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Hmm...
What's this- or who?
Click on
him to see where he came from. Nothing done
to the image but some contrast enhancement.
Rotated
90 degrees to the left, so look in the lower left corner. I
didn't even notice him until I was assembling the page to add to
the website, so he's in the part of the work image I trimmed off
when the file got too big and is "out of frame" on the
full enhancement. Sorry 'bout that. |
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| The
view from an MGS image. Given the more recent propensity for ridiculously
long file names , I find the MSSS description,
"MGS_Phobos_Big", rather endearing. The actual catalog
number, R0600044, means this image was taken in 2003,
not as part of the earlier "Science Phase"
series. If you dig in the archives, it was the third of
three images, but the other two ('42 and '43) only show Phobos
as a speck, no detail, so they were probably just targeting
shots. Hey, is that a
face I see there? A closer look seems warranted... |
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| Yup.
She's there. The tolas-portrait of a girl who died long before
the last Ice Age. Cool - and chilling, as well. Click on her
for a high-res view, and ponder what she might have been doing
on the sunlit side of Phobos. She has lots of company, though.
Depending upon the lighting angle, there are faces and figures
all over the place., just like on Mars itself. |
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Scared?
Don't be scared. It's just your friendly neighborhood Phobos. Let's review
a few things.
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Mars (the planet) is named for the Roman god of
conquest. Or is it? Mars (the god) corresponds to Ares, the somewhat older Greek god
of War, but unlike many members of the Roman pantheon, he was not
imported from the Greek roster of gods and goddesses. There are
significant differences between them. For one thing, no one much
liked Ares- he was pretty much a belligerent butthead. You might
feel the need to call upon him for aid, but he was guaranteed to
be trouble, being not so much a strategic thinker as a soccer
hooligan with cosmic powers.
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| Ares
(naughty) |
Mars
(nice) |
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Ares had a
half-sister, warrior goddess Athena, who was the "nice"
, the strategic thinker in Greek mythology. Since all those old
pantheons were composed of borrowed deities from diverse
sources, even the most conservative scholarly authorities
recognize at least three variations to the roster (as did
Socrates) , depending which source material you choose to cite,
so don't worry too much about discrepancies at this late date.
But that doesn't mean there aren't useful clues to be
gleaned. Ares had two sons by the goddess Aphrodite, Phobos
and Deimos,
who were considered by the public as the spirits of Fear and Terror. This may
be a mythological reference to the folk-wisdom that beautiful
woman often have a weakness for creeps. Or not. Aphrodite
also bore him a daughter, Harmonia
, by the way. His war chariot ( called a quadriga
) was drawn by four immortal horses, fire-breathing, etc, etc, a
number you can deduce from the name, so Phobos and Deimos were
not the horse's names, unless the other two were called Donner and
Blitzen, which is unlikely. So Asaph Hall was a bit confused
(see below). Ares did have a work-friend, Kydoimos
(does that name sound familiar?), who is described as "the
demon of the din of battle". Ares contributed to the
din with his own personal war cry, shouting the name of one of his
illegitimate daughters, Alala
, adopted by the Greeks in general as a battle call. Say the
name over a few times and you'll see who uses it today. Hey. the
only ancient people who actually liked this guy were the
Spartans, so what does that tell you?
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Mars, on the other hand, was
a revered figure.
Like the other Roman deities, he started out as a principle,
whereas the Greeks considered their gods to be actual
individuals. Not until the Roman rulers started adding
themselves to the god lists did the (official, at least)
position become one of direct worship. Until then, the rather
sophisticated Romans had a henotheistic view of celestial
matters, where the gods were archetypes, embodiments of the
various facets of existence and human behavior. That is why
there were so many, and why it was generally OK for your
neighbor to have different ones. But when politicians got
involved, the tolerance dissipated like smoke in acid rain. The
Greeks had undergone a similar shift earlier. The situation was
common in the ancient world, which is how various adopted local
gods would come to be incorporated into a unified official structure.
Politics, you see. Our ancestors were just as smart as we are
(arguably more so), but we have had little public experience
with the philosophical side of religion in modern times. For the
past several hundred years at least, religions have been
dominated by dogma. Except for Discordians, who have "catma"
(go look it up, I'm not kidding). So the
mechanism by which religions developed in prehistory is usually portrayed badly. This
background is actually relevant.
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Mars (the god) was named from the Etruscan
word Maris, which was not a god but one of those
principle things.
This represented a whole category of divinities who dealt with
matters of rescue, triumph, and resolution (not specifically war). They had different
divinities assigned to rule over various regions of the sky,
too, so they paid equal attention to the heavens as actual
real estate, unlike the Greeks, who thought of the sky simply as
the realm of the gods. The whole celestial
ecosystem of the Etruscans was apparently confusing to even the
Romans, who eventually collapsed the membership of these
categories into singular individual embodiments to adopt as
their gods. The word Maris was used in conjunction with an
epithet to imply relentless, unstoppable and heroic (however
dark) focus. Think of epithets
as official nicknames, like
"Braveheart", or "Lawgiver", for mythological
characters, who often were modeled on real people turned into
legends. The combination with Maris has been found on
inscriptions from every root culture in Europe, as well, along
with an apparently feminine equivalent, Marus.
In
modern terms, consider these analogous to "Darth", which
true Star Wars fans understand was not a military rank. So if an
early Roman, or Celt, or whomever referred to "Darth" Stinky, you
knew this was not just a bath-challenged hero, this was the
absolute epitome of stench, who could clear out an enemy camp
simply by striding in for a visit. Not that Mars smelled bad, of
course. He was a well-bathed Roman. That was just an example.
Ares was probably a bit ripe sometimes, though. |
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| Here's
a picture, in case all this history stuff is getting boring.
Stick with it, because it gets better and better. Below, we have
two views of Moya, the sentient starship from Farscape.
Keep her in mind for later. |
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| Back
to the Etruscans, and now it gets intriguing. The Etruscans believed
their entire religious system had been "revealed" to them by an
ancient group of seers. The specifics of their religion were
apparently revealed by one named Tages.
A few other names
have survived, like the nymph of prophecy Vegoia
( a nymph was a nature spirit, not a sorority girl), but mostly
these seers remain the stuff of legend. The last direct records of the
pre-Roman days were lost or destroyed during the Middle Ages. If
their founding mentors were ancient legend to the Etruscans by
the beginning of the Roman era, we are reaching
way back into the prehistory of Europe, where speculation
rules. The question even remains open on whether the
Etruscans originated in Italy, or somewhere else. We do know that their
religious system, including most of its Titans and gods, was
later adopted by the Roman Republic, because by then the
Etruscans had been conquered and absorbed into the general population. It was
the Etruscans who originally named the fourth
planet Mars, not the Romans. In
other words, the principle seems to have been named for the
planet, not the other way round. Who knew what, and when?
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Above, esa image H2912_0005_sr2.
Pretty busy, for a supposed rock, huh? |
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Moving ahead a
few years, and across the Atlantic, we find the Totonac people
of Veracruz. At least as old a culture as their neighbors the
Olmec, their descendants still live there on the Gulf coast of
Mexico, and we know almost nothing about the ancient roots of
either group. The Olmec are identified with the huge stone heads
depicting diverse ethnicities that they left behind, and no one
has a clue what the heads were really all about. The Totonac
culture has its own signature item, a statue of a "Laughing
Man". They were and still are very common. As the
academically astute can tell by the simple descriptive name, no
one has any idea what the meaning of the figure really is. Be
assured, if any ethnologist could manage to connect the statues
with Rabbit (a deity), they would be called "Pulque
Ceremony Ritual Totems" , but the origins remain obscure.
Totonac trivia: they were the first people encountered by
Hernando Cortez, and as it happened, still pissed about being
conquered and overrun by the Aztecs, so they helped him defeat Montezuma.
When they found out the Spaniards were also not so nice, well,
you know what happened. Why do I mention them here? Take another
look at the picture above (yes, I see what looks like a ridiculously
big ladder too, but I don't know what to say about it) and then
look at the marked version below, and at the images of the
"Laughing Man" figures, all Pre-Columbian but from
different times and locations, despite the similar faces. I
already made the case in an earlier chapter for the Maya as the
Earth culture with the closest ties to Mars, so maybe this means
something. |
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You can click on
the image for a version without the box, if you want. Not any
bigger, but higher resolution. |
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"What,
Me Worry?" |
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Continuing forward
through time and space, we reach the
latter part of the 19th century, Asaph Hall was in pursuit
of proof for the theory ( proposed by Kepler in the previous
century) that since Venus has no moon, the Earth
has one, Jupiter (as best he knew) has four, then Mars should
have two. In 1877,
he found what he had been searching for, the fast-moving satellites of Mars (the
planet). Some say that if anyone else had actually been
specifically searching before him, the state of the art in telescopes
had been good enough for at least twenty years and someone could
have beaten Hall to the discovery, but nobody did. It was the Man with a Plan who found them. He named
them Phobos and Deimos, "after the two swift horses
which drew the chariot of Ares in the Trojan War". He
could have named them Romulus
and Remus from the Roman culture, since at least one of
the wolf-suckled founders was fathered by Mars, but instead he
drew from Homer's Iliad,
using the Greek words, Phobos
("fear", though he translated it as
"flight"), and Deimos
("terror" or "dread"). In Latin that would
be Fuga
(as in "tempus fugit") and Tima
(as in "timorous"), so perhaps the translations got
slightly garbled (see comment above about the horses). By some accounts, the
names were suggested to him by a colleague, but naming rights
are so sacred to astronomers that such possible delegation seems
odd. Or maybe it was insight verging on inspiration, like one of
those ancient Etruscan haruspex. Fear, flight, terror, dread,
the distinctions (in English) are subtle,
if you think about it.
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| In
1958, Russian scientist Iosif Samuilovich Shklovsky,
published a paper making a case for Phobos as an artificial
satellite. Hollow, with a thin metal skin, no less. He felt the low orbit was impossible to reconcile
with the standard astronomical model of Phobos as a
"captured asteroid", among other problems. The only
real counter argument one could fairly raise against his well
reasoned theory would be to point out that the standard theories
on the origin of Earth's moon are similarly implausible, yet
there it is... which is a lame response at best. Given
that he only had basic astronomical data to work with (no probes
yet), his deductions were truly brilliant. |
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"...a
relatively thin metal skin." (and a bit of space debris) |
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| There
is supposedly a White House briefing paper from the Eisenhower
Administration dated 1958 (same year as Shklovsky's paper) where
science advisor Dr. James Killian mentions the possible future goal
of Mars exploration and specifically Phobos. He refers to Phobos
as potentially artificial and perhaps "...not built by
martians " (sic) . A very odd
statement, especially so because of the matter of fact way it is
included. It sounds like there had been prior discussion
of the Shklovsky paper, Phobos, and Mars. Not actually anything
controversial there. After all, why wouldn't a
"science advisor" discuss current news? There are
multitudes of anecdotal references to this briefing, but I
haven't been able to find an actual copy. A different report
claims that Fred Singer (Killian's successor) wrote a letter in
1960 to the journal Astrophysics
supporting
the Shklovsky hypothesis, but Singer has more recently made a
somewhat evasive denial of that. He was a regular contributor
there, however (see "More on the Moons of
Mars". Singer, S. F., Astronautics, February 1960. American Astronautical
Society ). Curiouser and
curiouser.
Since we are
reduced to speculation about the putative Mars briefing, I will introduce
another possible candidate, someone you have probably never
heard of before, Dr. George B. Kistiakowsky. He was one of the
"atom bomb guys" from WWII, reputed to be a lot of fun
at parties, and a Special Undersecretary for Science
and Security matters during the same time period as Killian. His
name is on a lot of briefing papers, most heavily
redacted and many with mentions of CIA, as well as NASA.
His diary has an entry (which I have seen) recounting a discussion with Eisenhower
about the need to reorganize NASA resources, which were
regarded as pointing in too many different and redundant directions.
He specifically recommended a greater focus on the Moon and less
on Mars and Venus. Hmm. NASA was a brand-new idea
and already they were shuffling things around. The one thing we can
reasonably deduce from this is that there were indeed many purposeful
meetings about space exploration and that it was considered as
something more than pure research or political competition with
the Soviet Union. His papers as well as Killian's seem to
be archived at Harvard , if anyone would care to go dig through
them. All that is online are indexes, but the topic descriptions
are intriguing. I suggest you look in "Box 28",
if you can get permission to peruse them.
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George B. Kistiakowsky,
thinking Scary Thoughts.
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James R. Killian,
the college President. |
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an example of the kind of chit-chat that went on at such
briefings, which doesn't mention anything about Phobos or Mars,
but does show that the space program was always a consideration:
Source: National Security Council, "Discussion at the 443rd Meeting of the National Security Council, Thursday, May 5, 1960," 5 May 1960, NSC Series, Box 12, Eisenhower Papers, 1953-1961 (Ann Whitman File), Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.
MEMORANDUM
SUBJECT: Discussion at the 443rd Meeting
of the National Security Council,
Thursday, May 5, 1960
Present at the 443rd Meeting of the NSC were the President of the United States, Presiding; the Acting Secretary of State (C. Douglas Dillon); the Secretary of Defense; and the Director, Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization. Also attending the Meeting and participating in the Council actions below was the Director, Bureau of the Budget. Also attending the Meeting were the Director, U.S. Information Agency; the Director of Central Intelligence; the Assistant to the President; the Special Assistants to the President for National Security Affairs, for Science and Technology, and for Security Operations Coordination; the White House Staff Secretary; the Naval Aid to the President; Herbert . York, Department of Defense; Central Intelligence Agency; the Executive Secretary,
NSC; and the Deputy Executive Secretary, NSC.
There follows (an
excerpt from) a summary of the discussion at the Meeting and the main points taken.
"...Mr. Gates said he felt we had made a correct military decision when we decided to develop a smaller engine for ATLAS rather than a SATURN-type engine. This correct military decision, however, resulted in our not having large rockets for space programs. Dr. York said the ATLAS became available for space work two years later than the comparable Russian rocket. This caused a big difference in U.S. and Russian space programs. The President said he thought some space work had been done with a combination of ATLAS and THOR. Dr. York said this was not the case; THOR and JUPITER with added stages had been used in space work.
Dr. Kistiakowsky believed that we were equal to or even ahead of the Russians with respect to the scientific information being derived from our earth satellite program. The President agreed but added that the public sometimes asked whether scientific information would enable us to defend ourselves against the USSR. Dr. York said the fact that ATLAS was available two years later than the comparable Russian rocket had attracted a great deal of attention. The President said we know that the Russians were working earlier on the large rocket engine but it was difficult to get the public to appreciate the real significance of missile developments. Mr. Allen said as a result of our recent successes in space activities, we have recouped much U.S. prestige abroad which had been lost after SPUTNIK.
Secretary Gates believed it was essential to separate space activities from military requirements in talking to the public about missile programs. The President noted that such a separation was one of the reasons for creating NASA. Secretary Gates believed the public was somewhat fearful of lunar probes. Dr. York said the Russians had simply demonstrated a capability for lunar probes which we knew they possessed. Mr. Stans wondered whether we were making high enough claims for our scientific achievements in space. (DELETION)
"
Oh,
gee, and it was just starting to get interesting. Dr Killian is
mentioned elsewhere in the document, but the mention of NASA
here caught my eye.
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A
pair if science fiction novels from 1955, three years before the
Shklovsky paper. The
Secret of the Martian Moons,
by Donald A. Wollheim, where Phobos is a relic of an ancient war
that destroyed the 4th planet, creating the asteroid belt, and
Phobos,
the Robot Planet,
by Paul Capon, where Phobos is a huge sentient computer that
uses flying saucers to abduct Earthlings. |
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