I haven't blogged yet about Spirit mainly because I don't have much to add to everyone else's wow-that's-great feelings. The landing's obviously an enormous achievement. But at the same time it's just the prologue. There are months to go, and the real highlights are surely yet to come (though they're unlikely to get anything like as much coverage).
I have been thinking fond thoughts of Nathalie Cabrol, though. Nathalie started working on Gusev crater as a feature that might once have been filled with water when doing her doctoral research in Paris in the 1980s, and soon began to think of it as a landing site. I think she first proposed it as such in public at a meeting in the Soviet Union, maybe around 1989. Since moving to NASA's Ames research center she and her husband Edmund Grin have kept at it, wringing every scrap of interpretation they could out of the Viking pictures of the crater. They've ceaselessly promoted it as a potential landing site, occasionally to the irritation of some of their peers. At a meeting in 1999 to discuss possible landing sites for a probe that was later cancelled, Nathalie put various people's backs up by insisting on discussing Gusev even though, for engineering reasons, the probe in question simply couldn't go there. Her response was that if a probe couldn't go to a great landing site like Gusev, then it was the probe's engineering that was at fault, not the scientific rationale for going to Gusev.
And now she's got her wish. I asked a mutual friend by email the other day if she was actually walking on air as she looked at the pictures. No, he said. But she's walking tall. Good for her. And Edmund. And all the rest of them.
i like your idea for mars
Posted by: emma rogers | January 23, 2004 at 08:07 PM