| A Word Edgewise
by Mary Joe Clendenin |
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MARS ROVER AS THE MOON EAGLE, PRODUCTS OF TECHNOLOGY OF THE TIMES
People around White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, where so many rockets had sought and finally accomplished the break-away from Earth's gravity, were ecstatic. Apollo was on its way home from the moon mission completed. I saved some Alamogordo Daily News from those exciting days. July 22, 1969, a piece from the Space Center, Houston, Texas, said goodbye to the Eagle, the chick of the Apollo which was the moon lander.
From a quarter of a million miles, through the blackness of space, you gave us a sense of our bigness and our smallness, Eagle. A vision of living creatures, more alike than unalike, hanging by their thumbs to the one warm blue sphere we yet see in the lifeless void. Salaam and salom, Eagle.
The Eagle, like the Mars Rover, was destined to remain. It would orbit the moon a few more times, the orbit decaying gradually until fragments landed back on moon surface. Plans are to retrieve the Rover at some future date, but the two technological wonders "gave us a sense of our bigness and our smallness." The whole world, for a few hours, celebrated with the men and women directly associated with the planning, and working of those plans. We shared a wonder.
The Rover was transported over 300 million miles, while the Eagle only went a a short journey in comparison. The difference can be accounted to exploding advances in technology in just thirty years.
I was a member of a National Science Institute at New Mexico State University, about 1962, with thirty or so other math teachers, taking courses in physics, atomic physics, of all things--way over my head. We made a field trip to Los Alamos Laboratories to get a glimpse of what was going on. There we saw the atomic reactor, actually saw from an observation deck the glowing rods under several feet of water. (Precautions, too, were new and few). We also saw one of the first ever computers. It filled a room, at least 30 x 30 feet, so big because that was as "chips" and circuit boards were just coming into use. That old computer used vacuum tubes, and required super air conditioning because of the heat generated by operating. It was continually shutting down as one or another tube went out taking hours to find which one in the many consoles that made up the one machine.
But with that first computer up-dated as quickly as knowledge became available, slide rules, simple adding machines, formulas, pencils and hard work, mathematicians and scientists completed computations necessary to successfully launch Apollo, bring it back through a space window that would allow it to re-enter Earth's atmosphere without skidding off into eternity. The landing was a wet one, an ocean one, but it all happened as planned and the three astronauts came home safely to the wonderment of the world.
In 1903, a great debate was in progress about the possibility of life on Mars. Professor Percival Lowell from Flagstaff, Arizona, reported a large projection on Mars had been discovered, leading Prof. Garrett P. Serviss to declare that the planet was undoubtedly inhabited. Another professor, from Paris, declared that the projection was only an illumination of the clouds or lofty mountain summits in the setting sun.
Professor Lowell backed up his claims with drawings of a network of canals which he saw. "The Martians," he claimed, "enjoy a climate not more unlike ours than ours is unlike itself in different places. . .the air is thin and almost cloudless, and the country badly watered, the people must irrigate to live."
He went on to surmise that the giant polar ice cap melted in the summer requiring the system of canals to carry water to places on the surface. Lowell did not claim to actually see the water, but the burst of vegetation along the sides of the canals after they were watered.
Opponents to the theory of life and canals on Mars, claimed that the trick was in the eyes of the beholders. Lowell admitted that it took patience and training to see the Martian wonders, but the arguments have gone on through nearly 100 years now.
Through the eyes of a little wonder, the Mars Rover, about the size of a boot box, at least some of the questions about Mars will be answered. Will the answers remove the mystery, the romance? Can a "War of the Worlds," and invasion of extra-terrestrials still have the power to bring excitement into our lives? I hope so. Explorations and investigations keep imaginations alive and possibilities ever at hand. What an exciting time to live.
(Information about Prof. Lowell and his adversaries came from Current Literature and Current History, July, 1903. Is that an oxymoron, "current history?")