Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS Andrew Kessler
Pegasus
ISBN 978-1605981765
341 pages
$27.95
Reviewed by Mike Brown
By coincidence, a day on Mars and a day on Earth last almost the same amount of time. Almost, but not exactly: Mars spins just a little more slowly, so the time from one sunrise on Mars to the next is 40 minutes longer than the same interval on Earth. This small difference usually causes no problems, but if you're remotely operating a robot near the north pole of Mars and you need to wake that robot at sunrise every (Mars) morning and get it busy scooping up ice, those extra 40 minutes per day can be maddening. One day you're heading to sleep just as the terrestrial world is awakening, two weeks later you've slowly gotten in sync with the rest of ground-based humanity, and two weeks after that you're back to daytime and sleeping with your blackout curtains closed. If you're sleeping at all. Because a robot at the pole of Mars has a lot to do and learn in the five months before Martian winter comes and it freezes to death, if indeed it makes it that long before a short-circuit disables it or NASA discontinues your funding or you succumb to exhaustion.
Though earthbound, Andrew Kessler spent 90 Martian days and nights watching the Phoenix Mars mission's robot perform experiments. He chronicles what he saw in "Martian Summer." This exceedingly informal account gives a picture not so much of the science of what was discovered as of the sociology of how it all happened. NASA does not come across well here. It appears to be a heavy-handed bureaucracy, forcing everyone to waste a frighteningly large amount of their extremely limited time before the robot dies for the sake of a single press release regardless of its scientific import. But there are heroes, and they are the engineers and scientists who stick to these crazy schedules in hopes of learning everything they can from a tiny dirt sample dumped into an oven, a probe stuck into the frozen ground or a perfectly calibrated picture of a lander's leg.
Enough interesting things happen that one wishes for a narrator who had spent more time learning and explaining rather than fretting that he was incapable of learning. But if you can control your exasperation, you will find an informative and even charming semi-insider account of how such a mission operates, how humans fare on Mars time, and how scientists and administrators behave under extreme stress. You might even find yourself, as I did, unexpectedly choking up when the mission's robot goes to sleep for the very last time.
Mike Brown is the author of "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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