Rutland columnist Allan Grey asks, as David Bowie did, is there life on Mars?

Rutland columnist Allan Grey asks, as David Bowie did, is there life on Mars and will it be found by the rover Perserverance?

‘Sailors fighting in the dance hall

Oh man, look at those cavemen go

It’s the freakiest show.

Take a look at the lawman

Beating up the wrong guy

Oh man, wonder if he’ll ever know

He’s in the best selling show

Is there life on Mars?’

So sang David Bowie back in 1971, asking the question that scientists and engineers all around the world are still asking to this day: Is there, or has there ever been life on Mars?

Attempts to reach Mars, started in the 1960s, with the USSR and then the US, most were unsuccessful, and it wasn’t until 1971 that NASA’s Mariner 9 spent a year orbitting Mars and sending back thousands of images, none of which answered Bowie’s rhetorical question.

Of many attempted Mars landings by robotic, unmanned spacecraft, to date just 10 have been successful. In 2012 NASA landed the robot Curiosity on Mars which still sends back data to this day, and has acted as the springboard for the latest exploration, culminating in the successful landing last month of the rover Perseverance in the Jezero crater. This location was once a lake, and where, if they exist, past signs of microbial life would most likely be found. The project has taken eleven years to come to fruition and has cost NASA a cool $2.75bn. Whether or not this project finds definitive answers to the big question, one cannot fail to have been utterly amazed by the fantastic achievement of the team at NASA, designing, building and landing Perseverance on Mars, I certainly have.

My interest was piqued the day Perseverance landed and a guy called Adam Steltzner was interviewed on TV about the outstanding success of the mission that launched back in July 2020, when we were all just happy to consider a staycation in Hunstanton. His job title is, “Chief Engineer, Mars 2020”, and I thought, wow, what a job title, what a guy, I must find out a little more about him.

Born in 1963, Steltzner struggled in high school, but excelled in sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll apparently; he was told by his father he would never amount to anything but a ditch digger. Sometime around 1984, while driving home one night, he noticed how the position of the constellation Orion was in a different place than before. This fascinated him so much he decided to take an astronomy class, but first had to complete one in physics, and it was there he had his epiphany, nature could be understood and predicted; as Steltzner put it, “I had found religion.”

Steltzner joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA in 1991, and has subsequently been involved leading teams developing Mars landing rovers including in 2012, Curiosity. Likened to Elvis Presley by the US media for his looks, Stelzner speaks publicly on topics of leadership, innovation, teambuilding and the power of curiosity and exploration.

So why my interest in this guy? Well I was also a school failure, just two O-levels, but unlike Steltzner’s father, my father managed to find me an engineering apprenticeship, and although it was hardly an epiphany, I studied control engineering at university and became an engineer for most of my career, designing and commissioning control systems for industrial water treatment plants, and later automated food production lines, embracing the constant evolution and sophistication of computer and digital technology...

And to emphasise the point, whilst traveling recently I had the pleasure of meeting a retired NASA control engineer who had worked on the Apollo project; he wrote software for the lunar module that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon back in 1969. He told me that my mobile phone had infinitely more computing power than the computers they had programmed back then to navigate men to the surface of the moon.

I worked for Mars for 25 years, latterly 10 years as a chief engineer, leading a team of engineers, pretty fulfilling in itself, but barely registering when compared to leading a team that gets to design and land exploration rovers on the Red Planet. That must be as cool as engineering gets.

For more than 100 years the film industry has also been just as pre-occupied as the scientists and engineers, speculating in many films about ‘life on Mars’. One of the earliest films, way back in 1913, tells the tale of a Martian who travels to Earth to help a particularly self centred man by the name of Horace Parker change his ways. Not only is Horace a miser, but he also expects everyone else to conduct their lives according to his personal convenience.

Does this bring any recent past US Presidents to mind? Maybe after Perseverance history might repeat itself, and a little green microbe will find its way down to Mars a Lago, one can only hope.

A good number of films centre on the theme of astronauts stranded on Mars, saved by daring rescue missions. In 1959, The Angry Red Planet told a slightly far-fetched story of two survivors who make it back to Earth having escaped the clutches of carnivorous plants, giant bat like creatures, and gelatinous, swivel eyed, astronaut absorbing amoebas. One of the astronauts returns with arms covered in a green alien growth infection, reporting dryly: “There’s life on Mars Jim, but not as we know it.” It seems even that far back, bats were largely held responsible for strange viruses and mutations in humans.

One of the most recent escapes from Mars, in the 2015 film Martian, saw actor Matt Damon return to Earth from Mars after 560 sols spent alone having been left for dead; he’d been struck by debris after a violent dust storm. This joint US/UK production has some great space action sequences proving the film industry is just as innovative as the space industry when it comes to the Red Planet.

‘It’s a God-awful small affair

To the girl with the mousy hair

But her mummy is yelling no

And her daddy has told her to go.’

There are various theories explaining the meaning of Bowie’s most cryptic song; according to some, it’s about a girl rejected by society for her ideas, reflecting upon her life and what’s happening around her, the fights between gangs, the TV shows, Beatlemania, the Iron Curtain and more. She is so disgusted that she wishes to leave forever and wonders if at least on Mars there is life, and hope for a better future.

Over the coming weeks and months we will watch as Perseverance beams back more fantastic images and data from Mars, but fortunately as yet there are no astronauts needing rescue, and no chance of little green microbes causing an alien pandemic.