A Planet with a Travelers Guide

In the sleepy community of Redlands, California, on the local li­brary shelves designated “Astronomy and Allied Sciences,” one book stands out for its well-worn, bent, and torn cover. It’s A Trav­eler’s Guide to Mars by planetary scientist William K. Hartmann. Advertised as an “extraordinary Baedeker,” the text is published in the format of the famous travel guide. Having sold so well the publisher reissued a second printing within the first two months of publication, the travel guide details features of the Martian surface. The adventures that await inside its pages include familiar and un­known craters, volcanoes, ancient river channels and flood plains, as well as the guide’s foldout maps, dramatic color photographs of key geographical locations, and sidebar articles on featured ter­rain. This isn’t a book for youth, but a serious guide for those in­terested in Mars. Readers are informed that they would be among the first to examine previously unpublished Mars Global Surveyor photos, as Hartmann served on the imaging team for that mission. His Martian travel guide offers serious analyses of geological for­mations in parallel with sidebars such as “What to Wear: A Look at Martian Weather.” Readers learn that typical daily temperatures span from -13°F during the afternoon to -125°F at night and that the extremely thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and low barometric pressure are inhospitable for human survival without protective gear. To familiarize travelers with the Martian night skies, Hart­mann explains: “The stars are brilliant at night after the glow of hazy sunsets fade, and the constellations are the same as the ones we see from Earth, with one exception: a blue-glowing ‘evening star’ with a faint companion ‘star’ is sometimes prominent for an hour or so after dusk.”36 One of Jim Bell’s panoramas, almost cer­tainly inspired by Carl Sagan, similarly captures from Gusev Cra­ter a view of our pale blue dot on the Martian horizon.

Travelers dulled by the “been there, done that” aspect of some Earth-bound excursions might consider the many fascinating des­tinations available via Google Mars, which offers virtual tours of Mars and commentary about major landmarks excerpted from Hartmann’s travel guide. Developed in collaboration with NASA by a Google team led by Noel Gorelick, and launched in 2009, Google’s virtual Mars was designed so that planetary scientists and general users might have ready access to a rich photo archive of past and current missions.37 Like Google Earth, click and zoom functions allow users to examine planetary features in 3D, as well as images from multiple NASA and ESA missions including Viking, Pathfinder, MER, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Express, and Mars Odyssey Orbiter. Geographical and geological highlights are indicated with icons of two green mini-hikers, to reinforce Hartmann’s Baedeker motif. Users might follow the tracks of Spirit and Opportunity, locate the Viking land­ers, peer over the canyon rim into Valles Marineris, or alter the perspective to the canyon floor, from which Hartmann notes its walls can soar upward for 13,000 feet.

Even more stunning are the spectacular landscapes produced at the University of California, San Diego in what is called the StarCAVE, a 3D virtual, immersive environment the size of a large closet that allows researchers to explore stretches of Martian ter­rain. The MER rover pancams, developed through a collaboration of the NASA Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University, and Google, produce high-resolution photos that can be config­ured as highly detailed 360-degree panoramas. The StarCAVE panoramas extend across the floor and to the ceiling so that plan­etary scientists can virtually explore the Martian landscape in situ to search for clues regarding soil deposition, wind and water ero­sion, and other geological processes. Using a hand-held device to navigate the immersive environment, researchers can zoom in to rock or sediment layers or zoom out to survey the broader lay of the land. Larry Smarr, who heads the California Institute for Tele­communications and Information Technology (Calit2) that oper­ates the StarCAVE, comments on the value of doing serious science in an immersive setting: “You can go into a room, and you’re on Mars.” He explains that the rendering is so fine that planetary sci­entists in effect can walk through the landscape, study rocks and geological features up close, as well as understand a site in relation to surrounding terrain.38

In the StarCAVE users must wear 3D glasses, but with the Per­sonal Varrier technology developed at the University of Illinois, Chicago, researchers can work in immersive virtual environments without any headgear, somewhat like the fictional holodeck pos­ited in the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. Even now re­searchers use this technology to engage with a variety of environ­ments, such as walking through the temples at Luxor, or exploring, from the inside, a molecule or a segment of the human genome. The public impact of these emerging virtual learning environments will be profound. Both NASA and the U. S. Congress are interested in using similar technologies to make planetary science more ac­cessible to everyone, so much so that the House of Representatives in its 2008 NASA Authorization Act invited the space agency to develop means by which general audiences can “experience mis­sions to the Moon, Mars, and other bodies within our solar sys­tem” through technologies such as “high-definition video, stereo imagery, [and] 3-dimensional scene cameras.”39 For now, Google Mars and the immersive environments of the StarCAVE or Per­sonal Varrier remind us that, whether in orbit or on the surface, our robotic partners precede us and increasingly unfold and make familiar nearby worlds.