Works in Progress - SEED
The furor surrounding ClimateGate is a stark reminder that the practice and process of science is something totally opaque to most people. New scientific knowledge is generated in a landscape of individuals, experiments, institutions, and publications (a process complex enough to warrant several fields of academic study). The incremental and provisional nature of discovery is not something that maps itself well to professions that people have more day-to-day interaction with.
Space science is one field that seems to generate exceptions. The Moon landing is often held up as the pinnacle of the public’s engagement with science; successfully getting a team of humans onto the Moon got the entire world to gather around their televisions.
But now we have a small army of remote-control robots exploring a whole other planet and this fact barely registers, even when their missions are in grave danger. Spirit, one of the two rovers currently traversing the face of the Red Planet, may have found its final resting place. While the nearly six years of service it has provided is almost all windfall on top of its original three-month mission, it now seems to be permanently stuck on the edge of a lonely crater. But even in death, Spirit works on: in a last-ditch effort to free a stuck wheel, the rover kicked up some sulfates, which could be evidence of steam vents and the microbial life that might have thrived in them.
Which is why it isn’t totally strange that when NASA has even more compelling evidence that there was once microbial life on our nearest planetary neighbor, it isn’t even a national news event. The most likely answer is that NASA has been burned before. The purported microbial fossils come from a meteorite that was first in the news more than a decade ago, when NASA’s initial suggestion that it contained evidence of Martian life was shot down. Then there were the Vikings missions in the ‘70s, which were met with a similar fate. The disappointment and disillusionment that occurred there makes LCROSS’s failure to raise a Wile-E-Coyote-style dust cloud look pretty tame.
