Our First Martians
Mike Malin and Ken Edgett are right at home on the red planet
Late on a Tuesday morning in March, Ken Edgett plops down at his desk and mutters, "Gee, I'm 300 pictures behind." After a few quick strokes and clicks there appear, scrolling down his monitor, stark images of stony gullies and wind-streaked mesas, seen as if from a plane a few thousand feet above the Earth. But this is not the Earth.
And Edgett is no longer at Malin Space Science Systems Inc., in a bland commercial building tucked into the warren of technology firms on San Diego's north side. He is with his buddy Joe the Martian, soaring in thin, cold air over the ice caps, craters, and flood plains of the red planet.
Edgett, 36, is a bit vague about his home ground. He confesses that he can barely find the local shopping mall. But in his familiarity with the nooks and crannies of Mars, other researchers agree, Edgett has no equal. Close behind is his former professor and now boss, Mike Malin, 51, who held first place until the demands of running a company forced him to cut back.
For three years, each has spent as much as 80 hours a week staring at new images (more than 100,000 so far) gathered by a gadget called MOC, for Mars Orbiter Camera, which has been circling the planet since 1997 aboard the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. The camera, which Malin designed and built for NASA, is a technical triumph that could see a golf cart from 250 miles up. Malin Space Science Systems has been analyzing the stream of images it radios home.
Edgett leans into the display showing 2-mile-wide strips of Mars never before seen in detail: eroded channels, plains marked by zigzagging paths of whirlwinds, and terrains so weirdly churned he and Malin call them "taffy pull" lands. "I never get tired of this," he says.
Malin and Edgett's eyewitness reports are part of a continuing revolution in scientists' view of Mars. In spite of some spectacular failures--spacecraft that crashed, blew up, or went astray--a string of NASA probes have reached the planet in the past five years: Mars Global Surveyor and a lander, both in 1997, and the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which arrived last year to chart surface chemistry. Together they are revealing an unexpectedly complex and baffling planet. "The Mars we see is not the simple Mars we'd heard about," Malin says.
In the past two years, he and Edgett have "hit two big home runs," says former Jet Propulsion Laboratory Director Bruce Murray, who advised Malin when he was a grad student at Caltech. In 2000, they identified steep Martian cliffs that seemed to have gushed water in the recent past--although no one knows how liquid water could exist today near the frigid surface. Later that year they declared that billions of years ago, Mars was warmer, wetter, and far more dynamic than anybody had imagined. The evidence: wide regions of terraced rock thousands of feet thick, implying epochs of flooding to deposit the layers and erosion to lay them bare. A 141-page paper by the pair on these puzzles "is an instant classic," Murray adds.
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