Mars2K4, the new Mars exhibit at The National Geographic Museum’s Explorers Hall is your best chance of getting up close and personal with the infamous red planet. Loosely divided into three sections, the exhibit begins with a look at the place of Mars in classical astronomy. It then explores Mars in popular culture. In the last installment, the visitor is able to view actual photographs of the Martian surface and learn about past and present missions including Spirit and Opportunity, NASA’s recently launched Mars Exploration Rovers.
The exhibit displays Mars’ legacy as potentially harboring intelligent life began in 1876, when an erring translator unwittingly interpreted cartographer Giovanni Schiaparelli’s map of the planet as having “canals.” Instead of having these man-made features, Mars, according to Schiaparelli, actually had “channels.”
By the 1880s, nearly everyone including respected academics agreed that it was more than likely that there was life on Mars. The exhibit boasts a ticket stub from a series of lectures given by Boston aristocrat and astronomer Percival Lowell at M.I.T. Not only did Lowell think there was life on Mars, he outlined the foundations of an advanced agrarian civilization that used Schiaparelli’s canals to redistribute water over the arid Martian surface.
The second half of the exhibit focuses on the cultural reaction to the possibility of life on Mars. For decades the concept of an “alien” was synonymous with “Martian.” The familiar cartoon character Marvin the Martian stands in display cases, and a looped episode of the TV show “My Favorite Martian” plays on a ‘60s-style television set. H.G. Wells’ incendiary radio broadcasting experiment “The War of the Worlds” is also presented.
The third and final portion of the exhibit is dedicated to the current fascination with the red planet. There have been 35 robotic missions launched to Mars since 1960, with some by Russia and by China, most by the U.S., and two-thirds of them ending in failure. The first missions were simple fly-by’s consisting of a camera on a rocket aimed at Mars. It took four failures by the Soviets and two by the U.S. before America was successful. The next wave of missions consisted of satellites sent to orbit Mars and take more pictures-again the U.S. succeeded first.
The photographs returned to Earth by Opportunity and Spirit are truly spell-binding. A sampling of these photographs is displayed along with a full-scale model of the mission rover, which is about the size of an ATV and has an uncanny resemblance to Johnny Number-Five from Short-Circuit.
Most stimulating is definitely the 3-D interactive computer model of Mars. It presents a photo-quality illustration of the planet suspended in space that can be spun and zoomed and explored at will. Think planetary virtual tour. There is also a list of hundreds of significant Martian landmarks that the viewer can display at the click of the mouse, such as Olympus Mons, Mars’ largest mountain and an active volcano.
A chair that looked like the driver’s seat of a spaceship situated behind a mock control panel and a big red button that read “launch” proved to be nothing more than a glorified video presentation. This portion of the exhibit was enjoyable, but the fact that it wasn’t actually a ride disappoints.
The question remains, however-could there be life on Mars? Are there microbes hiding in Mars’ polar ice caps? Might we still find very little green men burrowing through the red dirt? Of all the planets in our solar system, Mars is the likeliest candidate for harboring extraterrestrial life. Finding life on Mars would be a discovery akin to the Copernican revolution, changing nothing and everything at the same time. One would hope that such a discovery would rekindle humanity’s fascination with the heavens. Until then, I will rely on relatively obscure museum exhibits to meet like-minded space cadets.
Mars2K4 will run until April 25. National Geographic Explorers Hall is located at 17th and M Streets.
