William Sheehan<br>Photo: Bruce Foster
Feature
The Martian chronicler
by Marilyn Head
The beauty and mystery of the Red Planet draw an expert visitor from the other side of ours.
There, I can see the thing’s body. It glistens like wet leather. But that face. It, it’s … indescribable. Saliva is dripping from its rimless lips … The thing is rising up. I can’t find words. I’ll have to stop …” Orson Welles’s 1938 “faction” broadcast of a Martian emerging from his spacecraft, which caused mayhem among the citizens of New Jersey, is part of the folklore contributing to the mystique of Mars, according to psychiatrist and astronomer William Sheehan.
Accepting a temporary position in mental health at Timaru Hospital, Sheehan is really here to observe Mars at its closest approach to Earth. “At times I wondered if I had made the right decision – I haven’t worked so hard since I was an intern, but when I looked at the glorious Milky Way overhead, I knew I had.”
A sort of Renaissance superman, with degrees in medicine and literature, several prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship for his project “The Structure and Evolution of the Milky Way” and a string of acclaimed books on astronomy, Sheehan works as a child psychiatrist in rural Minnesota.
Intimidating? Not at all. He resembles Superman only in his Clark Kent persona – unassuming, warm and quietly enthusiastic when it comes to planets. I asked him when his interest in astronomy began.
“I can answer that exactly – February 17, 1964. I remember clearly splashing in puddles on my way home from school and looking up at the Sun and thinking that the Sun was a star and that all stars were suns. It was like being struck by lightning, and it opened up this whole new world. After that, I looked up every astronomical reference I could find.”
Most of those references were 10 years out of date, so Sheehan’s consciousness of worlds beyond was formed by the puissant mix of science fact and fiction that was possible in the pre-spacecraft era. Mars, portrayed with haunting realism by American artist Chesley Bonestell, became his favourite planet.
“In those days we took it for granted that planets were inhabited. The great 17th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe had asked, ‘What purpose would they serve if they were not inhabited?’, and we felt the same. There was this expectation that life had to be prevalent on at least a couple of planets. Venus, shrouded in thick clouds of what we now know to be sulphuric acid, was often depicted as a primeval swamp, even to the extent of harbouring dinosaurs, and of course everyone had high hopes for Mars!”
Why Mars in particular? “It’s the planet most like ours, even though it’s half the size and has a much thinner atmosphere. Its axis is tilted, so there are seasons similar to our own – spring comes to Mars in the same way it does to Earth and its day is almost exactly the same as ours, so the rhythms of life would be similar. We share a similar geological history and some landscape features. I’ve just spent some time in the Australian Outback and the bare, rocky, red landscape evoked a Martian landscape. There’s also evidence suggesting volcanic activity and running water in the past. The polar caps, which were thought to be entirely frozen carbon dioxide, may actually contain large amounts of water. All that adds up to the possibility of life.”
But it’s not just the physical similarities that make Mars special. “Mars is not just a geographical place,” Sheehan explains “but a province of the mind. Since it was first recognised as a wandering star, perennially flaring into angry brilliance, it’s always been associated with warfare and bloodshed. Works like H G Wells’s The War of the Worlds, based on interpretations of early telescopic views of Mars, continued this theme, so when Japanese astronomer Saheki saw bright flashes on Mars in the early 50s, people thought it quite possible that Martians were in the midst of a nuclear war. The physical features of Mars have names derived from the classics, so the Martian landscape is as romantic and familiar as it is alien and forbidding.”
The first maps of Mars were drawn in the 19th century and Sheehan is fascinated by how much they revealed about the personality of the observer. Italian astronomer Schiaparelli presented a Mars of chiselled lines and Euclidean geometry, typical of a personality type that demands clear-cut structure; others favoured subtly nuanced and shaded landscapes, which bespoke personalities “more tolerant of ambiguity”.
Schiaparelli’s maps, criss-crossed with “canali”, fired the imagination of US millionaire Percival Lowell, who saw in them evidence of a marvellous system of irrigation canals that the Martian inhabitants had constructed in a desperate struggle to survive on their dying, desert world.
“Actually, there’s a New Zealand connection,” says Sheehan. “Lowell established an observatory on Mars Hill in Arizona and the telescope he used – a superb Brashear refractor – has been sitting here, unused, for years.” It seems that it may be about to be resurrected as the centrepiece of a museum in Tekapo, next to New Zealand’s largest observatory at Mt John.
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