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UPDATE, Saturday, September 25, 1999.
A Mars update, since that's what my e-mail has been about all week. First the old news, for anyone new here. When Mars Pathfinder came down on July 4, 1997, bouncing on its air bags in an old flood channel called Ares Vallis, NASA renamed the lander the Carl Sagan Memorial Station. The little Sojourner rover drove off it and spent the summer sniffing rocks. I thought that was exactly right. He had been on the Mariner, Viking and Voyager teams and argued for going back to Mars his whole life, and he missed the landing by six and a half months. Now the bad news. On Thursday, September 23, the Mars Climate Orbiter reached Mars after nine months on the way, fired its engine to slow down into orbit, went behind the planet right on schedule, and was never heard from again. As I type this nobody knows why. The engineers are going through every number. My third period asked me on Friday if it crashed, and the honest answer, which I made them write down, is we don't know yet, and anybody who tells you they do is guessing. That's the whole lesson of this page, really. The Mars Polar Lander is still on its way, due to come down near the south pole in early December. Keep your fingers crossed for it. I'll post whatever we learn about the orbiter. |
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My name is Joel Patterson. I teach ninth-grade earth science at a public high school in Tucson,
and this is my seventeenth year doing it. Before that I worked two years at a copper mine south of
town, decided I liked rocks better than shoveling them, and went back to school for geology.
In the fall of 1980 I was twenty-four, older than everybody else in my mineralogy lab, and living in a rented house near campus with three roommates and a thirteen-inch black and white TV with a coat hanger for an antenna. Every week that fall the four of us sat on the floor and watched Cosmos on PBS. Nobody talked. One of my roommates was an English major and he didn't talk either. I'm not an astronomer. I'm a rock man. But every year since I started teaching, some part of what I do in class has come from a man in a turtleneck standing on a cliff over the ocean explaining the universe to a guy on a floor in Tucson. When he died in December 1996 I meant to write something, and it took me a year to start this page. I've been adding to it ever since. I've set it up the way my students ask about him, because they do ask. A ninth grader wants to know three things right away: who was he, what did he do, and is he still alive.  "Who was he?" Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York, in November 1934, to a working family. He often told how a trip to the 1939 New York World's Fair, when he was a little boy, set him off thinking about the future, and how he went to the library and asked for a book about stars and was handed one about movie stars. He got the right one eventually. He went to the University of Chicago and earned his doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics there in 1960. He taught at Harvard for a few years and then moved to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1968, where he stayed for the rest of his life as a professor and the director of a laboratory for planetary studies. What his students don't know (my students, I mean) is that he did real science before he was ever on television. In the early 1960s he worked out that Venus must be hot as an oven on the surface because of a runaway greenhouse effect, and the Mariner 2 probe found out he was right. He worked on why Mars changes color with the seasons, and it turned out to be blowing dust, not plants, which is the kind of answer a geologist likes. He was on the science teams for the Mariner, Viking and Voyager missions. He spent a lot of his career on the question of whether there is life anywhere else, and he never once said he knew the answer. "What was Cosmos?" Cosmos: A Personal Voyage was thirteen hour-long episodes on PBS, starting at the end of September 1980. He wrote it with Ann Druyan and Steven Soter. Millions of people watched it, all over the world, and the book that went with it was a best seller for months. If you were in school in the 1980s, you probably saw it on a cart with a VCR when the teacher had a sore throat. I'm guilty. The parts my class remembers:
"Did he win anything?" The Pulitzer Prize, in 1978, for The Dragons of Eden, a book about how human intelligence evolved. A scientist winning the Pulitzer for a book anybody can read impresses ninth graders more than I expected. There's a list of all his books on the next page. "What's on the gold record?" In 1977 NASA launched the two Voyager probes on the tour of the outer planets, and each one carries a gold-plated copper phonograph record, with a needle and instructions for playing it scratched on the cover in pictures. Carl Sagan chaired the committee that decided what went on it. They picked greetings in fifty-five languages, sounds of the Earth like wind and surf and thunder and birds, more than a hundred pictures coded into the grooves, and an hour and a half of music from all over the world, from Bach to Chuck Berry. Both Voyagers are past all the planets now and headed out into the dark, and the records will last longer than anything else people have made. I give my classes an assignment: you get one side of one record to explain the Earth to someone who has never heard of it. What goes on it? The arguments are terrific. One year a whole class fought for three days over whether to include a recording of a school bell. He also cofounded The Planetary Society in 1980, a group for ordinary people who want the planets explored. I've been a member since 1985. They send a magazine, and I keep the back issues in a milk crate by my desk for anybody who wants them. "What's the Pale Blue Dot?" This is the one. If you only read one part of this page, read this part. On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 was about 3.7 billion miles from the Sun, farther out than Neptune or Pluto, heading up and out of the plane of the planets. Carl Sagan had argued for years that before its cameras were shut off for good, somebody ought to turn it around and take one last picture of home. NASA finally agreed. Voyager took a set of frames of the planets, a family portrait of the solar system from the outside. In one of those frames, sitting in a streak of scattered sunlight, is the Earth. It is less than one pixel. A speck. Everyone you have ever heard of, every person who ever lived, every ocean and continent and mountain range, the whole thing is that dot. Sagan later wrote a book named for it, and in it he talked about how small we are, and how the dot is the only home we have ever known, and how that ought to make us kinder to each other and more careful with the place. I'm saying it in my own words, and not as well as he did. Go read the book. The assignment. Every year, the week before winter break, I hand every student a print of the picture. (The Planetary Society sells them. I buy forty a year out of my own pocket and I don't care.) Then we go out on the football field. We make a scale model of the solar system with the Sun as a beach ball on the goal line, and the kids walk it out, planet by planet, with a peppercorn for the Earth. They run out of football field before they get to Jupiter. They run out of neighborhood a long time before Pluto. Then they stand at the end and look back, and they can't see the peppercorn at all. Back in class they write one page called What's in the Dot. Everything they can think of that is inside that one pixel. Their families. Their dogs. The Grand Canyon. The test they took that morning. Somebody always writes "my ex-girlfriend," and somebody always writes "everybody who ever died," and you can hear the room go quiet when they read that one out. I keep the best ones in a binder. I've got nine years of them now. I'm a geologist. I spend my days on how big and old the Earth is. That picture is the only thing I've ever found that makes ninth graders understand how small and young we are, all at once. "Did they make Contact into a movie?" Yes. Contact was his only novel, published in 1985, about a radio astronomer who picks up a message from the star Vega. He and Ann Druyan, his wife, had been trying to get it made into a movie for years. It finally came out in July 1997, directed by Robert Zemeckis, with Jodie Foster as the astronomer, Ellie Arroway. He died before it was finished. The film is dedicated to him. They filmed part of it at the Very Large Array, the big radio telescope dishes on the plains of San Agustin in New Mexico. That summer my wife and I drove over to see them. It's most of a day's drive from Tucson. Twenty-seven dishes, each one as big as a house, and when they all turn at once to a new spot in the sky, the hair stands up on your arms. We had the visitor center almost to ourselves. I'd recommend it to anyone. The movie is rated PG. I show the first twenty minutes in class, the part where she's a little girl on a ham radio, and then I tell them to rent the rest. "Is he still alive?" No. In 1994 he was diagnosed with a rare disease of the bone marrow, the part of you that makes your blood. He was treated at a cancer center in Seattle and had bone marrow transplants, with his sister as the donor. He kept writing the whole time. He died there of pneumonia on Friday, December 20, 1996, at sixty-two. That was the last day of school before Christmas vacation. I heard it on the radio driving home with a box of ungraded lab reports on the passenger seat, and I pulled into a gas station and sat there for a while. When I tell the kids, they always ask if he was scared, or if he changed his mind at the end and believed in something. I tell them I didn't know him and I'm not going to put words in his mouth. His last book was published the year after he died, and he wrote about being sick in it himself, plainly and without feeling sorry for himself. If you want to know what he thought, that's where to look. Read it yourself and decide. "Why should we care? He's been dead three years." Somebody actually asked me that, in about those words, a couple of weeks ago. Fair question. Here is my answer, which I've been working on since:
For other teachers If you teach earth or space science and you want my scale model numbers, my Cosmic Calendar worksheet, or the Eratosthenes data sheet, e-mail me and I'll send them as plain text. No charge, obviously. Just tell me how it went. And if you've got students who like the night sky, send them to The Comet and Meteor Diary, a few doors down in this neighborhood. Sandra Henshaw, out in western Kansas, has been keeping a meteor diary since Hale-Bopp, and she's getting everyone ready for the Leonids on the night of November 17-18. I'm going to try to get my third period out of bed for it. Wish me luck. |
