Tomorrow (December 3), The Mars Polar Lander and the Deep Space 2 microprobes
will land on Mars at 12:15 PST. The first signal from the Mars Polar Lander
is expected at 12:39 PST. A live webcam of the control room will begin about
an hour earlier and go for several hours. The URL of interest is:

     http://marslander.jpl.nasa.gov/

At the risk of deeply offending again those who tend to believe that the
Earth was created 6004 years ago, last Thursday, I believe it's important to
understand why we're doing this. This mission is not merely planetary
astronomy. Rather, the Mars Polar Lander is just the first in a long series
of missions to come that will change their emphases from simple geology to
biology, and this mission is a first step in a fundamental exploration in
evolutionary biology. For more than fifty years now, planetologists and
biologists have believed that life should be as common in the universe as is
warm mud.

Everything about the Polar Lander was designed to seek out that warm mud
(with "warm" obviously being a relative term). See:

     http://missions.marssociety.org/mpl/msp98/why.html

There is increasingly good evidence that far more than 99% of the biomass of
the Earth lies beneath our feet, with large masses of bacteria inhabiting the
interstices of the crustal rock. Anything (including us) large enough to be
seen by the naked eye represents but a miniscule fraction of the mass of life
on Earth.

Moreover, life may not have originated on Earth in a "warm, sunlit pond" as
Darwin speculated, and indeed, perhaps not through the use of photochemical
processes at all, but through thermochemically-driven reactions, either deep
inside the earth or at the bottom of the oceans, next to heat-vents. If so,
these same processes very likely operated on Mars, beginning approximately
3.5 to 4.0 billion years ago, and may still be. The question of greatest
interest is: If life independently arose on Mars and still exists, how
different is it? How many pathways are there to biogenesis?

The first step in answering these questions is to simply find hard evidence
of water in the Martian soil -- and that's exactly what the Mars Polar Lander
is designed to do.

I've included below a posting I put to sci.astro a couple of years, right
after Pathfinder landed. If you deeply object to this line of inquiry, it is
at a minimum important to understand where your tax dollars are going.

Wirt Atmar

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KrisM28 wrote:
>
>  So what's the main reason we sent the pathfinder? I'm up for it but I'm
> just thinking, why? Is it one of those stupid evolution theories?

In a word, Yes.

Everything about planetary exploration, how we build the instruments, what we
seek, how we analyze the data, presupposes a common physicochemical universe,
driven by a universal Boltzmannian thermodynamics and a similarly universal
Darwinian evolutionary process -- if life should be found to exist. While
understanding the geology of extraterrestrial objects is essential to our
fully understanding the history and physical evolution of our own Earth, it
is ultimately the search for the independent origination of non-terrestrial
life that enthralls us all.

The fundamental question that permeates the design of every spacecraft
mission that we send away from the Earth, but one which is rarely spoken of,
is: "How unique are we as a species?"

If the origination of life is inevitable in every patch of warm mud -- given
sufficient time -- as we currently believe it must be, then our first task is
to simply seek out those places and processes that would seemingly promote
the formation of warm mud and estimate their probabilities of occurrence in
all of the universe.

> Does it [presumably Mars]
> have more gravity than earth?

No. Mars' gravity is only 38% that of Earth's.

> How long is the delay between us and the
> pathfinder?

It varies depending on the position of the two planets. Currently it's about
11 minutes or so one-way and lengthening as the two planets separate.

> Any awnsers would be appreciated, thanks.

You're welcome.

Wirt Atmar

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