“Fly me to the moon” , Frank Sinatra used to demand. And while Francis Albert never got there, Neil Armstrong was lepping about on the surface of the moon over half a century ago. But by today’s standards, going to the moon was a stroll in space – a mere 233,800 miles. On PRIME TIME (RTÉ) last Thursday, Miriam O’Callaghan picked up the week-ago story of the Rover mission to Mars, which is somewhere around 140 million miles from Earth.
She talked to Irish woman Niamh Shaw, who’s a space scientist with the International Space University in Strasbourg (no, Virginia, I didn’t know there was such a thing either). Niamh was even more excited about the week-old story than Miriam. She mentioned that with the success of the Rover mission, we can hear the surface of Mars. I’m not sure that’s going to affect my daily life or yours either, but at the same time it’s breath-taking: human beings can send a camera and a microphone 140 million miles and ask questions of the Red Planet.
Niamh explained that the Rover six-wheeler would collect samples from the planet, so we could check for signs of life. They’re not expecting to round a Martian boulder and meet a Martian woman or man. They’ll be looking for “microbial life” – viruses and such.
The Rover vehicle will collect samples about the size of the sticks of chalk they used in classrooms back in the day. But how will we get these samples back, Miriam asked. Well, it seems we’ll be sending another mission to Mars to collect them in a few years’ time.”We know how to do it” Niamh declared with a smile.
“Well lookit, thanks Niamh so much – you’ve got a fascinating job and that’s an incredible discovery that’s been made.” Miriam gushed.
Dr Niamh seems a nice and smart woman, but why do we have to get info on something like this from Irish people? We saw the NASA scientists roaring their delight through their masks when the vehicle parachuted safely onto the Mars surface. Any of those would have known at least as much about the mission as Niamh. Interviewing Irish only is a weird sort of clannishness.
That said, it is a stunning achievement: to send a small truck over 140 million miles, have it land and then start filming and recording. “It’s a wonderful distraction” Miriam said.
True. We’re hungry for news material – any news material – that isn’t Covid,Covid,Covid. But it’s a bit like a dog chasing a bus and catching it: what do we do if we find microbes or viruses? Bring them back to earth? And has anyone worked out if they might be infectious?
There’s something ironic about the world working flat out to suppress one virus, and at the same time sending a truck 140 million miles to bring back another.
As Maggie Thatcher almost said, it’s a funny old universe.
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