On Friday more than 1,300 people filled Convocation Hall to attend “Expanding Canada’s Frontiers: To Mars and Beyond,” an evening of speeches by scientists and astronaut Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to walk in space.
Joining Hadfield were NASA’s Dr. Darlene Lim, U of T’s Dr. Vicky Hipkin, and Harvard’s Dr. Dimitar Sasselov. Dr. Lim, a new Ph.D. graduate in geology from U of T, spoke about the Martian terrain. Physicist Dr. Hipkin spoke about the search for life on Mars, and astronomer Dr. Sasselov discussed the search for planets outside our solar system. Bob McDonald of CBC Radio’s science program Quirks and Quarks hosted the event. Undergraduate students Justin Trottier and Carmen Marra of the Astronomy and Space Exploration Society were given special recognition for putting on the event.
Dr. Lim began the evening with a photo of Earth taken by the Mars Global Surveyor. “When I look at this picture, I think of the future,” she said. “Imagine 100 to 200 years from now [when] we have colonies on Mars and people actually living there, we’ll use telescopes to look back at planet Earth.”
She marveled that in less than 50 years, we have moved from merely observing planets from afar to actually sending missions there, and that we may even be able to send manned missions to Mars within 20 or 30 years.
Hadfield later provided a brief summary of U.S. President Bush’s new plan for space exploration. At the top of the list is the creation of a permanent human settlement on the moon within 10 to 15 years. As Hadfield told the Varsity in an interview before the event, Bush plans to set up a space station on the moon as a stepping-stone to manned missions to Mars. “It’s a big plan,” he said, “but not bank-busting.”
Hadfield is optimistic about setting up colonies on the moon. “We now know much more about space, and we know how to safely get out of orbit.” When questioned by the audience on whether he thinks the American funding for NASA is genuine, Hadfield stated: “This [plan for a new space era] was not hatched when Spirit landed. [NASA and the U.S. government] have been working on it for at least a year.”
Hadfield did however comment, “We need to look at [Bush’s plan] suspiciously and evaluate it. But at the same time, we need to look at the good and the opportunities, and see what we can make of it. Time will tell.”
Dr. Lim speculated on what we might do once we reached Mars. She suggested that tourists might one day be able to reach Mars and enjoy the planet’s spectacular geography. She showed an image of Valles Marineris, the largest, deepest channel in the solar system. Measuring over 4,000 km long, it is 10 times the length of the Grand Canyon. She pointed out that thrill seekers could find no better cliffs to rappel down. Mars is also home to the solar system’s largest mountain, Olympus Mons, three times higher than Mount Everest.
Dr. Lim also spoke about the search for life on Mars. Although we have not yet found concrete evidence that life ever existed there, we continue to find life in the most hostile environments on Earth, in frozen icecaps and in boiling pools of sulfurous water. If life can survive in such places here it might be able to survive on Mars.
Dr. Hipkin continued the evening with a discussion about current searches for life on Mars. As part of U of T physics professor Dr. James Drummond’s team, she worked on the Mars Imager for Cloud and Aerosol (MICA), a colour-imaging camera for the MARs Volcanic Emission and Life (MARVEL) proposal. MARVEL competed to be the NASA scout to Mars in 2007-although it did not win the competition, Dr. Hipkin pointed out that making the final four from hundreds of contestants was a major accomplishment for the Canadian scientists involved.
If MICA ever gets to Mars, it will be able to search the atmosphere for the gases that living things produce, like methane. It could also find out if there are any active volcanoes on Mars, which could provide the heat and energy necessary to sustain life.
Hipkin also discussed some hypotheses about the evolution of life on Mars. With an average temperature of -62 C, Mars is a cold planet. “We might expect that life is evolving about 100 times slower on Mars than it is on Earth,” Hipkin said. This means that if anything is still living on Mars, we would expect to see the kind of life that had evolved on Earth two billion years ago-microbial.
During intermission, Lim raised the possibility that perhaps another form of life exists on Mars, one that is not necessarily carbon-based. “Perhaps it’s a completely different organism, with different tools and resources to live, something that we haven’t necessarily thought about. It’s an incredible possibility we have to be open-minded to, in the same way that we keep getting surprised by the new types of life forms we find here on Earth.
“Why are we going [into space]?” she continued. “It’s because we have this itch to explore, to find out if we’re alone. We’re still in the data-gathering mode right now, but this fundamental question is very important for us to answer.”
As citizens of first-world countries, Lim believes it is our responsibility to not only stop hunger, poverty, and mitigate international conflicts, but to also explore, to the depths of the oceans or to space and beyond.
When asked if it is out of fear that humans search for signs of life in the rest of the universe, Lim responded: “No, I think it’s out of a genuine human curiosity that we’ve had since the dawn of humankind.”
