FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: VICARIOUS TRIP TO MARS (PART 60)

Jean Bell Mosley's new autobiography, "For Most of the Century," is only available is serialized form in the Southeast Missourian. Return each week for her continuing story.

After our astronauts' trips to the moon and back, our nation's space program was pushed to the back burner of the general public's mind. It took us a long time to get over the awesomeness of the moon trip. But NASA (North American Space Administration) was diligently placing satellites in orbit whereby we could send and receive TV pictures around the curvature of the world and keep an eye on what other countries were doing. Then there slowly began to creep toward the front pages of the newspapers, periodicals and TV broadcasts bits of news of NASA's proposal to send an unmanned spacecraft to Mars.

I began to go outside on star studded nights to see if I could locate Mars, according to where my star book said it would be. Finding, through my binoculars, what I thought to be it, I would shake my head in wonder and skepticism. The moon? Yes, it was right up there, big and close, only about 237,000 miles away. We've been there, done that! But Mars?

Soon, news of the adventure began to dominate the media. Animated pictures of just how Pathfinder, the spacecraft, and Sojourner, the little toy-like, spiked-wheeled vehicle inside the spacecraft were to work came to us in bright colors via TV. It was almost like a fairy tale. Sojourner and Pathway were to be enclosed in huge airbags that would inflate when they landed on Mars. Braking rockets would slow the spacecraft when it was about seven miles above Mars. Then, about one mile above the planet, the airbags would be inflated so that the whole package would bounce softly on Mars' surface, at least softly enough so as not to damage things inside.

I examined the cushions on the old green couch, my reviewing stand for many years, to see just how much more wear they could withstand. Although the couch had been re-upholstered, nearly 45 years of sitting there, excitedly watching the world's big and little events on the TV, was wearing the cushion covers thin and the springs beneath a little weaker. Perhaps if I could stay rather still they might last through the Mars event, even the celebrations on New Year's Eve, 1999.

I watched and listened carefully as John Holliman explained just how we were to achieve this amazing adventure, the same John Holliman I had listened to when Desert Storm War began over Baghdad.

I thought TV was bringing me the animated pictures in miniature and that the real spacecraft would be much larger. Sojourner, in the animation resembled a wind-up toy Stephen had once had. In reality it was about the size of the toy, being only two feet long and one foot high.

Of course we couldn't see the actual landing for there were no photographers on Mars awaiting our coming! The Spacecraft had to land, deflate the airbags and erect its own camera before we got actual pictures of what was going on. But it was exciting to watch the scientists as they hovered in a room awaiting a signal that Pathfinder had landed. When they erupted in cheers, I knew something "out of this world" had really happened. There was a six-hour waiting period before pictures began coming back. It had landed in the dark hours on Mars, so they said, and had to wait for daylight there for things to start happening for both the spacecraft and Sojourner were mainly powered by solar energy. This up and down and squirming around on my reviewing stand was hard on the covers. I decided to place a quilt atop the cushions. It seemed fitting that I chose my Big Star quilt, the same quilt the good church ladies at Doe Run had made for my hope chest.

Just as tears had misted my vision when Alan Shepard and John Glenn had made their suborbital and orbital flights and Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon's surface, so, too, they misted my vision as I saw that little toy-like Sojourner roll off the spacecraft onto the surface of Mars and move about, one half inch per second, on its spiked wheels, leaving our tracks on Mars. Oh my! Where next?

Sojourner was guided and maneuvered by signals from the scientists in Pasadena, Calif., toward a rock dubbed Barnacle Bill and began to send back to earth information of the chemical make-up of the rock. New terms, alpha S-ray spectrometer, subatomic particles, began to creep into my vocabulary. Other rocks as well as the soil were examined.

The 1575 pictures Pathfinder sent back to Earth seemed to support the theory that the landing region had been flooded three billion years ago. That's 3 followed by nine zeros.

The many rocks all leaned in one direction as if having been positioned that way by flowing water, just as the smaller rocks in the St. Francis River that flowed by my early home had been positioned over and over again by floods.

One picture that was sent back was called the Twin Peaks. They appeared to be small hills far away from where Pathfinder had landed. However, if kept in the same perspective of the general size of things shown they may not be any bigger than a couple of robust hornets nests in the Ozark hills.

Although exciting as the venture had been, there was a sadness in the bleak scene. The thought of all water disappearing from Earth and nothing left but rocks made my eyes mist again. "Don't let it happen, God."

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.