The Quest for Mars: NASA scientists and Their Search for Life Beyond Earth

Lava, in Icelandic, is hraun. “It’s the oldest word for lava there is,” Jim says. There are several subsets of hraun: apalhraun, which is rough lava, and helluhraun, which is smooth. A small volcano in Icelandic is a dyngja. Hlaup means “flood,” and jökull means “glacier.” If you put those two words together – jökulhlaup – you get something for which there is no exact equivalent in English: a catastrophic outburst flood caused by water trapped under a glacier, which cracks open the ice and violently disgorges.

This catastrophic event occurred in 1993 on an Icelandic flood plain called the Skeidararsandur. Blocks of ice as large as houses tumbled for miles across the flooded black primeval landscape in an orgy of geologic violence. A similar geological disaster also occurred on Mars in the distant past. The scale was immense. It is estimated that the Martian jökulhlaup released as much as 100,000 cubic meters of water per second, more than the entire flow of the Amazon river.

At the moment, we are standing on hraun, or, more precisely, helluhraun, with a little apalhraun scattered here and there. Looking into the tephra ring, Jim says he’s stunned “to observe the development of erosional canyons massive enough to drive a Hummer through.” He didn’t see anything like this on his last trip to Surtsey. The erosional scars remind him of features shown in the latest images from Mars Orbiter Camera, now circling the Red Planet.

“These mini-canyons, technically erosional gullies, expose the underbelly of Surtsey, the volcano. They give clues about its future and the processes that formed it. The sheer beauty of these signs of geologic aging and their abundance are remarkable!” He takes a closer look at the black windblown tephra. “See how it’s sorted? See how the small rocks have risen to the top? That sorting is common. Some of them are rounded.” Those smooth contours, he tells me, are diagnostic of wind and water, and he looks for similar shapes on Mars. “So far, we haven’t found a lot of really rounded ones on Mars,” he admits. But he keeps looking because evidence of water is essential to the detection of life beyond Earth. In fact, water has assumed such importance that the question of extraterrestrial life has been reframed; where scientists once inquired, “Is there life elsewhere in the universe?” they now ask, “Is there liquid water elsewhere in the universe?”

Many planetary geologists, Garvin included, now see convincing evidence that Mars once had lots of water, and may still have a tremendous amount of water even now. Their goal is to follow the water because they hope it will lead them to life. So they seek distinctive water signatures. They look for evidence of dried-up rivers and oceans and shorelines; they theorize about subsurface water, and they measure glaciers – anything associated with water.

Stepping lightly on tephra, Jim makes his way across the eastern side of the island, squinting and kneeling, taking measurements, orienting and reorienting himself, studying the landscape, observing the reverse sorting of the soil, in which “coarser fragments the size of popcorn nubs rise to the top of the soil horizon, leaving the finer, claylike fraction below.” He notes the fragmentation of large blocks of volcanic rocks. On the right, Jim confronts a landscape studded with pitted blocks ranging in size from softballs to basketballs. Those pits grab his attention. He spent a good deal of his graduate career at Brown in the mid-1970s studying patterns of pits and surface textures on terrestrial rocks and on Martian boulders photographed by the two Viking landers, trying, as he put it, “to unravel the geologic secrets of Mars.” Here is a banquet of strikingly similar boulders, on which he is ready to feast. He notes unpitted gray rocks with angular shapes – so-called “country rocks” – as well as pitted rocks, whose morphology speaks to him, telling of displacement from a lava flow.

Jim explains how this local landscape came to be: “Once the sea water was kept out of where the lava was bubbling up, a carapace of lava formed. And that lava is very important, because it protects the vent. The vent is where the hot rock comes up. That is the reason this island survives today.” He displays what looks to me like an ordinary rock, but to Jim, it’s a geologic sonnet. “This is tephra that tumbled downhill. See how it’s made up of bits of other stuff? It’s actually a breccia. A breccia is stuff made of other stuff, little welded bits as strong as concrete.” As I hold the raw geological material in my hand, Jim reminds me that this is what the rocks on Mars look like; the main difference is that they’re coated with a brown dust. He feels around the edges. “It’s a smooth little rock,” he says. “That means it’s been worn by erosive agents, so we look at the rounding of the corners to get an indication of what’s going on.” I carefully replace the rock so as not to disturb the course of Surtsey’s geological evolution.

The hraun we traverse feels like soft beach sand. Jim tells me that on Mars, the soil is ten times finer than what we’re walking on now. “It would be more like walking on talcum powder.”

We press on, and the terrain subtly shifts. “Now we have coarse stuff lying on the surface,” Jim remarks, as he tries to read the landscape. “Here’s a little piece of basaltic pumice. That’s a good one,” he says, slipping it into his pocket, which is, perhaps, not quite kosher. “That’s one for the spectrometer,” he explains. There’s an honor system in force here. You’re not supposed to disturb anything. You try not to leave footprints in this haven for scientists if you can possibly avoid it. “Now, this looks like – aha! This –” he announces, “is a little lava bomb.”

“What?”

“A lava bomb is something that flew through the air and went splat! And then it started to break. Already, it’s weathering away. See how it’s crumbling. Again, this is what we looked for at the Pathfinder landing site.” He calls my attention to smooth rocks inside smooth rocks, and he begins to interpret. “You can piece together the history of this rock,” he says. “These rocks were always smooth; they got pasted together at the time of the eruption.”

He sees some similarities between the geology underfoot and the Pathfinder landing site on Mars. NASA sent Pathfinder to a location on Mars where it was believed that a great outpouring of water once occurred. “Some people think the rocks in Pathfinder’s vicinity came to rest there as the result of one big flood, but that’s ludicrous. It’s a mixed population of rocks around Pathfinder,” which suggests, to him, at any rate, that the geological history of the area has been fairly complex. Water might have come and gone around the Pathfinder site more than once over the eons. I look around; if you photographed a replica of Pathfinder here on Surtsey, you could persuade a fair number of people that the spacecraft was actually on Mars. The more Jim talks, the more I feel a geological kinship between the two planets; Mars seems so Earth-like, or is it more accurate to say that Earth is so Mars-like?

Garvin kneels to inspect a delicate lava formation. “See the thin carapace of lava? This black stuff?”

“It’s very soft.”

“Right, very soft underneath.”

“It’s falling apart.”

“Not all of it. And that’s important, because that’s the action of a process that tears down rocks and makes clays. We take clays for granted. On Mars, there’s likely to be a lot of clay.”

“And water is necessary for clay.”

“Yes. You have to break rocks. Look at this.” He points to where the hillside is collapsing. “What you see is little mudflows. And look at this. Here is a beautiful little lava rock! Very angular. This is a classic, coated with fine-grain stuff. It’s almost a pentagon.”

Jim points to the volcano’s peak looming overhead and recollects the last time he climbed it. “The wind was blowing at forty-five miles per hour the whole time, and it was very hard even to talk.” That windspeed was moderate, by Surtsey standards; the island endures 200 days of gale-force winds a year. “When we were here in ’91, this area was a desert, but plants are taking over now.” Now, the main plant in evidence is the lowly sandwort, a simple succulent that has proliferated on Surtsey with astonishing speed; small, dense, and tenacious, it can boldly go where other vegetation can’t. Even mosses can’t get a grip on Surtsey; the wind rips them out of the ground and flings them away.

“Look! There is a gorgeous breccia. Notice it’s in a little hollow, okay? That’s called an apron. We look for those kinds of things on Mars. Outside, you can see there’s a layering to it that’s caving in. See the carapace of lava up there? It’s starting to break off. In a big storm, that could fall.” It looks like the burned crust of a pie at the edge of a pan. “Now, see how these rocks are perched? Notice the pits. That’s where Mars comes in.” You see something similar in images from Pathfinder, Garvin says – pits left by primary gas bubbles in the lava. He snaps a picture of the pitted rocks on Surtsey as he continues. “Look at these pitting textures! All different. It’s exquisite.”

He zeroes in on a block of lava that speaks to him in a private language. Crouching, he declares, “Now, this is not primary lava. It’s softer, and it’s been coated with a bright alteration stain caused by chemical weathering. It’s allochthonous. That means it’s out of place, been moved away.” I step back to take in the scene, and I realize the site looks like the Grand Canyon in miniature. “This could be the beginnings of a little Martian canyon system,” Garvin exults. “It’s gorgeous. Oh, God, wouldn’t I love to measure that with a laser!”

We’ve been picking our way around the base of the volcano, and now we turn away from it and face the ocean. Before long, Jim again shouts. “Look at that.” He points to a slight discoloration on a mound of stones, in which he sees vast implications. “That’s the high water mark from a wave, where the fine dust coated the rocks. Now that is the kind of shoreline we are looking for on Mars.” The subject of ancient shorelines on Mars carries the charge of controversy and borderline heresy. Several scientists have tried mapping the shorelines of ancient Martian oceans that vanished a billion or more years ago, but their work has yet to gain widespread acceptance. I try to imagine Mars as a wet place, covered with oceans, teeming with possibilities, but this is like trying to visualize oceans in the Sahara, for Mars is red and dry and cold.

A large empty plastic bottle catches my eye, disturbing my reverie. The object seems as incongruous here as it would on the surface of Mars. We notice pieces of plastic, and buoys, and rope, and blocks of wood studded with rusty nails. “The garbage of humanity,” as Jim calls it, has drifted out here, fifty miles from nowhere, a mocking reminder of home. All day long, he has been scrupulous about not disturbing plants or lava or rocks, to the point of walking in old footprints. Avoiding the detritus, we cross a hard, crusty portion of the beach. “Hard pan clays,” he remarks. “See how they crack? They’re desiccated. We look for things like that on Mars. More indirect evidence of water. Here on Surtsey, we have a microcosm. We have a scale where it’s easier to see things. One of the things about Mars to remember is that it’s a big planet, about forty percent as large as Earth. If we land in three or four places on Mars, we’ll learn about them, but we won’t get the big picture of Mars that way, so we study sites on Earth that we believe operate in a similar way.”

We approach the water’s edge, but a formidable barrier repels us: a giant collection of round, basketball-sized rocks. “If we ever saw a field of dense, interconnecting rocks like this on Mars, we’d know the action of water was responsible. But, we haven’t seen this, yet.” As a geologist, Jim looks for patterns, distributions, colors, textures, and shapes. He is the detective, and they are his fingerprints. If he successfully unravels the geological mysteries of Surtsey with them, he will also know more about the development of the Red Planet.

Turning away from the beach, Jim and I finally begin the ascent to the volcano’s summit. I’ve been trying to put off this chore, but here it is, the thing we must do. Jim reminds me that we are climbing an active volcano, and there’s always a chance that it could blow without warning. I recall Iceland’s uninterrupted pattern of volcanic outbursts every five years for the last 1,100 years, and I remind myself that it’s due for another eruption. I feel as though we’re crawling up the side of a giant, overstressed pressure cooker. Jim tells me that a series of sensitive seismometers has been placed on the volcano; in fact, all the volcanoes in Iceland are similarly equipped, and the seismometers are so sensitive that they can detect microseizures involving magma, or molten rock. I’m somewhat relieved to hear about this detection system, but in the event of a warning, I wonder how anyone would be able to convey the news to us. Six months after our visit, a big volcano finally did erupt beneath Iceland’s largest glacier, Vatnajökull, located on the southeast coast, home to most of the country’s population.

The gray lava and rounded rocks give way to a smooth, steep incline. Jim estimates it’s twenty degrees, but it feels more like thirty to me, very steep, indeed. We zig-zag our way across, and look down on the larger of Surtsey’s craters, a craggy rusty red configuration filled with volcanic ash that from this height resembles a soft, inviting mattress. The wind picks up, and we crouch to avoid being flung down the slippery side of the mountain. Wind, incidentally, figures prominently in the Martian environment. On the surface, dust devils are everywhere. In the upper atmosphere, winds can reach 350 miles per hour, and wind storms occasionally engulf the entire planet, obscuring the surface for days.

Jim reaches a seep, a place where the ground comes apart, as if it were fabric that has been rent. A faint plume of steam rises from the wound, and the smell of sulfur permeates the air. Kneeling beside this smoldering, malodorous seep, I begin to think of Hell as a realistic notion, based on observable geology. Jim asks me to place my hand on the soil near the edge, and it feels like hot clay. A fine white crust along the rim contains bacteria that thrive in the heat and sulfur. This is the most primitive type of life on Earth, Jim reminds me. Life may have begun in volcanic seeps similar to the one at our feet, and it might have started the same way on Mars, on other planets, and on countless moons and asteroids – if it ever did.

These bacteria are examples of extremophile life, primitive life forms that have recently been discovered in places where biologists once assumed life could not survive because the conditions were too hostile – too hot, too cold, too dark, too salty, too deep. In recent years, many of the assumptions about the requirements for life on Earth – and, by implication, the possibility of life on Mars and other celestial bodies – have been overturned.

“We are finding out about the tenacity of life,” Jim said before the trip, “and it’s startling. We’re finding creatures that live at five times atmospheric pressure two miles deep in the ocean in places where the water would boil if there weren’t tons of pressure on top of it. We’re finding giant simple worms that look like garden hoses that live under those conditions. They don’t need any light, they scavenge the sulfur produced in volcanic eruptions deep in the ocean. They live off sulfur; they eat bacteria that grow in the sulfur, and that sustains them. Is there sulfur on Mars? Likely.” Life flourishes just about anywhere, it turns out, no matter how extreme the conditions. “Can you stick life a mile down in rocks and have it survive and bloom? Yes. Can you put it two miles deep in the ocean where there is no light of day, ever? Yes. Stick it on the coldest place on the planet and it will at least remain dormant there? Yes! Now, if you can form niches of life on Earth in such horrid environments, with pressure that would crush a human being to pulp and temperatures that would boil our skin – if you have life forms under those conditions, then it gets quite interesting. In fact, the question now in biology is: can you even produce a sterile environment?”

The question got me thinking about the famous Miller-Urey experiment designed to illuminate the origins of life. In 1953, two scientists at the University of Chicago, Stanley L. Miller and Harold Urey, put gaseous methane, ammonia, water vapor, and liquid water – ingredients thought to simulate a primitive Earth atmosphere – into a closed system, and sent an electrical discharge spark through the mixture. The gases interacted, and a gummy residue formed; analysis showed it contained organic molecules, including many amino acids, which are the building blocks of life. It had been previously thought that the prerequisites for life were rather special and demanding and occurred only on Earth, but the experiment suggested that all you needed to produce life were a few simple, readily available chemicals and an energy source. These things could be found on other planets, on some asteroids, and most probably on Mars. You don’t need oxygen for life to develop, and you don’t even need the Sun; the heat source could be volcanic or subterranean. I asked Jim, “If you put together all the necessary ingredients, does life inevitably develop?” Because if it did, it could be developing on Mars and throughout the universe, wherever those things are found.

“Larry,” he said, “you’ve just asked the Genesis Question. We don’t know the answer. Some people believe it could, some believe it couldn’t. A few billion years ago in the history of this planet, and in the history of Mars, and possibly in the history of other places, there may have been very sporadic conditions that might have been able to sustain life. But that was at the time when the planets were being constantly bombarded by junk leftover from when the Solar System formed. There was a lot of leftover crap, and it eventually smashed into the planets. We think all the planets formed about four point seven billion years ago in a relatively commonplace little spinning nebula of dust that collapsed to produce them and also spun off stuff that didn’t quite make it, like the materials in the asteroid belt that occasionally crash into us.” And then he said: “There was even an idea that life sprang forth on those objects, and there was a great so-called ‘panspermia’ wherein life spread from one place to another from some unknown source. Not us. We weren’t the source, according to panspermia theory. We were just one of the places where it landed and survived.”

I casually remarked that panspermia sounded like the answer to the question of life in the universe.

“Be careful,” Jim said. “The idea is very controversial, and often misunderstood. A lot depends on whom you talk to.” Although there is no consensus about life on Mars now, he told me, many scientists have come to believe that it’s very hard to imagine that Mars didn’t have a failed attempt at life forms at some point in its history. “The question is: where did it go? Seeing the existence of life on Mars would be like finding the Rosetta Stone. We may be alone now, but not in the past.” Jim thinks of Mars as the mother of all control experiments. “The theory goes like this: the Earth is a very messy, complicated, intersecting set of systems, but we also need a sandbox to play in, and the best sandbox we have is Mars. It’s a natural control experiment for things we want to understand about our own planet, if we were able to strip away and isolate some of the variables. For instance, Mars is colder and drier. Water exists there as ice or as a gas in the atmosphere. When it did exist as a liquid, it probably did so only briefly. There is no biosphere altering the planet, as we have on Earth. If it ever started, it failed.”

It’s possible that we could end up like Mars, as the Sun fades. Jim tells me that if all the water on Earth froze and then evaporated, we could very well have conditions that would suck the oxygen out of our atmosphere without renewing it.

I begin to think of Mars as Earth reduced to the essentials. For purposes of scientific research, it’s more promising than the moon, even though it is much harder to reach. “Back in the days of Apollo, we could use military-class technology to zip up to the moon and fly around and be very clever because we had unlimited funds and a national commitment from our president to put human beings there. We don’t have that commitment for Mars,” Jim reminds me, making the idea of regular transits to Mars suddenly sound sensible. “People argue that NASA will never have carte blanche like that again. Nowadays, you have to keep the price way down. It means that when you go to Mars you can’t carry enough fuel to go into the orbit you want. You have to use the gravity and atmosphere of Mars itself to get you there.”

Jim takes heart from historical precedents for these difficulties. “Think of them in terms of the exploration of our own planet,” he says. “Think of the early sailors willing to risk their lives sailing from Greece to Crete, an island about a day away, if the wind blows right. They might be willing to do that because, what the heck? That’s analogous to going to the moon, which we can reach in a matter of a few days. Now imagine sailing not from Greece to Crete but from Greece to North America. That’s the scale of difference we’re talking about when we send spacecraft out to Mars.” At that scale, the celestial sailors will have to learn to improvise in order to survive, just their maritime forebears did.

While we linger at the seep, Jim reminds me that only thirty-five years ago, there was nothing here but the Atlantic Ocean and fresh air. And now we are standing on rock containing copious evidence of bacteria. Could life have spread as quickly on a Martian volcano? Well, why not? No one knows. Questions like these form the basis for “astrobiology,” the search for extraterrestrial life – generally in the form of primitive bacteria invisible to the naked eye. Although the questions posed by astrobiology – or, as it is sometimes called, exobiology – have concerned NASA scientists for over twenty years, the field has suddenly entered a period of rapid expansion, as it moves from the realm of the purely speculative to the potentially demonstrable.

Biologists are coming around to the idea that Earth, while complex and idiosyncratic, is hardly unique. Our planet does not necessarily contain a divine, magical, or fluke recipe for life. On the contrary, life emerged here when our planet was less than a billion years old, as the outcome of geologic and chemical processes. It might have been the inevitable outcome; if so, it could easily appear throughout the Solar System and the universe.

In that case, why has extraterrestrial life been so hard to find? One thing is now clear to many scientists. As the song goes, they’ve been looking for life in all the wrong places – mainly in moderate, sunlit, moist environments. As biologists develop a greater understanding of all the unlikely, remote places where life exists on Earth, it has become apparent that there is much greater latitude. Life forms can be so hardy and unpredictable that they will find a way to exist just about anywhere. And at the microbial level, life can be so simple it seems barely alive at all. Still, to qualify as life, the stuff has to satisfy at least two widely accepted conditions. It must be able to replicate, and it must be able to mutate and evolve. Darwin’s principles of natural selection apply at all levels of life, and if life is discovered on Mars, or anywhere else in the universe, natural selection will apply there, as well.

We make our way along shallow erosional gullies, which provide a foothold on the volcano’s sheer upper reaches, until we arrive at the summit of Surtsey, a precarious location high above the surface of the North Atlantic. Jim, who’s lighter and more agile, is a lot better adapted to climbing than I. The jet lag and lack of sleep are taking their toll; my heart thumps wildly, and the wind pushes me off balance. I look up, trying to orient myself. Heimaey, so solid and inviting by comparison, floats in the distance, and beyond, Iceland itself. After a brief rest, we head down the steep slope.

By mid-afternoon, we reach a small research hut at the base of the volcano, where the Icelandic botanists who flew in with us have gathered. A pot of water comes to a boil on a little propane stove, a welcome sight, a bit of Earth on Mars. Over a mug of instant coffee, I converse with a botanist, Sturla Fridricksson, who, Jim explains, is considered the grand old man of Surtsey research. Sturla’s face has been seamed and cured to a leathery perfection by the Northern sun. He looks as though he’s served time on the Kon-Tiki. Just as he launches into a complete geological history of Surtsey, a saga in itself, the Icelandic Coast Guard returns to rescue us. Their helicopter touches down with a great throbbing racket; the rotors feel like they’re sucking the air right out of my nostrils. Silent and overwhelmed with impressions from our day’s exploration, Jim and I begin the journey back to the mainland, as though returning to Earth.

When he’s not climbing active volcanoes, Jim Garvin often roams the hallways at his place of work, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. That was where we met, exactly one year earlier, when I was visiting a friend who also works there. Jim was standing in a busy corridor, holding forth on the subject of Mars, and within minutes, the sound of his voice attracted a crowd of curious scientists, who drifted away from whatever they were doing to listen. Somebody ought to be getting this down, I thought, and started to take notes as fast as I could. When we began to talk, he identified himself as a co-investigator for the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), a state-of-the-art spacecraft designed to orbit Mars and conduct a number of pioneering experiments, including mapping the surface of the Red Planet in more detail than is available for Earth.

His special area of interest, he explained, is an instrument on MGS known as a laser altimeter – a laser designed to fire impulses at the surface of Mars. Minute fluctuations in the time it takes for the impulses to return create a three-dimensional picture of the surface, accurate to within a few meters. This is an incredibly intricate engineering feat – akin to extending a tape measure all the way from New York City to Washington, D.C., to determine the surface variations on the dome of the Capitol, while recording the results in a moving car back in New York.

At that first encounter, Jim invited me – as he does everyone he meets – to share his obsession with Mars. He is a rigorous scientist, but underneath the rigor lurks a romantic explorer. Mars is not just a planet to him; it holds, potentially, the answers to the riddles of the universe. At the time of this meeting, in July 1997, the Pathfinder spacecraft had just landed on the Red Planet, and its tiny rover, Sojourner Truth, had captured the imagination of the scientific community and people around the world, who were able to follow the extraterrestrial proceedings closely on the Internet. As I talked with Jim about the development of Mars exploration, it occurred to me that Pathfinder belonged to a much larger story – mankind’s exploration of Mars – and that the exploration was itself part of an even larger story: the search for the origins of life on Earth and throughout the universe.

Despite the sophistication of the new missions to Mars, Jim waxes nostalgic about the Viking program of the mid-70s – “the Cadillac of missions,” he says. “They actually had better equipment then.” Of course, it cost the American taxpayer about ten times as much as the current hardware does. He became involved with the Viking missions when he was still an undergraduate at Brown; a geology major, he helped to analyze images from the Viking 2 lander spacecraft, and he got hooked on the study of Mars. (Planetary spacecraft come in three basic varieties – flybys, landers, and orbiters. The flybys whiz past a planet on their way to somewhere else. An orbiter circles a planet. And a lander touches down on the surface.)

Just when he thought he’d found his vocation, the Viking missions ended, and NASA closed the book on Mars exploration. The missions, Jim often says, were the victims of their own success. They sent back thousands of stunning color images, and provided enough data to keep scientists occupied for two decades. They accomplished so much it seemed there was nothing left to do except send people to Mars, and there wasn’t enough money in the budget for that.

After graduation, Jim went to Stanford for an advanced degree in computer science. The life of a geek was not his style. So what if he could de-bug his colleagues’ programs and make them run faster? The work was too routine, too solitary, too stationary. He returned to Brown for his Ph.D. in geology, where he studied under Tim Mutch and Jim Head, who also taught a popular undergraduate course known as “Rocks for Jocks.” One day, Mutch said to Head, “You know, there are no fundamental problems left on Earth.” Mutch turned his attention to the planets and published an important – one is tempted to call it groundbreaking – book, The Geology of Mars, in 1976. This was a revolutionary idea, to study the geology of the Red Planet in a scientific manner. Geology claimed a gigantic new turf: the Solar System, and, by extension, planets and asteroids everywhere. All at once, geology became an integral part of the exploration of space, and Mutch was leading the way, training a new generation of planetary geologists, including Jim Garvin.

“At first glance,” Jim says, “Tim Mutch might have been perceived as a Jimmy Stewart type of character: tall, thin, amiable, and always above-board, almost self-deprecating. Deeper inside the man was his passion and resolve.” Occasionally, he’d remark to Jim, in an offhand way, “You’re a Mars person. Did you know that?” And at a party, he buttonholed his fast-talking young graduate student and said, “Jim, you and a few others are the future of Mars exploration, so it is yours to make it happen.” That was, he says, “heavy stuff” for a twenty-one-year-old grad student to hear.

As it happened, Brown played a role in analyzing data from the two Viking landers, so Jim had access to the latest developments in Mars research and analysis. He still revels in the memory as if it were his first love. It was his first love. In defiance of conventional geological practice, Mutch concentrated on the enigmatic landforms of Mars. “This was revolutionary thinking to me, as most geologists argue that studying typical landforms is the best way to learn how a surface was formed,” Jim says. “But Tim argued that finding those enigmatic landscapes might be more pivotal in the workings of Mars than background normal landscapes.”