Mars has long
been a source
of fascination
David Levy at the
Jewish
National Home for
Asthmatic
Children in Septem
ber 1962.
on the road with Doveed
By DAVID H. LEVY
Sky’s Up Editor in Chief
Mars and I have been friends since February 2,
1963. On that evening I was a 14-year-old patient at
the Jewish National Home for Asthmatic Children.
I didn’t know much about anything, but I did want
to take a look at Mars. And I did understand that at
8:02 p.m. Mountain time, Mars would be in direct
opposition in the night sky, meaning that it would be
in the sky from dusk to dawn.
I assumed that Mars would put on quite a show.
Carefully checking my watch, I began looking at
this red planet just before 8. I thought that promptly
at 8:02, Mars would puff up in a burst of cosmic
radiance. I thought it would briefly become so bright
that I’d have to shield my eyes.
That never happened. Mars just stayed as it was.
I might have spotted a darker area at the top,
now understood to be one of the polar caps. But
essentially Mars just sat there, staring at me as I
stared at it.
After a while I brought Echo, my telescope, inside
our cottage where Jim, my houseparent, was waiting.
“You were standing behind the girls’ cottage with a
telescope,” he said accusingly. “What were you doing?”
“Looking at Mars,” I answered innocently.
Jim looked at me, then his face broke out in peals of
laughter. “You are the only person who could say that
and get away with it!”
And that is how I became friendly with Mars.
Mars at noon: No canals
My second encounter with Mars took place during
the Summer of 1965. Now 17, I was a camper at the
Adirondack Science Camp in upstate New York. I
saw the banner headline in the New York Times that
day. Humanity had just sent its first spacecraft flying
past Mars. Called Mariner 4, the craft was designed
to fly past the planet and take closeup pictures. One
48
specific area it was photographing was a spot where,
decades earlier, Percival Lowell had reported seeing
artificial canals there.
Would Mariner confirm both the canals and the
existence of intelligent life on Mars?
Mariner did neither. It spotted what appeared to
be a bright surface pockmarked with craters, but
nothing else, and certainly no canals. For those of
us who wanted so badly not to be alone, this was a
disappointment, but, as years passed, the question
of life on Mars would not go away. Intelligent life,
canal-building life? Probably not. But what about
simpler forms of sub-microbial life?
A fossil from Mars?
Several thousand years ago a bright meteorite
broke up in Earth’s atmosphere and crashed in the
Allan Hills region of Antarctica. In 1983, a team
discovered and collected that rock, and it has since
been confirmed that the specimen did indeed come
from Mars. In 1995, David McKay and his group of
planetary scientists suggested that the rock displayed
possible evidence of fossilized life. Despite a huge
amount of excitement at the time, it now appears not
likely that this was a fossil. But the questions linger.
At the time, McKay, the team leader, suggested that
it is possible that microscopic life forms persist to
this day.
Did the scientists have egg on their faces? Not at all.
Their discovery inspired an intense search for life on
other worlds, not just Mars, but ice-covered Europa,
a large moon of Jupiter, as well. The rock did not
answer any questions, but it did pose some brilliant
ones. Someone, perhaps someone reading these
pages of Sky’s Up, might be the one who comes up
with the answers, and, at the same time, poses even
more questions.
Sky ’ s
Up