One recent afternoon, Tina Seeger and Diana Trujillo were showing off a few snaps from their latest trip. “I have a soft spot for rover selfies,” Seeger, a twenty-seven-year-old NASA geologist, said. She was screen-sharing a shot of the Perseverance rover posing at the Jezero Crater on Mars, taken April 6th. Jezero (rhymes with “hetero”) is just north of the Martian equator. “It’s really special, because it used to have this ancient lake environment with rivers flowing into a delta,” Seeger, who has wavy hair and was seated outside a coffee shop in Bellingham, Washington, said. Deltas are “sexy” for geologists. “They’re murky and gross, with a lot of sediment,” she said. “Maybe there could have been life there!”
She clarified: “We’re not looking for little green men. More like biosignatures, evidence of ancient microbes, and things like that.”
Getting to Mars was a slog. Are we there yet? The nearly three-hundred-million-mile journey—about a hundred thousand trips across the United States—took almost seven months. And the landing zone on Jezero was strewn with gnarly rocks. Perseverance entered Mars’s atmosphere travelling more than twelve thousand miles an hour. There was little room for error. It stuck the landing.
“Within kilometres,” Trujillo, an aerospace engineer who was video-calling from her home, near Pasadena, said. Forty-one, with long dark hair, she came to the United States from Colombia when she was seventeen, with little money or English. After studying at the University of Maryland, she eventually began working on Perseverance’s robotic arm. In February, she hosted NASA’s first live broadcast of a Mars landing—in Spanish. “When we were getting close, you could see the sand moving from the retro-rockets hitting the ground,” Trujillo said. “It was like dancing a tango with Mars.”
“I cried,” Seeger said. “I’m a sucker for those scenes in movies.”
Seeger pulled up a photo that the rover took of a landscape to the northwest. (Perseverance has twenty-three cameras.) “Look at that variety of rocks,” she said. Because Mars does not have tectonic plates, she explained, “they’ve just been sitting there for billions of years!” The foreground looked like a campfire the morning after, with charred briquettes sprinkled across a bed of ochre soot. The background featured a brick-hued mound of delta deposit, more than two hundred feet high. Seeger couldn’t help but admire the framing. “That’s a picture I would take on my vacation,” she said. “Beautifully composed!”
Seeger confessed to a little Photoshopping. Sometimes NASA adjusts the color balance to touch things up, she said, to make Mars look a little less Martian and a little more “intuitive for people on Earth.” The sky in the photo had hints of familiar blue and gray, like ominous snow clouds.
She moved on to talking about the rocks in the shot. “We’re still trying to figure out if they’re sedimentary or igneous,” she said. They were basaltic, and thus presumably igneous. But, she wondered, were they spewed from a volcanic eruption? Or buried in a lake and only relatively recently unearthed? “If I was in the field, I could pick them up and figure it out,” Seeger said. “That would be transcendent.”
She sipped an iced chai through a straw. “It’s funny getting to know a place really intimately that I’m never going to get to go to,” she said. She noticed that her laptop battery was running low. Lightning round:
Did David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” resonate for them? Trujillo said, “Not my thing.”
Did they have to worry about storms like the one in the opening scene of “The Martian”? “I love ‘The Martian,’ ” Seeger said. “But the atmosphere is just not thick enough to sustain the kind of winds that would impale Matt Damon and strand him on Mars.”
Would you need sunglasses there? Seeger had hers perched on her head. “It’s real dusty,” she said.
The odds of going to Burning Man at the Jezero Crater someday? “Water is a pretty big issue,” Seeger said. (There is none.) “And the oxygen thing—you don’t have any air to breathe.”
It sounded pretty bleak. “I wouldn’t want to go on a one-way,” Seeger said. “I really love the Earth.”
Trujillo checked her watch. She said that she hadn’t been sleeping well, juggling family duties, night shifts, and extraterrestrial time-zone challenges. (Earth days are about thirty-seven minutes shorter than Mars days.) “We’re working around the clock,” she said. “I’m on Earth time and Mars time.” ♦
