must be in error even though he had carried it out with his usual rigor.

Mittlefehldt kept an open mind. He knew this was often the way you learned new things: you focused in on these little oddities, things that didn’t add up—the geological odd ducks—and you chased them down. They were usually trying to tell you something important. But it took a focused effort to climb out of the old sucking sump of conventional thinking.

Mittlefehldt dropped the matter and moved on to other things. That was the way he liked to work: keep several projects going at once, put the riddles aside, and let them simmer and churn in his subconscious for a while. They would get sorted out in their own good time.