SPACE.com: More than a century after astronomers discovered "the canals" of Mars, the planet remains as mysterious as ever and just as intriguing to the public. Why is that?
Dr. William Hartmann:
I think this is because Mars is the most Earth-like planet by far in the solar system. There are a lot of geological features there that are familiar to us -- lava flows, sand dunes, river beds and possible shoreline features. The big news is that though it is a dry dusty cold planet on the surface, we believe now that over the last few years of research, that there is a lot more water underground as frozen ice. That has revved up the interest even more. It adds to the possibility that life may have started up on Mars.
In Guide you mention the analogous relationship between Iceland and the near polar regions of Mars. How much can geologists infer by studying similar regions on Earth?
Well, quite a lot, actually. For example, in 2001 we found the hillside gullies on mars and there was a lot of discussion about whether they were caused by water or liquid CO2. When we saw that Iceland and Greenland as well as parts of Canada all had gullies like those found on Mars, that strongly supported the idea that the Mars gullies were caused by wated. It’s a familiar process as to what we've seen on Earth.
You say in your book that, "the Cydonia area has been the subject of a time-wasting, deliberately orchestrated, and pseudo scientific frenzy about one of the mesas." Tell us how you really feel about the alleged "Face on Mars"? Do you think the media misinforms the public intentionally?
Not the media in general, but I think we've seen a change in the media in our country. When I was a growing up, publishers were very embarrassed to realize they published something that was incorrect. There was an understanding that things needed to be vetted and checked. But now, people seek out certain kinds of publishers and TV producers, they seek out a market niche for a story. It doesn't matter how absurd the story is, if it attracts a certain market niche or gets viewers than it is viewed as a commercial success and that gets honored. I worry about the students I talk to now. How do they know when they're getting a good, accurate story or if it’s a Fox news program that says the Apollo missions never happened? I had students in my classroom asking if this really happened, if it was a hoax. The fact that these stories turn out to be wrong doesn't seem to be a factor.
The Guide is a wonderful format to explain a planet, why did you choose it? Are you a traveler yourself?
The idea for the guide format actually came from my publisher. They are good at designing interesting books. I picked three dozen places on Mars that were interesting and had dramatic landscapes with exotic geology. My challenge as a writer was to try to link them and tell the chronology of Mars from the oldest to the newest geological feature. I like traveling, thought, and in the last few years I've been going to a lot of international meeting and I have sidebars in the book from working with the many people I've met in my travels. Traveling, I think, is what helps break down barriers between people. Your not just exploring Mars, but you're exploring it with Russians and Germans, people from all over the world, and that's a neat concept and a neat community.
As exciting as the robotic missions are, do you think they add to people's frustrations about actually sending humans to the planet?
We have to have robotic missions now because we don't have the human missions, though I try to promote a mix of human and robotic missions when I speak. This is a good time to talk to the American people about space exploration and to emphasize that we want to give our grandchildren the opportunity to live out there, operating in what I call our cosmic environment -- the moon Mars, the asteroids and the inner solar system. People use the world environment to decribe the conditions that we live with here on Earth, but our environment goes out beyond that. Are we going to go out and develop the larger resources that are out there in space, including 24-hour solar energy?
With the Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey continually sending information back, how difficult was it to keep the science on Mars up-to-date and accurate prior to publication?
Thing are evolving rapidly in Martian science, but I was the Mars Society meeting in Eugene, Oregon last week and Bob Zubrin held up the book and said it was the first book that gives an up-to-date view of the post-Viking science of mars. I was surprised that some other recent books on the subject only have the Viking view with appendices on the recent findings. When I began writing the book about a year ago I tried to portray the direction Mars science was moving in over the last two to three years -- relatively recent, young water and lava flows. I thought I was going out on a limb, but now more people are saying "yes, this is how mars is."
How crucial do you think the discovery of water on Mars would be to NASA, or any other international space agency, in adopting a policy of human exploration of the planet?
Water has already been discovered, Odyssey confirmed that it can see ice in the top few feet of the planet's surface. We know there is a cap of water ice on the north pole. But the growing evidence that there is lots of ice and that it melts does support the NASA philosophy of "follow the water." I think the NASA philosophy is paying off. Yes, there is water activity. Now we go directly toward finding out if life actually began there. The question of whether life started on Mars is a perfect scientific question because either answer is profound. If we find that life did begin on Mars, it means that we are not alone in the universe, it is the first time that we can say that for sure. On the other hand, if we go to Mars and it has water but life never took hold, it could be that we are alone in this universe or we're wrong about our theories of how life started. Either answer would be profound.
What do you hope the various Mars craft descending on the planet learn when they get there?
It will be exciting. All three landers are going to places where there could have been water in the past. It would be interesting to see that. The Terra Meridiani site is very interesting to me because there is a hematite deposit, evidence that there may have been a spring there. What I see with my research, which is mostly of craters, is that we see an old surface with many flattened, degraded craters, but very few small, sharp fresh craters. It looks to me to be an older surface that has recently been uncovered, strata has been stripped away within the last 20 million years. That might be the perfect place to find an old lakebed. This may be a particularly interesting spot.
In the long term do think the colonization of Mars is a good idea -- an ethical idea -- from an ecological perspective?
I think that the first thing we have to do is convince ourselves if there has ever been bacterial life there. We should be very careful. We know that Sojourner arrived on Mars with microbes, but we don’t want those leaking out and getting into the Mars aquifers. We should establish what microbial life, if any, is there on the planet. There is a profound question to be answered: Has life ever started on Mars? We don't want to lose our opportunity to answer that question by overloading Mars with terrestrial contamination, especially with the underground ice and possible underground water.
