Mars Sample Return 1
A speculative tale based on the history of the Viking Lander experiments
Welcome back to Glass Half Full and thanks for reading!
Today marks the start of a new speculative / science fiction serial. I’m calling it Mars Sample Return for now, but it really needs a better title. The story takes as its springboard two facts: 1) NASA’s well publicized Mars Sample Return mission, which aims to bring rock samples back to Earth from the Red Planet, probably in the 2030s; and 2) the lesser known fact that way back in 1976 one of three experiments on board the Viking landers gave positive results for bacterial life on Mars. After that, it’s all speculation reminiscent of The Andromeda Strain.
The orange fireball streaked across the sky, a long tail of plasma streaming behind it. Joan Lee’s friends, gathered around the TV in her small living room, gave appreciative oohs and aahs. She wished the broadcast had audio, although how a capsule traveling at forty thousand KPH could be miked, she had no idea.
“Is this the part where we should be worried?” Jared asked. He was an environmental attorney but was here to support her, the same as the rest of her friends.
She stared at the screen, the NASA commentators describing all the safety features of the capsule and what viewers could expect next in its return to Earth. “No, if anything happens now, it’ll just burn up. That would probably kill anything living on board.” Burn-up on re-entry — the best outcome, but not a likely one, considering the rigorous testing the mission’s equipment had undergone.
“Probably?”
“Extremophiles can survive just about anything — it’s in the name.”
The friends gathered in her tiny apartment this evening could be considered a subset of all her friends, one labeled “current” as opposed to another labeled “former.” Or perhaps “non-NASA” and “NASA,” respectively. The VENN diagram showing the overlap between NASA friends and current friends contained a single member, Marcy, who couldn’t be here tonight, a watch party at work having won out over sororal loyalty. Joan told herself she understood.
The non-NASA friends were mostly from her undergrad days at Cornell, now lawyers like Jared, or doctors, like Melanie, plus a couple of teachers and post-docs in other fields like chem and m-bio. As an astrobiologist, her training had necessarily been wide, giving her plenty of chances to make friends beyond the usual space nerds.
Her friends had arrived with appropriate looks of commiseration and sympathy, and many bottles of wine. Even though it had been months now since the Big Event. The tours of her one-bedroom took longer than she’d expected because everyone wanted explanations of her framed prints of Hubble and Webb photos: black holes, exo-planets, the Pillars of Creation within the Eagle Nebula. “Space Godzilla,” one friend dubbed that last one.
Then the NASA broadcast began, and they all gathered around the TV. Today’s feature was the conclusion of the Mars Sample Return mission. The capsule had just completed its nine-month journey from the Red Planet to Earth, carrying samples of Martian rocks and soils that could indicate whether life had ever existed on Mars. To Joan, this was simply the wrong question, since experiments on the original Viking landers had shown that the Red Planet currently supported life, at least in microbial form. Which was why the capsule burning up in the atmosphere might be the best outcome. And also why she no longer worked at NASA. And further, why she had experienced a brief, unwilling moment as an alternative media star.
On the screen, the plasma had dissipated, the capsule having scrubbed most of its speed, now revealed as a flattish disk pancaking down toward the barren wastes of western Utah.
“Descent rate is nominal,” came a scratchy voice from the TV.
“Chug!” Melanie shouted, ‘nominal’ being the cue for the night’s drinking game. Joan supposed it said something about their advancing age and/or maturity that most of the participants sipped rather than chugged from their glasses. That, and they weren’t drinking Bud Light any more.
“How about now?” Jared asked. “Should I be scared now?”
“Yes, now you have my permission to worry. If it starts flip-flopping, it could hit the ground at an odd angle or at too high a velocity.”
“Then it would crack open and all the little Martians would spill out, right?”
“Something like that,” she smirked. Even if the capsule landed on its heat shield, it could still be damaged. But even then, the samples themselves had been stored by robotic arms in indestructible containers — assuming all the lids had been tightened correctly, which was hard to know for sure at a distance of 140 million miles. There were just so many ifs.
Mel went around the room with a bottle, refilling glasses. Jared continued in lawyer mode. “Where are the parachutes?”
“No parachutes.”
“What!?” He looked aghast.
“It’s just going to pancake down onto the ground.”
Mel paused, wine bottle held at an angle. “What, no brakes?”
“It’s the brake. Well, it and the atmosphere.”
“So it’s just going to smash into the dirt?”
“At a survivable speed, yes. They’ve tested it over and over.” Although, testing for such high re-entry speeds was difficult. She stared at the screen, hoping for the best, while trying to sip from her glass. She nearly spilled wine all over her shirt because she forgot Mel had just refilled it.
“And no little green men are going to come spilling out?”
Joan reached for a napkin. “Not if it lands as planned — and not little green men. Bacteria, most likely.”
“Like in The Andromeda Strain.”
She was surprised any of her friends knew that old movie. “Something like that, yes. But I’m not saying there definitely are bacteria. Those samples have been sitting in their canisters on Mars for a decade. And even if they’re alive, it’s likely they’re nothing life-threatening or contagious.”
“How likely?” Jared asked.
“We just don’t know.”
“Why would they take that kind of risk, though?”
She stared back at Jared and the rest of her friends, not knowing what to say. Why NASA would take such a risk was the ten-billion-dollar question, the one that had gotten her fired.
Here’s Chapter 2.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it! If you did, please consider hitting that like button, sharing it with your friends, or even subscribing or upgrading your subscription. And please leave a comment with your thoughts!
I’m posting this serial as I write it and, being a plantser, I’m not really sure how many chapters or episodes it will take to tell the story. Right now I’m guessing six or eight, but these things tend to expand as I write them.
Somewhere along the way, probably after the story wraps up, I’ll post an essay with my thoughts on that Viking lander experiment and what it says about the conduct of science at one of our most highly respected scientific agencies. My thoughts and research on this are still evolving, so I don’t want to give any hints about this right now.
Brilliant beginning! I'm leaving this comment and will now continue to chapter 2...