E.T. hunters join forces with Mars lander crew

By Stephanie Innes
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 06.15.2008

The University of Arizona-led Phoenix Mars Mission includes an intriguing partner: a group dedicated to finding extraterrestrials.

The SETI Institute — SETI stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — is a partner in science experiments under way on the red planet.

The group's name may be familiar to movie-goers who remember the 1997 film "Contact," starring Jodie Foster. Foster plays a SETI scientist who detects an extraterrestrial radio signal from the star Vega.

But don't get too excited. Officials with SETI anticipate no such signal from Mars.

"There will be no green men popping into the camera waving at us, no huge footprints," SETI researcher and Phoenix Mars science team member John R. Marshall said. "If there has been any life on Mars it's unlikely it got beyond simple, microbial forms."

The Phoenix spacecraft touched down on the red planet May 25. Science experiments are expected to last about 90 days.

SETI's interest in the Phoenix mission is in laying the groundwork to finding out whether primitive life ever formed on Mars and if conditions there could still support microbial biology. If life did start on Mars, that opens a whole universe of possibility.
"You have these two options: One where we're the only life form in the universe, and the other is the possibility that there are other life forms out there," said Marshall. "If you find even one microbe on Mars, your whole uniqueness disappears."

That life might be like nothing we've ever seen before, perhaps not DNA-based like everything on Earth, he said.

Rather than hunting for aliens, Marshall — a planetary geologist and co-investigator on the mission — spends his days interpreting data from the lander's microscopes. He's part of the team working on the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, or MECA.

SETI scientist Richard Quinn is also working on experiments with MECA, looking for soluble salts that would give a better picture of Mars' water history.

MECA takes needle-sized soil samples and mixes them with water and other substances that cause reactions to determine how abundant minerals such as magnesium are in the Martian soil. The equipment will allow researchers to focus on particular elements, including carbon and water molecules. Using a microscope, researchers will get an up-close look at the shape, size, texture, and composition of soil particles on Mars. Finding clay crystals or weathered materials under the microscope would indicate the action of ground water in the past, which would be important, since liquid water is essential to life.

They've already had a chance to look at a sample under the microscope and have observed what Marshall calls a surprising mixture of different mineral fragments.
The SETI Institute, founded in 1984 and based in Mountain View, Calif., is a private, non-profit organization with a mission of exploring and explaining the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe.

Both Marshall and Quinn work with SETI's Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe.

In addition to the Carl Sagan Center, SETI includes the Center for SETI Research, which literally listens to the cosmos for signs of intelligent life. That division is headed up by Jill Tarter — named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in 2004. Tarter's work inspired Sagan's book "Contact."

The SETI Institute also supports a program called SETI@home, though it is not part of the group's research. The SETI@home program uses regular Internet-connected computer users to help in the search for signals from extraterrestrial intelligence.
Not surprisingly, fringe groups with their own ideas about alien life are attracted to the group.

But SETI officials are scientists, not random individuals haphazardly looking for UFOs.
"We arrogantly assume we're very unique and we kind of arrogantly assume our solar system is unique — but we don't know how many solar systems are out there," said Marshall, who divides his time between California and Tucson during the Mars mission.
"That signal could be headed to us at this moment. You just don't know if or when it will happen."

SETI scientists note that we are only one planet around a very ordinary star — the sun. There are roughly 400 billion other stars in our galaxy, and nearly 100 billion other galaxies. It would be extraordinary, they say, if we were the only thinking beings in all these enormous realms.

Similarly, Foster's character, Ellie Arroway, is shown as a child in the beginning of the film "Contact," asking her father whether we are alone in the universe.
"I don't know," he replies. "If it is just us, seems like an awful waste of space."