Tuesday, March 09, 2004
By Joseph B. Verrengia, Associated Press

NASA's celebration last week of gritty evidence that Mars once had enough water to support life has spawned more questions: Where's the water now? When did it disappear? Are there any fossils of living creatures, or even microbes?

But prominent scientists outside the space agency are beginning to ask a harder question: Does Mars represent what is out of whack in American science and exploration?

"So what if there is water up there?" said George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni, who served as a domestic affairs adviser in the Carter White House. "What difference does it make to anyone's life?" he said. "Will it grow any more food? Cure a disease? This doesn't even broaden our horizons."

Even some physical scientists who understand the incremental nature of research are less than enthralled.

"It's all very exciting," deadpanned marine biologist Sylvia Earle, who holds the world's record for untethered undersea exploration, the oceans' equivalent of spacewalking. "It confirms what many of us had suspected for a long time."

Mars enthusiasts say the discovery of water evidence in the rocks by one of NASA's two roving robots is important precisely because it confirms what researchers had been discussing for years. Science is strewn with plausible ideas that experimentation has disproved.

"In this case, there was no substitute for finding out directly," said Case Western Reserve University physicist Lawrence Krauss. "This shows that Earth is not a closed system, that there was water elsewhere. It is a precursor to potentially something far more exciting," he said. "If we discover a fossil? Boy, that will rank up there with the all-time greats."

Today's $820 million mission using the robotic rovers Opportunity and Spirit may be just the beginning of Mars spending, and that has scientists in all fields a little worried.

The Bush White House wants to return to the moon and eventually send astronauts to Mars, perhaps by 2035, an effort that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

Considering the projected $477 billion federal budget deficit and the competition for scarce taxpayer dollars, many scientists say it makes more sense to concentrate on pressing scientific issues that would improve life down here.

Both Etzioni and Earle, in separate interviews, suggested the world's oceans are the most obvious, and promising, scientific target.

Earth's oceans have been barely explored. New potential marine sources of energy and medicine as well as knowledge about climate and origins of life on Earth 4 billion years ago remain largely unexamined.

Ocean research is divided among several agencies and laboratories. Its primary agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) receives about $3.2 billion annually, as compared with NASA's $15.5 billion. In his 2005 budget, the president wants to cut 8.4 percent from NOAA's budget while boosting NASA's by 5.6 percent.

The annual budget of the National Institutes of Health — the government's premier biomedical research arm — has been doubled over the past several years to about $27 billion. But that money is spread among 27 divisions, from cancer to Alzheimer's to drug addiction.

To some degree, Mars has divided space scientists too. Astronomers bemoan NASA's decision to stop servicing the Hubble Space Telescope and let it die years ahead of schedule as the agency refocuses from stars to planets.

And Earle, the ocean explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society said, "I don't want to cut a penny from space. But the resources going into the investigation of our own planet and its oceans are trivial compared to investment looking for water elsewhere in the universe."

For decades the question of whether our nearest and most similar neighbor once supported life has been the subject of intense interest.

That Mars is so unforgiving — more than half of the 36 previous missions have ended in disaster, including a European one last December — serves only to make it a more tantalizing target.

Space enthusiasts don't claim the current twin rover mission to be a historic turning point on par with the conquistadors' arrival in the New World or Darwin's voyage to collect specimens for his theories of evolution. Nor does it compare to Neil Armstrong's giant leap for humankind on the surface of the moon.

Today, scientific exploration is performed incrementally because of the enormous distances and technological complexities involved. That's one reason NASA attaches importance to what Opportunity found in an outcropping nicknamed "El Capitan" at the landing site in Mars' Meridiani Planum region.

Previously, the assumption that Mars was wet was based on circumstantial evidence, such as satellite imagery of what appeared to be canyons and surface channels carved by water now missing.

The rovers landed in January specifically to check its rocks for evidence that they were formed in a persistently wet environment. Mission accomplished, said James Garvin, NASA's lead scientist for Mars and lunar exploration.

In a finely layered rock, Opportunity detected concentrations of jarosite, an iron sulfate mineral that forms with water, as well as layers of salts that match evaporation sequences found on Earth when briny water pools dry up.

Visual examination also showed several features of rocks formed in watery environments, including signs of dissolved salt crystals, BB-sized spheres of minerals, and crossbed patterns of rock layers.

"This really is the smoking gun of a watery past for Mars," said David Grinspoon, principal scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and author of Lonely Planets. "We're not just chasing ghosts."

Not that future exploration necessarily will be accomplished by humans. Some NASA critics, like Colorado astrophysicist Robert Zubrin, strenuously argue that humans should go to Mars soon, traveling light and making their fuel from rocks on the Martian surface for the trip home.

But the current thinking is that robots and computers can do a cheaper, safer job in a hostile environment. The very thin Martian atmosphere contains almost no oxygen and it exerts only a trace of the pressure that helps make Earth habitable.

"We're in a new phase and one we had better get used to, Krauss said. "The more adventurous we get, the more we have to count on robots."

The value of robotic exploration is one area in which Mars supporters and critics like Etzioni and Earle can agree — up to a point.

After all, submersibles have been trolling the oceans for decades. Earle argues that remote marine studies have found that life — our lives, really — is not guaranteed as the oceans decline.

Most of the seas' big fish — tuna, sharks, and swordfish — have been depleted. Half of the coral reefs are dead or dying. Around the world, runoff pollution has created more than 50 dead zones in coastal waters. Sea levels are rising, and the oceans' role in the planet's changing climate is poorly known.

Real oceans need scientific attention more than the dried-up remnants on Mars, Earle contends. "Every time I jump into the ocean I see things I've never seen before," she said. "We have better maps of Mars than our own ocean floor. That's just not right."

Source: Associated Press