Mars

Mars has no need for winter. Broken and barren, cold beyond our iciest dreams, even on its best and brightest day, one’s mood there would have to bolster itself without the hope of a better season or a new day. But still, despite all that, you know, I’d like to go. I offer no explanation. And I’m not alone. When the first of the rovers shut down this past week and was silent and unresponsive, I worried. I went out and looked at the Red Planet in the southwest and sent the little robot my good tidings. I waved for some odd reason. It felt cold out but, really, what do I know of cold?

The small, framed images of Mars that the Spirit Rover returns to us make Mars look bright and red and dusty. I assume because Mars is bright and red and dusty. Looks like it is on some side trail in Monument Valley, a bad place for street hockey or baseball. It does not appear to be minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit though that is somewhere close to the average temperature there. Generally, landscapes that look like the one I’ve seen make us Earthlings think “hot.” It isn’t. It is scare-an-Eskimo cold. But surely the little Spirit is insulated. With some sort of space age thins late, some kind of composite-fiber wonder wool, the full metal jacket of our mothering instincts. I admit that it does not look all that insulated in its widely circulated NASA portrait. It looks thin and strutty, squat like a coffee table with satellite reception and a hammerhead—it looks like spacebar square pants. Its tires appear grooved for the kind of trouble a Hummer would run from. At least we did that. And its recording eye must surely be shaded with some high-tech monocular shade for the sun’s awesome glare out there. Oh, the God awful sun of Mars. Mister Spirit does not look built for high speed, he doesn’t look that safe and secure overall, but surely we gave him a cool shade for his sensor eye.