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 The Lost Dawnby Stuart Atkinson Page 1 of 4 July 20th, 2001, is a very special day. No, not because it's
another anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon,
though it is that too. I was thinking rather of an anniversary
of something which happened slightly further away than the Moon:
July 20th, 2001, will be the 25th anniversary of the succesful
touch-down of Viking 1 on Mars.
I know, it's hard to believe it's 25 years since we gasped in amazement at those first pictures of Mars' orange and tan, boulder-strewn landscape, but it is. And in this modern age, when kids can see flashy, hi-definition, digital quality images taken by the sparkling CCD eyes of Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor just by opening the pages of any book or magazine, or by clicking on a link to call up one of a thousand websites, it's hard to recall the "Mars Fever" which swept the world back in 1976. The planet seemed to hold its breath as Viking's periscope-like cameras panned across the frosty fields of Chryse Planitia, revealing, for the first time, just how alien, and yet at the same time how familiar, Mars was. By any measures, Viking was a triumph, an outstanding scientific success. Its pictures retain a haunting quality still, and its instruments - crude by today's standards perhaps - returned data which kept a generation of planetary scientists hunched over desks and charts for decades. Some still insist that Viking's in-built biological laboratory found evidence of native martian life in the samples of soil it gathered up with its little scoop, but with no definitive proof that's a can of worms which looks set to continue to leak rather than open completely for many years to come. In a sense, Viking gave us Mars *back*; after the crushing disappointment of learning, from those grainy black and white Mariner pictures, that Mars was as sterile and as crater-blasted as our own Moon, Viking brought the planet back to life in a veritable explosion of colour. Suddenly the future was exciting again! Mars was a place we could go to, explore in person, a real world with mountains, volcanoes and valleys big enough to put Earth's greatest to shame. Surely, we all thought, gazing at Viking's pictures, it won't be too long before *people* are bounding across that plain, waving cheerfully at a resurrected Viking's cameras, sending us crackly greetings from across a hundred million miles of space..? But it didn't turn out that way. Astronauts have still been no farther than the Moon, forsaking our satellite after a mere handful of missions, and, for now, the human race is quarantined, through its own choice, in low Earth orbit. So, on its 25th anniversary, Viking 1 will face the sunrise abandoned and alone, a dust-covered relic of an over-optimistic age when we believed that the Solar System was ours for the taking. Its eyes are dimmed, sand-blasted into cataracts by the hissing, grainy winds of Mars. Its bold paintwork and designs have faded in the harsh sunlight and UV, leaving it looking like the dried-out, orange husk of some huge insect. Yet it could all have been so different. It *should* have been different. If we'd dared to keep following our instincts to explore and see what is over the *next* horizon, we could have made it to Mars years ago. There would have been people on Mars, today, celebrating the anniversary of the landing on our behalf - and those people would have been able to stand around the probe and see the most amazing, most spectacular sight in the martian dawn sky... Copyright© 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Stuart Atkinson, sffworld.com. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author. |
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