Instant Genius - Mars in opposition, with Dr Stu Clark

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

This week Mars will be lit up by our Sun, providing astronomers and amateur stargazers a wonderful chance to study the Red Planet. Astronomer and author, Dr Stu Clark joins us to explore how our image of Mars has evolved over the last 150 years. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit name audio.com to learn more. From BBC Science Focus, this is instant genius, a bite-sized masterglass in podcast form. I'm Daniel Bennett, the magazine's editor. If you're on social media, you might have noticed that astronomers have been posting a lot more pictures of Mars recently. That's because the planet is in opposition for the next few days, which makes it the best opportunity there has been for a few years, and indeed that there will be for a few years to take a closer look at the planet.

Here to explain what Mars being in opposition exactly means and how our view of the planet has evolved over the decades is astronomer, author and regular science focus contributor Dr Stu Clark. He's also the editor of The Book of Mars, an anthology of fact and fiction that charts our characterisation of the red planet

over the last 150 years. Remind us all. Mars is in opposition this week and you hear different points throughout the last 10 years of different planets being in opposition. So remind us, what does a planet being an opposition mean? When a planet is in opposition, I mean it literally means that it is opposite the sun in the sky. And so we see it reach its highest altitude at around about midnight. but practically what that means for most people is in order to see Mars in opposition, for it to be 180 degrees away from the sun, it means that the Earth has to be directly in between the Sun and Mars.

And so that means that the Earth is actually at its closest point to Mars at that time. And so Mars appears brightest, it appears at its largest as well, well. So it's generally one of those moments in astronomy, you know, that astronomers like to make the most of. It's throughout the whole community really. So you can, if it's, skies permitting a clear day or clear night, you can go out with one of those stargazing apps and find Mars and see it. Is that right? Yes, it's very obvious in the night sky at the moment. This beautiful red Mars. I mean, it properly is red. And it's very easy to notice.

And you can trace it over the sky, across the southern sky, over towards the west, and see Jupiter shining very brightly as well. And then if you go further, you'll see Saturn as well, more of a slightly dimmer sort of ochre dot right in the west. It's already been a sort of spectacular opportunity where I've seen astronomers and stargazles on Twitter posts some just incredible photos already. Is this kind of position

its closeness and its brightness, does that also make it a good opportunity to study the planet? Yes, anything that you do to study Mars from the Earth is made a bit easier at our position because the planet's reflecting more light and we're a bit closer.

So we are, you know, we're seeing the disk of Mars larger than it, that it normally is. So from the Earth, for example, you, astronomers monitor Mars for its weather and any sort of changes that they see in the atmosphere. And these are sometimes better to do from the Earth than from spacecraft, because from Earth you see Mars as a whole planet. You know, the spacecraft just see little bits of the planet as they fly over it. And then they stitch it all together later. But to get

sort of global context. You know, the Earth is brilliant for that because you see the planet, you know, all in the same field of view. So monitoring the terrain, so changes in the ice caps, for example, Mars has extremely variable seasons. And, you know, the atmosphere pretty much disappears in the winter and freezes out onto the ice caps and the polar caps of Mars. Then in the springtime, Martian springtime, when that gas starts to turn back into, or come out of the ice and turn back into the gas and fill the atmosphere again, you get these vast dust storms that can engulf the entire planet. And so those kind of things are monitored from Earth.

So we presume there'll be sort of scopes and observatories trained on Mars at the moment to try and just gather up as much data as they can while it's in this. Indeed, and even the Hubble, you know, the Hubble Space Telescope, that has a monitoring program that's been running on Mars as well. And so how often does an opportunity like this arise? How often does Mars appear in opposition? Yeah, it appears every, roughly every two years. And the thing with Mars is that not all of these oppositions are created,

equal. And the reason for that is because Mars has an elliptical orbit. And so it varies its distance from the sun quite dramatically. And so if we are going to have a very close opposition, then we need to be somewhere close to Mars being at the closest approach to the sun. It's perihelian position. and that was the case for the last couple of oppositions, sort of 2020, 2018. Now we're drifting away from that configuration. So Mars isn't quite as big. So we can kind of line up at different points along both our orbits,

and sometimes those can be a bit further away. And now I suppose we're drifting out of the line. That's it, yeah, exactly. But there is this cherry on the cape. this opposition, which is that on the very night of opposition itself, the moon will actually drift in front of Mars. So the moon will occult Mars. Mars will disappear behind the moon for about an hour. And it's going to take place at around about 458 GMT. So it's super early in the morning. But Mars will disappear behind the moon in the early hours of the 8th of December.

around about 4.58. Across the UK, the timing will vary by a couple of minutes or so. And then it's going to spend about an hour behind the moon and pop out the other side. Wow, so we might see on the ape, we might see some sort of magical shots of a moon, kind of obscuring the fate of Mars. Absolutely. I bet there are some astrophotographers out there. I mean, they're incredibly skilled bunch, some of them. of them. And so we'll see

sort of like the lunar limb actually sort of biting through half of Mars, you know, as it disappears behind. Because it won't just suddenly disappear. The moon will actually cross the face of Mars. And so being at opposition,

where you've got a large diameter, large angular diameter there for Mars, it gives a lot of opportunity to actually watch that happening. So you've just actually edited and anthology called The Book of Mars. And correct me from it, it's made up of around 100 different pieces of writing, short stories, news pieces, fiction, nonfiction. Is it fair to say having put that

together that Mars is the planet that we sort of know most about and have written most about, you know, other than Earth, of course? Yes, so it's very clear. I think that Mars is the most observed planet after Earth. But it's also the planet that has completely captured our attention. And I think there are a number of reasons for this. One is that it does go through this rather dramatic series of oppositions. So Jupiter and Saturn, for example, they stay relatively constant beacons in the night sky. They move to and from the sun. So we sometimes look. lose them from view. But they're so far away that their brightness in the night sky doesn't change that dramatically. And then we have flighty Venus and even flightier Mercury that never stray far

from the sun. But Mars goes through this extraordinary dimming and brightening. It's this gorgeous red color. It seems to draw your attention very much. It does these little retrograde loops in the night sky as well, where it appears to back track and then carry on. I mean, all the outer planets do that as well, but it's particularly obvious, I think, on Mars. And it's right in the middle of one of these sort of retrograde loops at the moment. They always happen at opposition because of a changing line of sight from the Earth to the planet. But then, of course, I think one of the key things is that Mars has this terrain that you can see, even with relatively small telescopes, and that changes as well with the seasons.

And so it absolutely captured people's imagination. And you can see in the writings. So the book itself, I mean, it's just called the Book of Mars. As you say, it's about a hundred writings, both. fiction and non-fiction, and they span about 150 years. And by looking at the science and then the stories that were being written about Mars, I could sort of trace the diffusion of scientific knowledge into this sort of the cultural appreciation of Mars, see which of the ideas about the planets held on for a long time even after they were disproved by science and those kind of

things. It's been absolutely fascinating to chart this understanding. And I think it's safe to say that in that period of time in that last 150 years, we're still just as fascinated by Mars today as we were back then. It's interesting. You mentioned the, I'd never thought about the sort of terrain of Mars, I suppose, being able to see that and liken it to our own and personify it is probably quite a big factor because there is a planetary scientist who we've interviewed before called Paul Byrne, who feels very passionately that Mars has stolen Venus's spotlight or it's time it's unbeat. And so I just wanted to sort of ask you what your thoughts on this are, certainly in the last decade, Mars has been, has enjoyed a lot of popular attention,

both from the media and the public, in terms of, you know, Musk wanting to go there, and people want to form a base. There's obviously sort of habitability reasons for that. Mars is a lot friendlier place than Venus, but I wonder what your thoughts were, why it's so popular as a planet and as a place for study compared to something like Venus, which, as Paul would argue, it's kind of the closest thing Earth has to. to a twin has a very sort of similar orbit and it's quite close to us. Why is Mars, say, more popular than Venus? Yeah, it is an interesting question because, of course, Venus actually comes closer to us than Mars does.

You know, it's brighter in the sky than Mars is. But I think one of the issues with Venus, of course, is that it's completely covered by clouds. It's extremely difficult to see any level of detail through a telescope with Venus. You know, it hides its secrets very well. And when we have gone there, you know, we've found it really quite inhospitable with the temperature and the composition of the atmosphere. Mars, on the other hand, resembles as an extreme desert. And I think when we see it, you know, we can. land on it, we can move around on it. We can look at it and we can see familiar landscapes,

you know, cliffs, craters, desert plains, these kinds of things. So, you know, it does have an atmosphere. It's very tenuous. It's mostly carbon dioxide, so it's not at all breathable. There's lots of evidence for water on Mars, certainly in the past, maybe even today as well. So everything adds up to it being a challenge, but you can imagine mounting that challenge to go and live on Mars, to create a base on Mars, to explore it with people. And it's so fascinating. That's reflected in the earliest writings that I put in the anthology. Because every idealized society that you can imagine, everyone's different view of what utopia looks like, whether that's a communist utopia, whether that's a feminist utopia, you know, a capitalist utopia. And all of those were translated into stories and placed on Mars by these early, often 19th century and very early 20th century.

writers as well. So there's a, there's a real sense of the, the idea of Mars as, as a venue for a human utopia, but that utopia takes whatever form you believe utopia is. So it's like a bit, it's a, it's a, it's a fresh start. It's an attainable, but it's a, it's a good venue for a fresh start. So, I mean, you touched on it there, but I'm really curious to hear your take on how our idea of the planet has, you know, going back as, I don't know how far back, you said 150 years, but I imagine you probably had to look further back than that. How is our sense of the planet changed over the decades? So I believe, so the earliest piece is from 1873. and this was the beginning of the telescopic observations of Mars

that started to show what we now know were optical illusions but these straight lines that people called the canals. And it's that I think really, this idea that astronomers were seeing things that made it look as if Mars might be either inhabitable or inhabited. And that sparks just this major cultural and scientific investigation of the possibilities of Mars. And gradually as the astronomers, so unpack all of that and sort of show us that there are no canals. There's hardly any water vapor for a start.

And that was the first observation. So the spectroscopic observation of the atmosphere. of Mars that made it clear that there was no widespread water vapor in the planet's atmosphere. Therefore, there couldn't be open bodies of water or canals or anything like that on the planet. But the idea of the canals is so prevalent in sort of culture by this time. You still have people in the 1950s, you know, which is 40 years. after astronomers start to realize there's no canals, there's no widespread water on Mars, on the surface certainly. You still have people, you know, like Ray Bradbury, like Philip K. Dick, still

writing about canals. But they've morphed them now. They've morphed them into the relics of, you know, dead civilizations. Or they've used Mars now, and this is super interesting, the way this comes out from American writers as well. well. They have used that idea that, well, if they even are still canals, you know, they're completely derelict, the planets are drying up desert, and therefore any life, the people that built the canals, they're a decaying civilization, they're an indigenous people on the back foot. And so Mars then becomes a venue for the exploration of, you know, white colonialism across America and how far does the American ideal of manifest destiny go before it becomes too far? So you read these stories about colonizing Mars in that same way

and displacing this indigenous population. So Mars becomes this crucible that you can pretty much explore anything that's happened on the Earth or that you want to on Earth, but just put it in an exotic environment. So that's fascinating. that that idea of the canals, that moment when we see something, I suppose, that's a reflection of what we know here on Earth becomes really deeply embedded in culture up to the 50s. And you mentioned Philip K. Dick then, and to me, the first thing I think of his total recall and the idea that these underground tunnels, and I have this sort of faint memory of these

visuals of kind of straight lines under the ground. Is that what you're sort of referring to about Philip K. Dick there and how it appeared in his work? Yeah, in fact, he uses Mars in several of his novels. The one I decided to go for the excerpt for this particular piece was from his novel Martian Time Slip. And that was super interesting to me because that's where he sort of full-on uses

the Martians as the displaced indigenous population. They're not extinct. They're just being trampled all over by the earth settlers. And the other thing that I found fascinating about that book as well was that he kind of anticipates the mental health epidemic. And so he talks a lot about mental health and his lead character suffers. But the question that comes up in the book

is whether this sort of neurodiversity is just normal to say other cultures and other races. So the Martians, for example, may appear simplistic to the human settlers, but there's so much more going on in their minds and some of the more neurodiverse humans find it easier to understand the Martian way of life because of their different perceptions

and the different ways that their brains work. I want to just then ask about sort of where we are today and I guess the big question of the moment, particularly in the backdrop of the Artemis launches, which is the missions that are set to put humans back on the moon. But often in the same breath, we talk about them as the ones that will then lead us to Mars. Having digested all of this history and culture, I'd love to know how long do you think it will be before we are able to actually set foot on the planet? Yeah, I think it's still difficult.

I mean, it really is difficult. The interesting thing about this is Elon Musk. he's the wild card in the equation. Yeah, Artemis is amazing. I mean, it truly is. And to see the European Space Agency so deeply embedded in those missions, you know, with providing hardware,

you know, that keeps the capsule powered and supplies communications and all of that. The service module is just absolutely amazing. So we'll definitely see people going back, to the moon and I think relatively soon. And of course, Elon Musk is absolutely completely embedded in that effort. And then he might be the one that drives, you know, forward to Mars and sort of drags the national space agencies with him or motivates them so that he again plays a key role in all of that. One thing that's been very clear ever since the

the finish of the Apollo missions, you know, in the 1970s, is that NASA has talked an awful lot about going to Mars, but we've seen no real, how can we say, sort of political or financial commitment to make that happen. And perhaps NASA is not, perhaps NASA is not best place to do it in the most cost-effective way possible. simply because it is a government agency. So it has to always be thinking about safety.

And I'm not saying you should be cavalier about that. But its hands are tied when it comes to those kinds of things. And so maybe this new move of a real commercial sector in space as we're seeing developing. Maybe that's the thing that will actually, make cost-effective systems that get us to Mars safely. And so there's a new deal to be done between the private sector and the national space agencies.

I'd also say that I think having space agencies like ISA and others, Jaxa, the Japanese agency, really upping their game, their abilities, what they're doing is astonishing. And now it can be a much more global effort. You know, the Chinese are doing extraordinary things in space. And, okay, that might be sort of pushing a rivalry angle there. But I think all of these things are coming together at a time,

which will make this actually happen now. So are you suggesting that effectively what we might see play out over on the moon in the next decades will be a sort of collaborative private, public sector partnership and if those private companies win big then they might then turn their sites

to Mars and think of another collaborative way to get there in order to sort of that's my feeling. Yeah, that's my feeling. We'll see, I mean, whatever happens, it's going to be fascinating to play out.

But I think it feels like the era of of the large, nationally funded big mission to me feels somewhat over. And even the ideas of all these national space agencies collaborating together, that eases that and makes bigger projects possible. But my feeling is there's a big role, even if it's just supply chain for the private sector as well, and they can increasingly play that part. And the more we use space,

the more off-the-shelf, these kind of components and these systems are going to become. And the smaller, the tweaking that needs to be done in order to adapt them, say, to Mars from the moon. So I suppose what I'm trying to say in this rambly way is that the era of big bespoke missions like Apollo, I think it's probably over, but we'll see an organic sort of movement

outwards into the solar system. Do you think I've continued to a decade that we might? I think for purely selfish reasons, I'd quite like it to be in the 2030s. Yeah, that would be pretty nice. Yes. And then I just wondered,

do you sort of, just lastly, do you, I suppose buy into is the wrong phrasing, but do you buy into the idea that we need to put people on Mars as opposed to robots? Do you think we need to be there in the flesh? And, you know, could you expand on why that, why you think that's important? Yes, I do, actually. And, you know, I thought a lot about this quite recently, especially while editing the book and sort of starting to think my way through Mars has captured us so completely.

And it's a process that began actually when I was writing my previous book beneath the night, which was all about why are we so fascinated by the night sky? And that's a fascination that dates back throughout human history. You know, the very earliest writings are about the night sky. You know, we're in thrall, really, to the wider universe. And Mars is that beacon that draws us outwards now. And the reason I think it's important that humans go

is because of this fascination, is perennial fascination with the wider universe. And what does it mean to be alive in this big universe? So it gets a little philosophical. It sort of departs a little bit from sort of the pure science of investigation and knowledge gathering. But it becomes what's our role in the universe? As at the moment, we are the only intelligent creatures that we know of that exist in the universe. That may not be the case at all.

the universe may be teeming with intelligences. But what does that mean now that we can have those thoughts, now that we can think what's our place in the universe, why are we here, what's the meaning of it all and all of those things? And it's something that I think from my journalistic background, the answer almost becomes obvious. And it is, you know, what is the role of a journalist? Well, it's to bear witness to things

that your readers can't. So you become this funnel, if you like, for telegraphing experience. And that's the same really for the human race being alive in this mighty universe. Our job, if you like, is to bear witness to the universe. We are an evolutionary process, you know, of the universe, consciousness has come about you through the random shufflings of molecules and chemicals. We are a way for the universe to know itself. And, you know, as I say, this gets very metaphysical and, you know, and quite philosophical. That means, to me, it's no surprise that we want to go out and explore these new places. It's no surprise. It's no surprise. that we want to experience what it would be like to stand on the moon, to stand on Mars,

to achieve something by building a base there. You know, it just becomes so obvious that that's part of what humans do. And it ultimately comes down to the fact there's no single reason to do it, but there's every reason to do it. Because as many individuals as there are on Earth, there will be as many reasons to do these things. People will find their own justifications for going or not going. So it's inevitable.

It's just who we are. And the trick and the challenge is to do it in the most responsible way possible. So we're just not some sort of rampaging force through the solar system, you know, but that we can do it with respect for the local environment and understand properly what it means to do these things and the kind of stewardship that would come with exploration. That was Dr. Stu Clark there, talking about our future on Mars.

Now, if you'd like to find out more about our understanding of the Red Planet, do check out the Book of Mars, which is on sale now and published by the head of Zeus. Thanks for listening. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents, as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, do come find us online at sciencefocus.com.

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