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.
Obsessed? The credit goes to Malin's master camera-making and both men's skill at geological analysis of images. Like many successful researchers, they are also fired by passions that date from childhood and verge on obsession. Malin and Edgett are the nearest things to Martians humanity has yet produced.
Malin still has the space scrapbook he started as a 5-year-old in Burbank, Calif., its first entry a newspaper photo of a V-2 rocket at White Sands (N.M.) Missile Range. In high school he built camera-toting rockets from aluminum tubing and ceramic nozzles he cast himself, sending them soaring thousands of feet above the Mojave desert. At the University of California-Berkeley, while others covered radical 1960s politics for the Daily Cal student paper, he wrote of Apollo.
The Mars bug bit at Caltech when Malin, then a geology grad student, was enlisted to catalog some 10,000 images from the Mariner IX Mars mission. Most researchers turned away from Mars by the mid-1980s, following the failure of the Viking landers to find life, but Malin, by then a young faculty member at Arizona State University, persisted. "He was always a maverick," said Caltech's Arden Albee, chief scientist for Mars Global Surveyor, who flatly says Malin has done more than any other Mars scientist in the past 10 years. "He hates being told what to do."
In 1987 Malin won a MacArthur "genius grant" fellowship. Never married, free to spend the money as he liked, he used it to help start his space camera and photo analysis company in 1990, with NASA as the prime client. The setup lets Malin take part in the space program while partly insulating him from bureaucracy.
His acolyte Edgett got started on Mars even younger. In 1975 his fourth-grade teacher in Rochester, N.Y., assigned the class to write a story, and thus was born "The Legend of Joe the Martian." Edgett wrote four more Joe stories on his own. A year later he inhaled news of the Viking landings. "They made Mars real for me," he recalls. The 10-year-old memorized Martian locales, savoring such exotica as Chryse Planitia, Utopia, Valles Marineris, and the mighty volcano Olympus Mons. After studies at Arizona State, he signed on with Malin and his new company. And recently he returned to his roots, coauthoring a children's book, Touchdown Mars: An ABC Adventure, about kids who fly there with their cat.
The pair are hardly twins. Edgett is friendly and easygoing, "a huggy bear," as one old friend from grad school called him. Malin is all fire and tightly wound ambition, and more than a few other scientists are wary of him. He now turns loose all accumulated MOC images every six months, but early on colleagues accused him of hoarding data, even refusing to lend images. (Malin retorts that some co-investigators backed out on deals to help run the camera and says that he was better about sharing data than some scientists on earlier missions.) Another colleague recalls Malin brutally denigrating competitors' instruments. "It can take a compulsive person to succeed in this business, and Mike is that," says Murray of his former grad student. "I think his temperament is in some ways like the old Antarctic explorers, a Scott or Shackleton."
Like pole-obsessed explorers, Malin and Edgett don't plan to stop going back to Mars. After the Mars Global Surveyor mission ends in the next several years, one of their cameras will fly aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to be launched in 2005, and they don't expect that to be the last. Their photos are as close as this generation is likely to get to the surface of Mars. When separately asked their biggest fear, Malin and Edgett had the same gloomy surmise. As Edgett put it, "We'll be dead before somebody actually goes there and really figures that place out."
The Mars archives
The more than 100,000 images from the Mars Orbiter Camera portray a turbulent planet, with rock layers apparently deposited by ancient floods and gullies perhaps cut by recent bursts of groundwater. The selection at right--keyed to the full planet (left)--also includes intimate details such as dust-devil tracks.
1. LAYERS Erosion reveals ancient rock layers in a view about 2 miles across.
2. VOLCANO A 15-mile-wide crater is a relic of an eruption early in Martian history.
3. DUST DEVILS Half-mile-long gullies end near curlicue tracks of whirlwinds.
4. VALLEYS The walls of these mile-wide troughs probably follow ancient fractures.
This story appears in the April 15, 2002 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.