At the 2013 annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Michael Carr give the Shoemaker Lecture on “Geologic Exploration Of The Planets: A Personal Retrospective Of The First 50 Years.”  I was lucky to hear it, because he included this anecdote about Mariner 9’s arrival at Mars in 1971:

The planet was engulfed in a dust storm and very little could be discerned except for polar caps and some dark spots which turned out to be volcanoes poking up above the dust.  As an aside, there was a lot of argument about those volcanoes. They looked exactly like calderas. But already by that time, the perception of Mars as a lunar-like body had solidified, and there was just enormous resistance to interpreting those dark spots as the summits of volcanoes.

Before Mariner 9 reached the red planet, Mariner 4 flew by on July 14, 1965, returning 22 images of a rugged, cratered surface that had never before been seen – not quite what the imaging team expected to find!  This bulletin, circulated to the DSN stations along with the photos, sums up how these results affected the understanding of Mars and its planetary evolution:

Man’s first close-up look at Mars has revealed the scientifically startling fact that at least part of its surface is covered with large craters.  This is a profound fact which leads to far-reaching fundamental inferences concerning the evolutionary history of Mars and further enhances the uniqueness of Earth within the solar system… Some mention must be made of features looked for but not seen on Mariner photos.  Although the flight line crossed several “canals,” sketched from time to time on maps of Mars, no trace of these features was discernable.  It should be remembered in this respect that the visibility of many Martian surface features, including the “canals,” is variable with time.

Mariner 4 arrived at Mars to find it cold and barren – “more Moon-like than Earth-like” – and that revelation, as Mike Carr recalled, fueled the dominant perception of Mars for the missions that followed.  The Mars of 1965 had to fit somewhere in our limited palette of planetary analogs, and the never-before-seen craters of the ancient highlands tipped the scale toward the lunar end.  Ground-based observations of the seasonal cycle on Mars, evidenced by the retreat and expansion of polar caps and changes observed in shade and placement of darker regions, had inspired hopes of a geologically active planet, but the cratered terrains and absence of a magnetic field said otherwise.  In fact, they said it so loudly that when Mariner 9 caught a glimpse of Olympus Mons “poking up above the dust,” it took a lot of convincing to entertain the notion that Mars might be more Earth-like than our first encounter suggested.

Yesterday – fifty years to the day after Mariner 4’s Martian flyby – NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto, and we have been bathed in ever more detailed images of the dwarf planet and its moons for the past several days.  As the photos have gotten clearer, a chorus of comparisons has risen:

Pluto is red! It looks like Mars!

“Pluto looks remarkably like Mars–but a lot better than Mars, of course.” — Fran Bagenal, #PlutoFlyby #RedPluto pic.twitter.com/ff0GGva9Jk

— Corey S. Powell (@coreyspowell) July 14, 2015

Of course, Pluto isn’t red for the same reasons that Mars is red (space-weathered hydrocarbon molecules vs. iron oxides), so there are plenty of holes to poke in the analogy…

John Spencer: “This part looks like Mars, if you ignore the temperature and the composition and everything else.” — Emily Lakdawalla (@elakdawalla) July 14, 2015

It’s been very exciting to see Pluto come into focus, and even more interesting to watch the process of viewing, describing, and naming features that have gone from light or dark patches to “the whale” or “the heart.” I can’t avoid thinking of this process in the context of previous planetary quests, especially Mars exploration with its history of telescopic observation, flybys, orbiters, and rovers.  It’s satisfying to see that Mars has graduated to become an analog for even newer worlds – what an exciting time to be alive!

I recently came across a brief article entitled “So You Want to Do Research” in the December 1943 issue of Pro Tem, a Radcliffe College campus publication.  Written by Dr. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, the column offers some advice to students considering a career in research and describes some of the astronomer’s views on the process of science.  Payne-Gaposchkin describes an environment that is both demanding and rewarding, and she doesn’t sugarcoat the tougher bits.  Some of her advice sounds so applicable to graduate students today that it’s almost jarring to come across a sentiment or stylistic element that belongs to an earlier time, as when she consistently uses male pronouns to describe “a scholar” in the abstract.  I’ve pulled out a few excerpts that spoke to me here, but the whole article is available in Harvard’s digitized collections.

Only become an astronomer if nothing else will satisfy you; for nothing else is (approximately) what you will receive.  The material returns will never be great, and most of the scholars who receive them do so at the price of sacrificing time that they might devote to pure scholarship.  Fame is the reward of the few, and those who achieve it realize too often that it has been purchased by efforts that were not their highest.  If you do your job, you will be able to earn your living, and you will taste the delights of discovery, than which (to the addict) there is nothing more satisfying.  That is all.  If it is enough, then become a scientist.  If it is not, get out before it is too late.

Probably the most important starting points are good health, good eyesight, humility, and a sense of humor.

There are some for whom the world seems to hold no mysteries; for them, everything fits into a preconceived scheme and the whole is convincingly explained.  They will never be scholars.

…a complex training, difficult to describe, yet more difficult to achieve.  It involves a continuous habit of sorting the uncoordinated facts, fitting them together again and again until some pattern emerges, seeking other facts that seem to piece out the pattern.  The process is one of working ceaselessly on an intellectual jigsaw puzzle, in which you have little clue to the subject, the scale of the design, the relationships of the pieces.  The very elusiveness of the pattern is its chief fascination, the possibility that the final picture may prove to be of something never before seen by mortal eyes.

Astronomy is peculiar in several respects; it is a science debarred from experiment, and it deals chiefly with processes that are so slow that they defy any but long-drawn and precise observations.  It is a schooling in precision and patience, and it compels the construction of long-term plans and the formulation of long-term problems.

Lastly, there should be a word about technique.  Not the detailed technique of the branch of knowledge, the particular vocabulary, symbolism, and equipment.  Rather the technique of the intellectual jig-saw puzzle.  Let no one expect it to be easy work. It is hard labor, often carried to the point of exhaustion and despair.  Repetitions carried to the point of utter boredom. Simple, elementary processes that would shock the uninitiated by their naïveté.

The popular conception of scientific research: ‘You must be so very clever to be able to do it’ could not be wider of the mark.  Real investigation is not the reception of a transcendental vision, a process of thought beyond the power of an ordinary mortal.  The prayer of the scientist might well be, “Lord, show us the obvious.”

As a science communicator, I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that you don’t have to be “so very clever” to understand or to do what scientists do on a day-to-day basis.  It’s very much within “the power of an ordinary mortal,” because, well, scientists are ordinary mortals.  From a historian’s perspective, it’s interesting to hear Payne-Gaposchkin’s thoughts on academic fame.  It’s both conferred rather arbitrarily, and it takes up time that could be devoted to pure research.  By 1943, she had already received numerous awards for her work,¹ so it’s interesting to hear a somewhat cautionary note in her address to students.²  And as a former (recovering?) graduate student, I appreciate her no-punches-pulled description of the “exhaustion and despair” and “utter boredom” of research just as much as her admission that she’s an addict of the “delights of discovery.” So you want to do research? Couldn’t hurt to read this first.

I’ve been poking around the Harvard Library’s digital archives quite a bit this week, preparing for a “Genius Day” workshop I’m leading next month with the Institute for Educational Advancement.  The focus of the workshop is Annie Jump Cannon, an astronomer famous for developing the stellar classification scheme still used today and for personally classifying hundreds of thousands of stars by their spectra.  While trying to track down a high-resolution scan of one of Cannon’s spectroscopic plates,¹ I came across an article she wrote in the Radcliffe Quarterly in 1931 entitled “Astronomical Adventures.” In recounting some of her experiences, she describes a field “at a cross-roads between the old, the visual, and the new, the photographic method,” and offers a new definition for the “adventures” in store for aspiring astronomers. I thought I’d share a few brief excerpts that I particularly enjoyed, but feel free to read the entire account here. ²

Astronomers are not often thinking of pure discovery. We have no expectations of ever finding at one glance, as did Tycho Brahe, a new star rivaling Venus in brilliancy, nor any hope of emulating Galileo’s thrilling experiences. Something different must satisfy us in these later days.

Has it not been something of an adventure to take any part, however small, in the remarkable development of astronomy during the present century?

It is often difficult when one stands at the cross-roads to choose the new and untrodden path. It is not the path of our dreams. Who in the “gay nineties” ever dreamed of an astronomer who was not nightly gazing through a large telescope at soul-thrilling celestial objects? Time has proved, however, that along the new and seemingly unromantic photographic path lay all the coming adventures.

There is romance in science! What more appealing to the imagination than the fact that these dark lines in star light bring us messages as to what the stars are, how they are traveling, and how far away they are.

The spectrum of such a star, if it can only be obtained, always tells the story of its vagaries in the bright bands indicating glowing gases. Not soon to be forgotten was the thrill of finding such an object while in Arequipa, of eagerly photographing its spectrum and beholding on the negative the tell-tale bands proclaiming its escapade. To the gleaming southern stars, thus one was added, whose light had been traveling fifty thousand years to shine down on us over the Andes.

When the California astronomers came east to the eclipse of January 24, 1925, we could boast of no such optimistic weather reports, but almost contrary to our own expectations, we had a clear sky on that below zero morning. No clouds marred the spectacle from Cornell to Nantucket. The mystical shadow bands danced, glowing prominencies streamed out, and the glowing corona flashed forth its matchless beauty.

Curious, I looked around for other personal accounts from the women at Harvard College Observatory, the “computers” that were the backbone of Edward C. Pickering’s research program in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century.  While not at all a comprehensive survey of the online archive’s content, my little search yielded a couple of items that I am truly happy to have come upon. I’ll do my best to share some of them here as well.