It Came From Outer Space
When scientists at the Johnson Space Center thought they had found signs of life in a Martian rock, it was good news for NASA, Bill Clinton, Hollywood, the tabloids–and even Dick Morris’ favorite call girl.
THE FOUR-POUND ROCK CAME TO US free of charge, a gift from the heavens, hurtling through the atmosphere and plummeting to Earth without the aid of astronauts, space stations, or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Before that time it had existed placidly for more than four billion years as part of the surface of the planet Mars, oblivious as the climate shifted from balmy to harsh, as the water that once flowed freely mysteriously vanished, as meteorites bombarded the planet and fractured the ground. At some point, a signal event occurred: A particularly violent meteorite collision launched the rock into space, where it floated, ignored and unimpeded, for 16 million years. Then came another signal event: The rock succumbed to the inescapable pull of Earth’s gravity. Glowing from the heat of its descent, the rock formed a thin shell around its inner core, protecting its history within.
It landed in what is for meteorites the neighborhood of choice: Antarctica, the pristine, sterile, keep-to-yourself continent. There the rock lay for 13,000 quiet years. Having missed the era of dinosaurs, it now remained profoundly anonymous during the creation of cave paintings and the construction of the pyramids, during the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the French Revolution, the two world wars, and Elvis. And then, with the crunching of snow boots on a jagged ice field in 1984, the rock had its first contact with humanity.
It was picked up on a routine meteorite-gathering expedition by a NASA scientist who was drawn to its luminous green cast, an attraction that owed everything to her green-tinted sun goggles. It was flown back to the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it was wrongly identified as a diogenite—an asteroid fragment—and sequestered in a nitrogen-enhanced cabinet when it wasn’t being examined. No one except a few NASA planetary scientists (scholars who devote their lives to the study of planets) paid the rock much mind until 1993, when an old NASA hand who happened to be one of the world’s experts on diogenites found it troubling. He ran a few tests, scratched his head, and ran a few more. The rock was similar to a diogenite, but it wasn’t a diogenite. In fact, its chemical characteristics resembled those of only eleven other rocks on Earth, all of which, science had determined, came from the same place: Mars.
As word of the discovery spread, and as other scientists confirmed the finding—gases extracted from the rock were compatible with tests of the Martian atmosphere done by the Viking spacecraft in 1976—the rock’s eons of obscurity came to an abrupt end. Suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of the rock: scientists in London, scientists in California, scientists in the Johnson Space Center’s Building 31, where some of the country’s top planetary scientists work on the government payroll. Researchers would request a gram of it and be given a tenth of a gram because the rock had become precious and irreplaceable; normally voluble colleagues became unusually silent and secretive once they got their hands on it. For twenty or so years the search for life on Mars had essentially been abandoned because Viking had found no signs of life there. Now this rock’s chemical composition gave off enticing hints that Viking, which had analyzed only the planet’s soil, had missed something—or had not known where to look.
And so this rock was launched on another trajectory, one that would propel it from NASA’s labs to the White House, one that would have it serve the needs of everyone from NASA scientists and brass to presidential candidates, network news reporters, and even one very shrewd Washington, D.C., prostitute. Some people hoped the rock would be the biggest thing since Copernicus. Some people hoped it would unlock the secrets of the universe, that it would prove that we are not alone. It might, some people hoped, tell us who we are.
But maybe, in a strange way, it had already done that.
WE DID NOT GO LOOKING FOR LIFE—life found us,” David McKay would say in mid-September 1996, but that wasn’t exactly true. Almost from the moment he first heard of the rock at the Johnson Space Center (JSC), he had known what its potential was, but as a scientist he was still hedging his bets. Now he was being heralded worldwide as the mild-mannered leader of the NASA team that had announced in August that they had possibly—the qualifier was most assuredly his—discovered life on Mars. He had testified before myriad government subcommittees, spoken with nearly every reporter on the planet, cooperated with a Discovery Channel documentary on his team’s research produced by Walter Cronkite, and begun to realize that he would not be deluged by the typhoon of scientific criticism he had anticipated. Even so, McKay wasn’t letting success go to his head.
He was sixty, white-haired, and bespectacled, a tall man with a hurried gait and the stooped posture of a dedicated microscopist. Before the Mars rock came into his life, caution and conservatism had allowed him to develop an admirable if not spectacular reputation in the field of planetary science; a Rice University graduate, he had been recruited during the glory days of the Apollo program to teach geology to the first astronauts headed to the moon. Since then McKay had written more than three hundred technical papers, received numerous professional honors, and reached the top of his division’s pay scale at the JSC; as of 1994 he was financially secure and happily married with three daughters, two of them grown. He was not, in short, the kind of man who would be tempted to risk throwing it all away. But then he heard about the Mars rock.
The reclassification from a diogenite to a Martian meteorite had made the rock the star of the 1994 Lunar and Planetary Science conference in Clear Lake. Its presence there was fortuitous. Though the desire to explore other planets was deep and abiding in the popular culture—by 1995, four of the top 25 highest-grossing films of all time were about outer space—the scientific community’s enthusiasm was inversely proportional. At best it had lost interest in searching for life on Mars; at worst it viewed the goal with disdain. But the search for life on other planets had always been at least in part a search for the origins of life on Earth. With the dispiriting Viking results and the shrinking funds for space exploration, the action had moved back home. Microfossils, nanobacteria—they were the ticket now. Encountering and analyzing these tiny terrestrial particles might more easily reveal our beginnings. Who needed Mars?
The answer, of course, was David McKay. As secure as he was, he was also in danger of becoming fossilized himself. The chance of finding life at NASA had become almost as slim as finding it on Mars. Once known as a center of scientific innovation, the institution now featured a space shuttle of dubious value, an entrenched bureaucracy, and an aging work force, of which McKay was a part. Since Apollo, NASA’s successes had been few and its failures had been brutally displayed before the public: the Challenger explosion, the rocky start of the $6 billion Hubble telescope, the proposed space station that had become little more than a perpetual dog-and-pony show. The mothballed rockets that lay on their sides at the JSC’s sun-bleached campus in Clear Lake seemed painful metaphors for NASA’s downsized, dysfunctional era, when poor morale was manifested in peeling linoleum floors, dim lights, and in at least one building, pay phones shrouded in cobwebs. McKay had agreeably shifted from division to division, had amenably won and then lost supervisory positions, had learned to pursue his work passionately though unobtrusively. Few expected him to be replaced upon his retirement.
One could say that David McKay was not looking for the Mars rock—the rock found him. But something about it made him feel an eagerness he had not felt since he held the first moon rocks in his hands. The Mars rock represented a gamble of cosmic proportions: If he was right about it, he could make one of the most important discoveries of modern times; if he was wrong, he could bring ruination not just upon himself but upon the institution that had nurtured and supported him for almost thirty years. “I’m going to get a piece of that meteorite and look for signs of life in it,” McKay told his wife, Mary Fae. Mary Fae, who admired and respected her husband, thought, “Sure you are.”
THE PLANETARY SCIENTISTS OF BUILDING 31 were nothing if not resourceful. With space exploration at a virtual standstill, many of McKay’s colleagues had turned their attention to meteorites—rocks substantially cheaper to acquire. For that reason, the Mars rock had become quite popular by the end of 1993. One day, the man who had saved it from misclassification, David Mittlefehldt, wandered across the hall to tell a colleague about something he’d found inside it. “I’ve got some neat material,” he told Chris Romanek, a trim, athletic 35-year-old completing a research fellowship at the JSC. “Take a look.” Romanek had received his doctorate in geochemistry from Texas A&M, but the scarcity of work had made him more than willing to take a job outside his field, learning about meteorites as he went along.
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