"Isn't it weird that we sent a space probe to Mars and we didn't find
anything?" -Television reporter in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks

The first time we landed on Mars was in 1976, when Viking 1 dropped down
on a rocky slope of Ares Vallis, took some soil samples, and sent back
the first black and white snapshots from the surface of the red planet.
The fact that Pathfinder's recent landing on Mars is a repeat of the
1976 trip seems to have been largely forgotten. For the twenty-something
net browser Viking is a hazy memory from a pre-digital past.

Net frenzy over the Pathfinder landing reached a height on the Fourth of
July, with NASA reporting over 100 millions hits on its website. Among
those logging on was Vice President Gore, who spent the better part of
the day downloading grainy Marscapes from the NASA site, and told Time
magazine that "we are likely to experience an emotional and spiritual
impact not unlike the one which accompanied that first picture of Earth
rising from the moon's horizon a generation ago." That the Vice
President should summon up the Apollo mission of '68 is indicative of
the general amnesia which has affected our interest in the space program
over the last twenty years. Space exploration in the dark decade of the
eighties was characterized by the Strangelovian logic of Star Wars,
Death Star of the American military and black hole of defense spending.
If Gore's comment holds true, Pathfinder's major achievement will be in
transforming the image of the space program from evil empire to
planetary playland.

Space travel has always been heavily laden with symbolism. The most
famous space picture of all is of the American flag flying on the moon.
Viking landed on Mars in 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial.
Pathfinder touched down on July 4th, Independence Day, 1997. In many
respects, however, Pathfinder marks a departure from previous space
missions. In place of the stars and bars, the rover wears an unassuming
color strip which allows mission control to adjust the hue of pictures
beamed back from Mars. If the pioneering space missions of the Cold War
were designed to wow the American public and intimidate the Russians,
then Pathfinder is a deliberate attempt to bring the space program down
to earth, and back into American popular culture.

Pathfinder's landing on Mars was almost comical. Decelerating from
16,600 to 23 mph and inflating its cocoon of airbags, the probe hit the
surface of Mars like a cartoon spaceship, bouncing 50 feet in the air
before coming to rest a half mile away. The cartoonization of outer
space began with the Jetsons and leads to a rock on Mars named Scooby
Doo, against which, as this is being written, the rover is resting its
head. Soon it will move onto another rock nicknamed Yogi. Ten years ago,
the rocks might have been given Latin names like Ares Vallis, the flood
plain where Pathfinder landed; now planetary nomenclature is strictly
Hanna Barbera.

Excitement over this Mars landing is due at least in part to our
American obsession with cartoon characters and cuddly robots. In the
mythic age of space exploration, rocket ships reached the planetary
proportions of the Starship Enterprise and Battlestar Galactica. In
comparison, Pathfinder is petite, and Sojourner, the Mars rover, is no
bigger than your microwave oven. Sojourner is cute. It doesn't make you
gasp in awe, it makes you want to bend down and play with it. Powered by
D batteries, Sojourner is essentially a remote control car, which
explains much of its appeal. Driving a car on Mars almost beats walking
on Mars. Taking its cue from the rover, Jeep just released a television
commercial of a Cherokee driving on Mars. We couldn't have chosen a
better representative of American culture on Mars then the rover, or
Jeep for that matter. Were a Martian to stumble across the rover on
Mars, the message would be clear: "This is a car. This a symbol of my
culture."

The pictures sent back by Pathfinder look a lot like the desert in
Arizona or New Mexico - a dry, dusty plain strewn with boulders, and a
low hillside rising in the distance. Mars is not especially exotic
looking. For a more alien-looking landscape, you would have to visit
Arches National Park, or the Badlands in North Dakota, both of which
look a lot more like Mars then, well, Mars.

The pictures themselves are somewhat mundane. It's what they don't
reveal, i.e. Martians, that makes them so intriguing. The growing number
of UFO enthusiasts can be attributed to the fact that belief is
disproportionate to evidence. The lack of concrete proof that life
exists elsewhere in the universe has actually stimulated UFO cultism, as
both the recent Roswell and Heaven's Gate events demonstrate. The
Heaven's Gate cult went so far as to return the telescope they had
bought to view a spaceship they believed was trailing the Hale-Bopp
Comet, claiming the telescope was faulty.

Like Heaven's Gate and Roswell, The Pathfinder mission is a symbolic
confirmation of our belief that life exists elsewhere in the universe.
Cult suicide and UFO conventions are singled out to to convince us that
irrational belief in extra terrestrial life is in fact scientifically
rational. "Is there anybody out there?" - the question underlying space
exploration, science fiction and UFO fanaticism, is only rhetorical.
After all, there's no way of ever proving it false.

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Munro Galloway is a painter who lives in Brooklyn, and writes regularly
on art and culture.

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Visit Mars:
Links to Mars Pathfinder Web pages
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mpfmir/

Past Missions to Mars
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/pao/flash/marslife/pastexpl.htm

National Space Science Data Center Mars Photo Gallery
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery/photogallery-mars.html

Spaceviews Mars Pathfinder Mission
http://www.seds.org/spaceviews/pathfinder/

Jet Propulsion Lab's Future Mars Mission
http://mgs-www.jpl.nasa.gov/

University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Lab Imager
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/imp/

Passport to Knowledge Mars Mission Home Page
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/mars/

Mars Today Poster of Current Conditions on Mars
http://humbabe.arc.nasa.gov/

Marvin the Martian Home Page