Mars Bar

I spent a couple of hours yesterday watching a bunch of guys in blue shirts sit and stare at their respective monitors. They did this with great intensity, but I can't say that it made for high drama. But I knew that somewhere, there was drama and excitement, and tension. The men and women at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena had been working for years for this moment, and you could see it in their faces.
You could see it when you looked very closely. We weren't in Pasadena. We were watching a projected image in Oakland, and listening to the crackly audio of Mission Control. We stood in that warehouse, surrounded by art and images of Mars, waiting for some real pictures of the Red Planet. We had come to celebrate the success of the Phoenix Mars Lander, at least vicariously. We filled the empty minutes wondering what might happen. Would a hole open up in the sky above us just as the lander touched down, with a booming voice emanating across vast regions of space shouting, "Hey! Leave us alone already!"
They sent a media package along. There's a DVD that contains, in addition to other cultural relics, Orson Welles' broadcast of "War of the Worlds". At this point, no one expects little green men to come creeping toward the lander to inspect and discover the disc. Instead it is included as a time capsule of sorts for the humans who eventually catch up to the various and sundry probes, robots and satellites that we've been lobbing in Mars' direction for the past thirty years or so. What a hoot that will be for our astronauts to drag the DVD back to their capsule to listen to the way we earthlings managed to defeat the Martians with our rhinovirus. Their ray guns turned out to be no match for our cough and cold season.
When Phoenix was finally on the surface of Mars, our crowd cheered right along with the scientists in Pasadena. Maybe we were relieved to be watching exploration instead of incursion. Later that night, I looked at pictures of Mars' north pole with my son. "Aren't they in color?" he asked. After all, the video we had been watching of Pasadena had been in color. And we had been able to watch them move. This just looked like a parking lot. A parking lot that is four hundred and twenty-two million miles away. That's a pretty neat trick.