sublimeguile

It has this Lazarus mode that will bring it back to life if it dies. That wasn’t really intended for a year from now, when Martian spring comes back. It was meant for the end of the mission, what we’re going through right now. Phoenix is quite literally dying every day now, and coming back to life because of this Lazarus mode which will kick it back on. It wakes up every day now, it doesn’t know where it is, it doesn’t know what time it is…

It has a sequence that it goes through, and when it detects that its landing pad’s feet are down, it realizes it’s on Mars and it starts acting like it’s supposed to act on Mars. It’s doing this now day after day, and the mission, at this point, is just trying to get any kind of science they can out of it. They’re instructing it to take a picture, take a temperature reading, as soon as it wakes up, so we can get some information.

I had brought with me field guides to the fauna and flora, all published in the early 1970s. Yet once in the Hawaiian forest, I had a shock: my books were listing species that were extinct — or about to become so. I was in the forest six days a week and I kept thinking, “If I give it enough time, I’ll certainly see most of the species still left.” But I saw very little. In fact, in Hawaii today, I’d say there are only about 10 remaining native land bird species, with another 10 clinging to survival.

So suddenly this extinction business seemed very real. Whenever you’d meet biologists over coffee, there’d be the same conversation: “Do you ever wonder what Hawaii was like before, with 150 species of birds and 1,500 species of plants?” That changed my life.