Published Jan. 11, 2004 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune
The Planet Mars must have a crackerjack public relations team here on Earth. Last summer, media outlets pummeled us about how close Mars was to our planet. Now, with NASA’s recent successful probe landing on the Red Planet, we’ve got even more Mars news.
Thanks to this attention, the planet enjoys higher name recognition than any of the Democratic presidential candidates, though the cold red orb has denied that it will enter the race before the convention.
I know as much about Mars as I do about Venus, Jupiter or the theory of a mysterious tenth planet, which I can only assume is named for some character in “Lord of the Rings.” You’ll have to dig out yesterday’s paper to read Marc Rouleau’s space column for the so-called “scientific facts” about the Mars Rover. Me, I was a journalism major, so I’ll spend the next 400 words writing about this stuff as though I actually know if Mars is inhabited by Star Wars Ewoks or not.
Of course, everybody knows that Mars is home to wookies, not ewoks.
I’ve been reading the reports about the landing of the Mars Rover last week, and taking in some of the breathtaking views of the planet. If you haven’t seen them yourself, drive to Fargo and buy a “North Dakota 2004” scenic calendar and see for yourself how good the wookies have it on Mars.
Well, you can do that, or you can go to www.nasa.gov. Mars has desolate wastelands … AND craters. Somewhere, a North Dakota farmer is wondering what it would cost to ship soybeans from Mars.
According to news articles, NASA scientists have been setting their watches to match the Martian day – about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. That way, they get to take advantage of every moment of daylight on the planet’s surface. These NASA folks were pretty excited when the rover landed without a hitch last week. Several previous rover attempts have met untimely deaths, either in the hollow reaches of space or with a resounding crash on the surface of distant planets. If they had lost another expensive space toy, it’s unlikely that mom and dad would have bought them another one.
The rover mission is to analyze geological features on the surface of the planet to determine if any life ever existed on Mars. The answer to that question might yield many answers to questions about the survival of life on Earth. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Rover found ancient ruins of a reality TV show studio, with a complete audience of Martian skeletons who died of stupidity.
Well, OK, maybe I would be surprised. I don’t think the wookies would have tolerated Reality TV for long before they went “GGnnAAAARRhhGGnnGh!” and crushed their primitive television sets. (HA! And you thought I was done with wookie references!)
Among the planets in our solar system, Mars is most like our own. It’s about the same size. For us Iron Rangers, it’s just as red and bumpy as our native lands. That’s why it’s exciting to see so much scientific progress in the study of Mars.
Perhaps one day people will inhabit Mars, or at least vacation there like the people in “Total Recall” (Remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in “Total Recall” was told to “start the reactor … free Mars!” by a character that looked like a newborn puppy? I hope not. That would be sad).
Sound crazy? No more crazy than the star of “Total Recall” getting elected governor of our nation’s largest state. Look to the skies; the possibilities are endless.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for The Daily Tribune.