I keep heading back to Mars, along with a lot of other folks who are interested enough in the Mars Exploration Rover mission to log in and see the “latest from Mars.” It’s sort of like having a web cam on Mars, and for Mars junkies, that’s great!
So, I was looking at this shot from the gallery today, taken on Sol 13, and it struck me again how familiar this alien world looks. These could be rocks I’ve hiked over on dozens of geology field trips back in college, or family jaunts to the mountains and desert. Once in Hawaii, I was hiking on a cinder cone and if I hadn’t been surrounded by scenery that told me otherwise (and of course, a breathable atmosphere), I could have been strolling across a cinder cone on Mars. The colors and textures were similar to scenes we’ve seen in Mars images.
Make no mistake, Mars is NOT Earthlike in any survivable sense. It may look just like the Arizona desert or a lava cone on Mauna Kea, but take one step onto the Martian surface without a survival suit and you’ll find out the difference! Still, that “hominess” that we all read into Mars may be the key to getting us off our duffs and actually sending people to explore it. That’s my hope, anyway.
I do my bit to encourage Mars interest — like posting pictures that catch my interest. In my planetarium show, “MarsQuest” I thought long and hard about simple ways to bring a sense of familiarity with Mars to audience members. Sure, the pictures will do it, and finding a way to say that in some ways the planet is just like Earth (while in other ways it isn’t), are good methods. But, here’s another one: place names.
Ever get ready for a trip to someplace you’d never been before? You look over a map or read a book about it or talk to people who have been there and can give useful tips. You learn how to pronounce “Las Ramblas” if you’re going to Barcelona, read the guidebooks about the parks and churches and restaurants and maybe pick up a few phrases of travel Spanish to help you order food, get a good hotel room, and catch a taxi. What if you’re going to Mars? Why, you learn the place names! And Mars has plenty of good ones, like Meridiani Planum and Gusev Crater. So, in MarsQuest, I have our narrator rolling some wonderful Martian place names across his tongue: Cydonia Mensae, Valles Marineris, Ares Vallis, Noctis Labyrinthus, and Olympus Mons.
Get used to those place names folks. Learn how to say them, and as you do, think about the landscapes they portray and the experience of being the first (or second, or tenth or twentieth) person to stroll the dusty plains of Mars or crawl up the gentle slopes of its towering volcano. It’s not quite as good as being there, but until we get a viable Mars mission plan in place, we’ll make do with vicarious explorations via the Mars landers and orbiters we’ve already sent.

NOTE: A special thanks to Stu Goldman at Sky & Telescope for writing up this blog in his Astronomy Online” column in the March issue of S&T. And a warm welcome to S&T readers! It’s been a few years since I left the staff of S&T to pursue other things, but I still see my friends on the staff once a month or so, and of course I still think about all the readers I met when I represented the company at star parties and astronomy meetings.

My grandfather used to have a saying whenever he’d hear something amazing (good news or bad). He’d shake his head and say, “By golly, that’s really the berries.” I thought about that when I saw the first pictures of Martian “berries” come down from the Opportunity Rover. He’d probably have said that if he’d lived long enough to see what we’ve been seeing on Mars this past few weeks.

It has been amazing. I don’t think anybody could have predicted these little berry-shaped things scattered all over the place. To me they look like hardened dustballs or maybe little crystals that have bounced along the surface, maybe pushed along by the winds. I’ve seen others speculate that they’re tektites — pieces of glass formed when a large meteorite strikes the Earth. (You can read more about tektites here.) I’m looking forward to hearing about the geologic analysis of these things once the mission scientists have had a chance to examine more images of them.