"The Martian" Review

Okay, I'll admit it: I've never watched a single episode of MacGyver. I'm almost afraid to do it at this point, considering how deeply woven into my code the ethic of the show has become.  I'm worried that the 80s cheese will taint that Mojo of Inventive Improvisation that so guides my approach to the problems that can so pretzel up my days.

Indeed, there have been times when, in the process of tackling one of those problems, I have arrived at a "MacGyvered" solution, using available materials (Madame 'Cyte frequently...errm...laments the heaps of bric-a-brac that I keep around, expressly for its utility as a pool of raw materials for such projects...till the moment when they allow me to construct --like a Master Builder in Lego World-- a Fix)...only to find a purpose-specific tool for the job...and experience actual disappointment over that, and the sudden obsolescence of my jury-rigged solution.

If that Moment rings any kind of bell in you, then you are just the sort of person who will groove HARD on "The Martian."

The novel --the first by engineer Andy Weir--  had sat in my Kindle queue for a couple of years, after it had been recommended to me by someone who'd read and enjoyed (and written a lovely review of) my novella, Night Music. She'd said that it bore strong affinities to my book, in its scrupulous attention to technical detail, its inventive use of technology, and its celebration of the human mind as a problem-solving engine. Naturally, I was intrigued (and more than a little flattered/honored to have communicated so successfully that she so clearly Got what I was going for). 

Finally read it over the Summer (before I found out that it had been optioned as a film, let alone  that it was nearing completion....with Ridley-Freakin'-SCOTT at the helm!)....and immediately re-read it as soon as I was finished (and I almost never do that). I was even MORE flattered/honored at the comparison!

As for the film....Yay. Just Yay.

As I say, this is not a movie that will speak with too loud a voice to those with not even a whisper of tech-geek in their souls. It is very faithful to the book, though with some notable exceptions which are all in service of making it work better as a film (successfully. The "Iron Man" beat comes most vividly to mind).  It moves at a deliberate pace. It explains many things (usually via the protagonist, Mark Watney's video log).  It sets up problems, establishes the stakes, and walks us through the solutions (and setbacks. OY! Such setbacks!).

The situation is that Watney --played superbly by Matt Damon-- finds himself left alone on Mars after his fellow crew members on an exploration mission need to abort very early, due to a terrible storm that jeopardizes the crew's ability to leave safely (gotta give a Mulligan here; the actual atmosphere on Mars is so thin that even a hurricane-speed wind would exert little more dynamic force than a stiff breeze at Earth-level atmospheric pressures. But whaddya gonna do; gotta tell a story here). While trudging to the MAV (Mars Ascent Vehicle) to evacuate to orbit, Watney is struck by a fragment of the high gain antenna and hurled into the Martian night, very plausibly killed in the process.

But, it turns out, he is not dead....but will be if anything breaks down, and when the food supply runs out.

So, as the trailers say, he's gotta "Science the shit outa this!"

And Science he does!  It is a JOY to watch him attack problems, inventorying his assets and liabilities (rather bigger column, that one), apply scientific principles in solving them, fail to be defeated by the odds and the obstacles, and maintain a wry, profane sense of humor about the whole affair (wait for the whole "Space Pirate" thing..).

All Hail Duct Tape. 'Nuff said.

One of the characteristics of Scott's films that most stands out is his eye for breathtaking visual design. This film is no exception.  The surface of Mars is rendered with heart-stoppingly stark, majestic beauty. Being something of a Mars Geek, I was impressed at how precisely the color palate of the 4th rock from the Sun is reproduced. "You Are There" doesn't begin to cover this! The space scenes are stunning, conveying the brain-melting vastness of the distances in every direction, while also preserving the paradoxically claustrophobic quality of hurtling through that Vastness in a succession of pressurized tin cans.

Probably set in the early 2030s, the technology is marvelously realistically designed. Things are functional and plausible, treated in the matter-of-fact way that tech is treated by real people (when was the last time that you described your computer as a "silicon-CPU information processing node?"). It was the little things: the big outboard thermal radiator vanes on the aft end of the mothership, Hermes, glowed orange while the ion engines were active (and those low-but-constant-thrust engines glowed a realistic arc-blue-white, with no dramatic flares like you'd see with chemical rockets). Also, things fell on the Martian surface at rates and on trajectories that accurately depicted what it would look like at .38-gee. Most folks wouldn't notice these things consciously, but the dividends in verisimilitude pay off quite nicely in the hind brain.

All of this visual and technological wizardry, however, would fall flat without recognizable people in its midst.  The character work in this film is highly effective in its deft, understated clarity. These characters come across as real individuals, into whose lives we have dropped at a critical time. Jessica Chastain's Cmdr. Lewis is someone who takes her job very seriously. She is wracked by leaving Watney behind, even as she clearly knows it was the only responsible choice. The conflict of these realities is at times heartbreakingly manifest in her performance.

The unfolding relationship between Kate Mara's Johannson and  Sebastian Stan's Beck comes across in a series of sweet, almost-imperceptible little beats. Michael Peña's Martinez is a good-hearted, wise-cracking natural counterpart to Damon's Watney.  The Earth-bound cast plays out the politics and practicalities of this extraordinary situation with a recognizable Truthfulness that makes no one the Villain (even Jeff Daniels' NASA Director has defensible motivations for choices that might otherwise have been turned into a stock "Gutless Bureaucrat" cartoon in a lesser script). Honorable mention goes to Donald Glover's Rich Purnelle, the brilliant, quirky, socially inept astrodynamics savant; his description of his rescue plan during the "Project Elrond" meeting (One does not simply walk to Mars...) was high-LARIOUS!

And Damon. Ah, Damon.  He simply LIVES in Mark Watney. It's like how I will never again read LOTR without seeing Viggo as Aragorn. He inhabits that character with such an unforced, real-to-the-marrow way that his voice will sound in my head when I eventually (inevitably) re-re-read The Martian. It's clear (as it actually wasn't in the book) that the wise-cracking persona is a defense against the Dread and Despair that it only very precariously holds at bay. His humanity is a stand-in for our own, speaking to the best aspects of how we might manage any analogously dire situation in which we might find ourselves.

Final note:  Of all the things I love about this film, perhaps the one that lies closest to my heart of hearts is the degree to which it non-preachily extols the virtues of learning and critical thinking as the means by which we can deliver ourselves from the atavistic Fears that lie within us. Lateral, creative thinking, fueled by an intelligent deployment of well-learned lessons about how things work in the 'verse are what allow us to transcend the shadows all around us. The bootstraps by which we can lift ourselves from even the deepest of pits are composed of well-tempered strands of neural fiber, honed by exposure to and flexible recombinations of the DNA of knowledge and logic, informed --but not dominated-- by emotion, intuition, and Love.

"The Martian" not only tells us how we can survive even the most desperate of straits...but why we can and must do so.

There But Not Back Again

Over at MSNBC.com, the intriguing (though hardly new) idea of one-way Mars colonization is discussed. The idea does have a certain appeal, once you get past the vicarious dread at the notion of leaving behind the Good Earth for ever. Once you remove the reaction mass and logistical complications of a return trip, you could find yourself in the position to derive far bang per buck of mission cost. There is plenty on Mars for the establishment of a self-sustaining colony, if only the seed materials could be included in the outward-bound leg of the journey. Fuel and shielding and provisions alone would probably be a fair approximation of the mission mass for a greenhouse enclosure, where Mars' CO2-rich environment and roughly 24-hour days would make local food production (and air/waste recycling loops) eminently doable.

The main question in all this is: Who would do such a thing?

Let me go on record here and say, "No exclusively NASA (or any other government agency)-only colonization missions!" If government wants to lend a judiciously-limited hand (say, by results-based matching programs with industry, or by a prize structure, or somesuch), then that's shiny. But we can't afford some sort of Mayflower Project.

Besides, as many others have noted, NASA has proven conclusively that it is capable of rendering sterile and prosaic even the single greatest adventure on which the human species will ever embark. That such a dessicated, risk-averse bureaucratic entity should ever muster the testicular fortitude to send people on a one-way trip is simply incomprehensible. Which is a good thing! The aridity of a Government-controlled mission would rival that of the Martian atmosphere itself. The chances of true social evolution would run constantly afoul of the culture of meticulous regimentation which so characterizes NASA. Any such colony would have woven into its DNA an ethic of control which would put the most grandiose fantasies of Progressive Social Engineers to shame!

Much better would be a colony ship festooned with corporate logos, with ad revenues, reality show and documentary film rights (can you say "Planet Mars," in IMAX?), and the promise of hermetically contractually-protected mining claims (Mars has had some very significant vulcanism in its past, offering the promise of rich veins of precious and "rare earth" metals...to say nothing of the downstream value of helium-3 for fusion energy tech). Protocols would, of course, be in place, but they would stand a much better chance of being malleable in the face of local conditions than a military-style State-controlled regime. A society and an economy would arise from the exigencies of the survival situation.

In The Case For Mars, Bob Zubrin said that "the chief export of a Mars colony will be ideas." Now, you'd think that a die-hard Mars colony advocate like Zubrin would be some kind of social-engineering Utopian. In point of fact, he is refreshingly Conservative/libertarian in his thinking, and has some uncommonly intelligent things to say about our energy conundrum. He truly believes that Mars colonists will have to make hard choices with scarce resources, in ways that maximize the value of even more scarce human capital. The result will be a crucible of bold, fast-paced social and technical evolution of the sort which would make Thomas Paine weep with joy.

The kinds of people who would want to go on such a trip stand a very good chance of being precisely the sorts that we'd want on it: intrepid but not reckless, independent but aware of the importance of a chain of command...actually, now that I think of it, I'm not sure we can particularly spare them right now! But they would constitute the ultimate laboratory of what free people can do when their lives depend on it.

The ideas would shoot sunward at a pace which even the editors of high school textbooks would have a hard time buffering for censorship!

H/T to Hot Air for the headline.

Meteorites on Mars

Sounds like a good pulp science fiction title. And the lifelong Fan in me bounces around a bit at the thought we live in times in which it refers not to a fanciful film but to a mere press release.

Via the NASA site, comes this announcement that the Opportunity rover has happened across yet another large nickel-iron meteorite on the plains of Terra Meridiani. Study of an earlier such find has yielded some really fascinating insights into the Martian environment into which it careened, apparently a very long time ago:

Opportunity found a smaller iron-nickel meteorite, called "Heat Shield Rock," in late 2004. At about a half ton or more, Block Island is roughly 10 times as massive as Heat Shield Rock and several times too big to have landed intact without more braking than today's Martian atmosphere could provide.

"Consideration of existing model results indicates a meteorite this size requires a thicker atmosphere," said rover team member Matt Golombek of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Either Mars has hidden reserves of carbon-dioxide ice that can supply large amounts of carbon-dioxide gas into the atmosphere during warm periods of more recent climate cycles, or Block Island fell billions of years ago."

First of all, let me just say that I looked at these images of this pitted rock, sitting on the sands of Mars, and paused a moment to say, yet again: "Good gods! That's the surface of freakin' MARS!!"

In my office, I have a couple of framed images from Opportunity and Spirit. Every now and then, a client asks me if I took them. And I have to chuckle, for the obvious reasons, and also because the pictures look so lovely, but so commonplace. "Planet" is such an abstract concept. Tickles the intellect, but leaves the glands largely untouched. Now, it's those moments when the reality of a "World" jumps out of these pictures that I just get grabbed but hard. Never gets old.

Anyway, back to the meteorites: I was struck by the above-quoted passage. The very existence of these large, space-borne rocks on the surface speaks to a time when there was enough of an atmosphere to slow them down to the point that they would not get pulverized by the impact. That. plus the numerous finds of near-surface water ice (including some pretty spectacular recent ones) lend further support to models for an earlier Mars which possessed a much thicker atmosphere and probably a very significant amount of surface water. Much of that atmosphere is locked up as dry ice at the poles, a whole lot more adsorbed into the regolith and rocks. Much of the water, it seems, is sitting close to the surface in permafrost (though the possibility of subterranean liquid aquifers can't be ruled out).

First of all, this makes it even more probable that the conditions for the emergence of life were present on Mars for periods of time which compare most favorably with the interval on early Earth in which abiogenesis is theorized to have occurred. Mars, it seems, had what it takes to get itself populated.

Second, it makes it clear that a little bit of site selection research could drop a crewed mission on a patch of Martian land which could provide a rich source of water, and so save a whole lot of mission mass which would have been devoted to consumables. That means a lot more payload, even if you factor in the additional gear for extraction  (long-distance pressurized rover, anyone?).

I actually hope that substantial fossilized but no extant life is found. Changes the whole ethical calculus of colonization-focused missions if there's something alive down there. It gets harder to argue for terraforming when it might obliterate an extra-terrestrial biosphere (imagine the emails from Robert Redford!). It would probably be a show-stopper for intrusive habitation (and I can't say that's a bad thing, mind you, but it would be almost as much of a bummer as a boon). The science would be outrageous, but the promise of a Martian branch of human civilization would be a bust for a very long time...if not forever.

This is not to say that coexistence with Martian life might not be possible. After all, it probably thrived under conditions on Mars which would also be favorable to us (thicker atmo, more water). Indeed, the arrival of Humanity on Mars could be the best thing that's ever happened to the natives.

And wouldn't that be an interesting Bizarro version of colonizations past!

Water, Water Everywhere?

The latest findings from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter offer some promising signs that the early aqueous environment on Mars was not the acidic mess that some had theorized. The presence of carbonates in key strata of Martian bedrock argue convincingly for a neutral-to-alkaline composition of past Martian waters (since an acidic environment would dissolve the carbonate in short order). This in turn suggests that conditions were favorable (or at least not brutally hostile) for the emergence of life as we know it in ancient Martian surface water.

You can see on this map that the orbital assay has revealed carbonate in several equatorial regions of the Martian landscape. The fact that carbonates were also detected by the Phoenix lander on the northern polar plains suggests that relatively hospitable waters were once found in widely distributed regions of Mars in the ancient past.

Does this mean that life once existed on our neighboring planet? Insufficient data. But it should be noted that life appears to have emerged on the young, cooling Earth almost immediately (in geological time). This suggests that the processes which lead to the complexification of organic molecules into self-organizing, pre-biotic hypercycles can occur quite readily when conditions permit. I have a sneaking suspicion that more detailed study will yield evidence of at least primitive life having existed on Mars in the distant past. Whether some life still exists (e.g., in deep aquifers kept liquid by the planet's internal heat) is very much an open question.

As immense a find as that would be, I actually hope we find that life flourished on Mars for one brief, shining moment, then slipped into oblivion. The presence of extant life on Mars would greatly complicate the ethics of eventual colonization, given the immeasurable scientific value of coming to understand the biology of a separate cradle of life in our own solar system. But that's a question for another day. For now, it is very exciting to have begun to solve the riddle of the missing carbonates, and so moved one step closer to the discovery of a "second Creation," and thence to the tantalizing indication that our universe may in fact be teeming with life.

Might make stargazing a rather less lonely experience.

Farewell, Phoenix

I'm a few days late on this, but I wanted to mark what appears to be the end of the NASA Phoenix Mars lander's successful mission.

Launched Aug. 4, 2007, Phoenix landed May 25, 2008, farther north than any previous spacecraft to land on the Martian surface. The lander dug, scooped, baked, sniffed and tasted the Red Planet's soil. Among early results, it verified the presence of water-ice in the Martian subsurface, which NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter first detected remotely in 2002. Phoenix's cameras also returned more than 25,000 pictures from sweeping vistas to near the atomic level using the first atomic force microscope ever used outside Earth.

The Martian Winter has descended on the vast northern plains of Mars, with its bitterly cold temperatures and dwindling supply of power-generating sunshine. Phoenix recently sent what will likely be its final transmission before going quietly into that good night. It now sits as one more lonely monument to the inventiveness and curiosity of the human species, as we cast our senses skyward in search of our origins and our destiny.

Next up is the terribly exciting Mars Science Laboratory, a relatively gargantuan rover, which will use its plutonium power cell to range farther and dig deeper than any of its predecessors. Launch is scheduled for Fall of 2009, with arrival in 2010. This beast will be empowered to do some serious science, and woe betide any stubborn stones which get in its way. This fairly large video captures some of the promise and poetry which awaits us on this mission.

For now, though, I for one have raised a glass to the short but productive life of a Phoenix which is highly unlikely to rise from its own ashes. It may have gone silent forever, but its voice has added to a trove of data which may one day help to rescue Humanity itself from ultimate stagnation and death at the bottom of our ancestral gravity well.

Sleep now, Phoenix. You have amply earned your rest and our gratitude.

Red and Blue: More Space Between McCain and Obama

Recently, John McCain stated that he is "intrigued" by the idea of sending humans to Mars, saying that "it would excite the imagination of the American people" to know what it would be like to have humans stand on the surface of the Red Planet. Needless to say, I agree. Some argue that robotic missions can yield very significant scientific data at a fraction of the cost of sending missions which have to support the fragile human organism in the most inhospitable environments imaginable. This is not a groundless argument, but I have always felt that it rather missed some important parts of the point. The flexibility and mobility of human researchers, their ability to improvise and to stray from predetermined mission schedules to investigate "pop-up" objectives simply can't be matched by even the most versatile robotic probes, which bears on the "bang for your buck" part of the argument. But even this is not the central point.

It's funny how the argument for human space travel which seems the most "out there" is the one which addresses the most basic of human needs: raw survival. Initiating the process of spreading humanity beyond the confines of our atmosphere is a way of hedging humanity's bets for truly long-term survivability. It really is only a matter of time before the gods of orbital dynamics place us in the cross-hairs of another Extinction-Level Event like that which did for the dinosaurs. It could be a million years till the next Big One crosses our orbit at precisely the wrong time. It could be twenty minutes. I would rather we set about improving the odds that we'll have our space-legs well-developed when that particular hammer is cocked, either to have a much better chance of deflecting the bullet...or at least for there to be someone left to mourn and remember and begin again.

I am no fan of reality TV, but I am compelled in this context to reflect on its broad appeal. Starting with "The Real World" on MTV, millions of people have voted with their remotes on the value of participating in the lives of other people in unusual situations. We are a species of voyeurs, whose interests range from the prurient to the profound. We are constantly seeking to expand the range of our experiences, which I believe is a hard-wired trait of our tribal heritage, our need to belong to a community like our lives depend on it (gotta know what's going on in the yurt next door; might happen to me someday). As extraordinary as the data and images from our robotic probes in space and on the surface of Mars may be, the 'experiences' of these inanimate explorers is far too abstract to energize most people's imagination. We need the sense that someone's been there, and access to at least a vicarious experience of that being. The daily drama of humans en route to and on the surface of another world can scarcely be matched by any earthbound reality show (and smart mission financiers would charge a premium for the rights to broadcast that drama to dirtside viewers).

In addition to the drama, however, the inspiration which would flow from an undertaking of such magnitude would energize a generation which, for all its global interconnectivity, has grown all too inner-directed (planet-provincial, if you will), to the cost of our frontier-spawned culture. Giving this generation, and the ones to follow, a truly endless frontier (this time free from indigenous societies over which to steam-roll!) is one of the greatest gifts we could bestow. The Apollo program saw a burst in interest in science and engineering which continues to benefit us to this day. Think of how many young people would be motivated to expand the parameters of their perceived possibilities given the availability of such an adventure!

By contrast with this sort of vision, we have Obama's focus further down the Maslow pyramid. His thought appears to be that the 'diversion' of resources skyward would constitute a wasteful expenditure, and his equivocation on the matter of human spaceflight does not bode well for the fate of such programs under an Obama Administration:

In that new policy, Obama pledged to reduce the gap between the 2010 retirement of the shuttle and the first mission of Constellation, its successor program, now slated for 2015.

The new stance appeared to conflict with a previous Obama plan that would raid the Constellation budget to help pay for education reform set. That plan also called for delaying Constellation by five years.

But campaign sources said Obama would not delay the development Constellation, only later stages of the mission that would send astronauts to the moon and Mars.

However, it’s unclear what that policy would mean for NASA and Constellation, as the moon-Mars plan was the underlying reason President Bush pushed for the development of Constellation.

Plus, raiding the Constellation budget would not cover even a third of the $72 billion Obama needs for his education plan in a prospective first term.

Last year, NASA estimated it would spend about $23 billion on Constellation between 2009 and 2012; Obama has called for $18 billion annually for education reform.

Now, obviously I do not meant to imply here that exploring space is somehow "more important" than educating our young. What I take issue with is the proposition that the two are necessarily in conflict. That assumption is reflective of the strikingly narrow focus which has characterized the Obama campaign, despite all of its soaring rhetoric about Hope and Change. It's analogous to his penny-wise, pound-foolish notions about trying to raise revenues by doubling capital gains taxes, which will only disincentivize people from realizing their investments, and so ultimately take revenue out of the economy. In this case, he is essentially talking about diverting funds into the creation and maintenance of educational programs, and out of the kinds of societal-level projects which can help to provide the intrinsic motivations for young people to vector their educations toward the pursuit of broader dreams. This also bears on his approach to global trade and international relations (protectionist and non-interventionist), which will almost certainly drain the dynamism from trade and dangerously dilute the stabilizing effects of a robust American presence abroad.

In essence, then the difference between McCain's and Obama's approach can be described in terms of Red and Blue Planet models. Each is a state of mind which recurs throughout their respective theories of governance, one directed outward toward open-ended possibilities and their associated risks, while the other is a closed-loop, risk-averse vision.

Of course, in the fullness of time, these questions may in large measure be mooted by the increasingly robust private space projects which have been popping up in encouragingly large numbers of late. Private, for-profit ventures into orbit and thence to the moon, and even beyond would stand a far better chance of arising from and feeding back into a societal will for exploration than Kennedy-esque Programs, forever at the mercy of the vagaries of election cycles and the wrangling of various constituencies. However, here too the difference between the candidates is all-too relevant; it would be foolish to take Big Chances on the promise of profit from the development of space in a climate which stifles entrepreneurship as an Obama presidency doubtless would.

In the end, it comes down to which candidate demonstrates the greater faith in the ingenuity and vision of the American people for their future and the future of humanity. McCain is by no means my ideal candidate, but where it counts, he pretty much gets it, and his commitment to human space exploration is one of those areas which will win him my vote.

After all, it would be nice to have some hope...for a change.

Phoenix Has Landed

Following its long cruise and harrowing Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL), NASA's Phoenix lander has touched down on the vast northern plains of Mars. It is equipped to search for water ice in the shallow subsurface of what may in the distant past have been a Martian seabed, and to test for the constituents of life itself.

As is usually the case when these missions achieve their objectives, the chief feelings I experience (after I'm done bouncing up and down in my chair in a child-like geekgasm of glee) are awe and pride. The sheer complexity involved in getting a spacecraft from the surface of the Earth, across millions of miles of space, and nailing a precise entry into the atmosphere of another planet --itself hurtling through space at very high speed-- then shedding the tremendous kinetic energy of its launch and cruise phases, and bringing it to rest in a usable condition on that planet's surface...it is simply breathtaking.

The ingenuity of the human species, the spirit of inquiry and exploration has once again enabled us to place a robotic avatar of our consciousness on the surface of another world. This is not a concept that ever gets old for me. Light-minutes away from where we sit right now, a machine sits in the thin whispery winds of the Martian atmosphere, bathed in the glow of a visibly-smaller sun, its three broad footpads sunken into the sand and gravel of a world on which no human has ever (yet!) walked. It is both a humbling and an exalting thought.

I have avidly followed the progress of the twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, since they bounced to the surface of Mars, over four years ago. Two images from those rovers (here and here) occupy a place on my office wall. I pore over the true-color images and often imagine what it would be like to be standing behind the rovers as they capture them (usually editing out the part about the cramped, smelly, terrifyingly necessary pressure suit I would perforce be wearing at the time). Indeed, I think I've been spoiled by the ever-changing landscapes those mobile probes have afforded, and it's going to be hard to adjust to a fixed platform again. Small price to pay for the wealth of data which Phoenix stands to provide.

I live in hope that I will last long enough to see humans live and work off-planet. Mars is about as good as it gets in the neighborhood of old Sol for such protracted excursions, and ultimately for colonization. With all of the other topics to which these pages are usually devoted, it should scarcely surprise that I would be very enthusiastically in favor of not having all of humanity's eggs in one basket. If nothing else, the wealth of ideas which would at first be the chief export of any off-world colony would enrich the species immeasurably (can you imagine a fresher perspective?). But the prospect of some natural or human-made calamity erasing all that there ever had been or would be of humanity is simply too appalling to contemplate. Larry Niven once said that "the dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right." Bit harsh, but basically says it.

So, when I hear of another successful mission to deepen our understanding of the Red Planet, my hope-meter twitches ever so slightly in the right direction. With many more missions in the offing, these promise to be "days of miracles and wonder" indeed.

Well-met, Phoenix. May you have a pleasant and productive stay.