Science writer Kate Greene couldn’t have known that her memoir about her time on a make-believe Mars mission would be published as millions of people on Earth isolated themselves in their homes for months amid a pandemic.

But her book is one of two about Mars published this month that are oddly well-suited to the present moment. Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars and Sarah Stewart Johnson’s The Sirens of Mars are both about exploration. Yet they’re also about many different types of isolation and the human yearning to not be alone.
Greene participated in a mock Mars mission, called HI-SEAS, for Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, in 2013. She and five others lived in a dome on a rocky, barren patch atop Mauna Loa volcano for four months with no fresh food, no fresh air (all excursions were conducted in clunky “spacesuits”) and no instantaneous contact with the outside world.
NASA and other space agencies run such missions to figure out best practices for keeping astronauts sane and productive in isolated and stressful environments. It’s well-documented that boredom can lead to mistakes or inattention. Other simulated Mars missions suggest that astronauts isolated together could develop an us-versus-them mentality that would lead the crew to stop listening to mission control, which could be dangerous on a long mission.

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With humor and sensitivity, Greene relates how her crew got along (or didn’t), what she read, what she ate and the time-delayed e-mails she exchanged with loved ones back on “Earth.” Through the book’s series of essays, she uses the mission as a lens to examine everything from the ethics and economics of space travel to the nature of time, love and home.
Her descriptions of boredom and seclusion feel especially apt in a time of social distancing: “the way certain aspects of your environment, daily schedule and conversations smooth over, lose their texture.” Greene relates her experience to astronaut Michael Collins’ time orbiting in the Apollo 11 capsule alone while his crewmates walked on the moon. She connects both of those experiences to that of her brother, who spent the last year and a half of his life confined to a hospital room.
“On this oasis of a planet,” she writes, “there are so many ways to feel isolated, each of us with the potential to sit with the terror of being alive and possibly alone in the cosmos.”

The Sirens of Mars starts with a much broader view of Mars exploration. In lyrical, engaging writing, Stewart Johnson, a planetary scientist, chronicles how our perception of Mars has swung from a world teeming with life, to definitely dead and boring, and back again over and over since the invention of telescopes.
Stewart Johnson brings together a cast of characters to tell this history, from Galileo to the present-day team working on the Curiosity rover. Those characters include astronomer Carl Sagan, whose Cosmos TV series Stewart Johnson watched as a child. Sagan was almost ridiculed out of science for his obsession with “exobiology.”
She also introduces less famous but equally important people, like Sagan’s colleague Wolf Vishniac, whose “Wolf Trap” life-detection experiment was cut from NASA’s life-hunting Viking landers in the 1970s. To get over his disappointment, Vishniac went searching for microbes in Antarctica and died in an accident there before the Viking missions launched (SN: 12/22/73).
In this sweeping history of human fascination with the Red Planet, Stewart Johnson also tells a personal story of finding her place in the world, from an inquisitive child to an unrooted adventurer to a wife and mother and member of a scientific team.
She makes a clear case that the search for life on Mars is an effort to not be alone. In one of the most poignant scenes in her book, she is hiking on Mauna Kea — the next volcano over from Greene’s Mars habitat — and finds a fern growing amid the volcanic desolation.
“It was then, on that trip, that the idea of looking for life in the universe began to make sense to me,” she writes. “I suddenly saw something I might haunt the stratosphere for, something for which I’d fall into the sea…. a chance to discover the smallest breath in the deepest night and, in so doing, vanquish the void that lurked between human existence and all else in the cosmos.”
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It sounds like the setup for a joke: If radio waves give you radar and sound gives you sonar, what do gravitational waves get you?

The answer might be “GRADAR” — gravitational wave “radar” — a potential future technology that could use reflections of gravitational waves to map the unseen universe, say researchers in a paper accepted to Physical Review Letters. By looking for these signals, scientists may be able to find dark matter or dim, exotic stars and learn about their deep insides.

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Astronomers routinely use gravitational waves — traveling ripples in the fabric of space and time itself, first detected in 2015 — to watch cataclysmic events that are hard to study with light alone, such as the merging of two black holes (SN: 2/11/2016).

But physicists have also known about a seemingly useless property of gravitational waves: They can change course. Einstein’s theory of gravity says that spacetime gets warped by matter, and any wave passing through these distortions will change course. The upshot is that when something emits gravitational waves, part of the signal comes straight at Earth, but some might arrive later — like an echo — after taking longer paths that bend around a star or anything else heavy.

Scientists have always thought these later signals, called “gravitational glints,” should be too weak to detect. But physicists Craig Copi and Glenn Starkman of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, took a leap: Working off Einstein’s theory, they calculated how strong the signal would be when waves scatter through the gravitational field inside a star itself.

“The shocking thing is that you seem to get a much larger result than you would have expected,” Copi says. “It’s something we’re still trying to understand, where that comes from — whether it’s believable, even, because it just seems too good to be true.”

If gravitational glints can be so strong, astronomers could possibly use them to trace the insides of stars, the team says. Researchers could even look for massive bodies in space that would otherwise be impossible to detect, like globs of dark matter or lone neutron stars on the other side of the observable universe.“That would be a very exciting probe,” says Maya Fishbach, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who was not involved in the study.

There are still reasons to be cautious, though. If this phenomenon stands up to more detailed scrutiny, Fishbach says, scientists would have to understand it better before they could use it — and that will probably be difficult.

“It’s a very hard calculation,” Copi says.

But similar challenges have been overcome before. “The whole story of gravitational wave detection has been like that,” Fishbach says. It was a struggle to do all the math needed to understand their measurements, she says, but now the field is taking off (SN: 1/21/21). “This is the time to really be creative with gravitational waves.” More

A potential dark galaxy — one made primarily of dark matter — may have been spotted in the local universe.

Dark galaxies are theoretical, starless systems whose discovery could help astronomers better understand galaxy formation. The new candidate was found within a large, fast-moving cloud of gas first seen in the 1960s. High-resolution observations of the cloud, reported April 18 in Science Advances, revealed a compact clump of gas that might be a dark galaxy. More

McKenzie Prillaman is a science and health journalist based in Washington, DC. She holds a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the spring 2023 intern at Science News. More

You may have already seen the headlines: Signs of life have reportedly been discovered on an alien world. 

A team of astronomers led by Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge used the James Webb Space Telescope to search for interesting molecules in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system called K2 18b. The team now says they’ve found molecules that, on Earth, are associated with life, in an abundance that is hard to explain otherwise. More