40 Years Ago: The First Picture From Mars and more

On July 20, 1976, I was a student intern on the Viking mission to Mars at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California when Viking 1 made history’s first successful landing on the Red Planet. I was a member of the Lander Imaging Team, which was responsible for the lander’s twin cameras. The team leader, Dr. Thomas Mutch, was my professor at Brown University, and was a tremendous influence on me and countless other students. I wrote about him, and the incredible moment when humans saw the first picture from the Martian surface, in my book A Passion for Mars:

Dr. Mutch has already taken his place in the Blue Room next to Al Hibbs, the JPL engineer who serves as on-camera commentator for the mission. When the picture comes in – if it comes in – Dr. Mutch will describe what he sees, much as Neil Armstrong did as he took his first steps on the moon, seven years ago today. Up here in the imaging team area, Steve Saunders – one of Dr. Mutch’s former grad students, now a JPL planetary geologist – will be able to communicate with him over a headset. If Dr. Mutch needs any help from him and the other team geologists with interpreting the image, they’ll be ready.

“There are rocks, yes. There’s rocks, and, uh, there’s sediment, but it’s just incredible to see that Mars, you know, is really there.” Finally Dr. Mutch overcomes his own reticence and describes what he is seeing. He speaks in that clear, professorial tone I’ve heard many times before, but there’s something else mixed in, a trace of boyish enthusiasm that hints at the excitement underneath. No human has seen what he is seeing at this moment. With the world looking over his shoulder, my professor and advisor – this string-bean of a man with tortoise-shell glasses and unruly hair – is exploring the surface of Mars.

No one could blame Tim Mutch for not wanting to talk. The wonderful surprise, as he beheld the first image from Viking Lander 1, was not only that there was an image, but that it was as good as anyone could possibly have hoped. Even the exposure settings were perfect. His people had painstakingly calculated those settings years before, and they’d been right on the money. Sitting in the Blue Room with the world listening, however, Mutch was reluctant to jump the gun and announce that they had a superb picture before he was really sure they did. But as the image slowly built up into an elongated swath of Martian ground, Mutch knew they had really done it. Already he could see some details that reminded him of lunar scenes, like sharp-edged boulders that were probably blasted out of distant impact craters, and others reminiscent of desert landscapes on Earth, like tails of apparently windblown sediment behind rocks. The camera not only worked, it worked incredibly well.

That was apparent to everyone, not just the geologists, when the lander’s footpad began to appear; the familiar bowl-shaped pad was so clear that you could count the rivets. By that time Mutch was already impatient to see the next image, the one they called the survey. For this one, the camera would switch to a wider field of view and scan the ground from 20 degrees above the horizon to 40 degrees below it, across an arc as much as 200 degrees wide – or, if they were very lucky with the lander-to-orbiter relay link, even more. Based on what he saw in the first close-up, Mutch figured the survey image was going to be, as he told Al Hibbs, “mind-boggling.”

He was right. From the very first strip of data, the survey image was spectacular. In the distance Mutch could see what appeared to be drifts of sediment, snaking toward the horizon in the late-afternoon sunlight. Above, the sky was not the near-black canopy everyone had expected, but a surprisingly bright expanse – probably due to scattered light from airborne dust – that gave the whole scene a startlingly Earthlike feel. On the horizon there were fascinating details including ridges and hills that might be distant crater rims. And everywhere, there were rocks. They were scattered across the scene in all sizes and shapes, mute witnesses to eons of Martian evolution. This was a geologist’s paradise. “Just lovely,” he said quietly. “Just lovely.” Mutch could hardly believe that after eight years of struggle everything had turned out this well. Gazing at the unfolding panorama, he felt the same elation that comes from reaching a lofty and difficult summit. He had only one frustration: He wished he could get out of his chair, walk into the scene, and really explore it.

My friend Jim Cameron is best known as the filmmaker who gave us epics like Titanic and Avatar, but in his heart he is an explorer, as he explained in his foreword to my book A Passion for Mars. A few days ago, Jim did something that had me thrilled and terrified at the same time: He made the first solo dive to Earth’s deepest point, the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench.

Using a submersible of his own design, he reached a depth of more than 35,000 feet—almost seven miles—at pressures of nearly 16,000 pounds per square inch. There, where only two humans had been before, over half a century earlier, he found a landscape so desolate that it reminded him of the surface of the moon. He said later that it felt as if he’d literally gone to another planet and returned the same day. He’d planned to spend six hours on the bottom, but malfunctions in the craft’s robotic arm and maneuvering thrusters cut the dive short.

But this is just a beginning. Jim says he’ll be going back to the Challenger Deep to make further observations and collect samples. Another friend, NASA astrobiologist Kevin Hand, will be studying any creatures Jim is able to bring back from the abyss. To me, this is exploration at its greatest: Going where almost no one has ever been, seeing what no one has ever seen, and expanding our knowledge of the universe. To me, Jim is a planetary explorer, probing the remaining secrets of our own precious world, and inspiring us all to join the quest.

Last month, I was invited by the Federal Aviation Administration to give the final talk at their conference on commercial human spaceflight. I can’t recall a time that has felt more exciting, or more critical, in the last several decades. I was glad to have the chance to talk about how we got here, and where we need to go. What about you–where do you think we should go?

I had a fantastic time appearing on the Colbert Report. You can watch the video of my segment of the show here.

I’m getting ready to appear on one of my favorite TV shows, The Colbert Report, on April 4 on Comedy Central (tune in at 11:30 p.m. Eastern/Mountain/Pacific Time and 10:30 p.m. Central Time). I’ll be talking about the current and future space program, and my book, A Passion for Mars.