New Mexico: Mars on Earth

Dec. 2—details

—Roving with Perseverance

—Through June 5, 2023

—New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science, 1801 Mountain Road NW, Albuquerque

—Tickets are $5 to $8; 505-841-2869, nmnaturalhistory.org

Ask Albuquerque-area volcanologist Larry Crumpler about Mars and he's likely to say, "It's like New Mexico, but more so."

Both are rocky, of course. Both are rife with pristine and mysterious landscapes. Both are dry and remote. And misconceptions about each abound.

An exhibit featuring a full-size replica rover and helicopter from the Perseverance Mars mission is on display through June 5 at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science to educate visitors about the Land of Enchantment's cosmic sister. Crumpler is involved with both the NASA mission and the museum, serving the latter as volcanology and space science research curator.

The replicas are part of NASA's Roving with Perseverance road show, a touring exhibit stopping, Crumpler estimates, at about half a dozen museums nationwide.

The Perseverance rover landed on Mars in 2021 and is searching for signs of ancient microscopic life, as well as collecting and storing rock and sediment samples for future retrieval. Also part of the mission is the Ingenuity helicopter, which has completed numerous short flights above Mars, scouting spots for the rover to explore — and proving that controlled flight is possible on the planet.

Unlike the real versions toiling many millions of miles from Earth, the terrestrial copies are more accessible. "You can move the camera around and you can move the arm around, but you know, that's all manual. It will roll if you push it." Still, some details from the rovers have been left out of the replicas, such as wiring and riveting.

"But you know, all of the basic structure, all of the antennas, all of the instruments that we use, it's all there," Crumpler says.

The compact car-size rover has a protruding frontal arm and a camera that resembles a head. The helicopter looks like a space-age drone.

As a team member for the Perseverance mission, Crumpler gets frequent updates on its progress. Although the public might assume that the mission is controlled and monitored from a central location, his team is scattered throughout the country.

Museums applied for the right to host the replicas, Crumpler says. His NASA connections certainly didn't hurt New Mexico's bid.

When Crumpler learned of the replicas' availability, he said, "'Hey, we are a museum with actual, ongoing research involving this mission. If anybody should have it, we should.' And so we [applied] and, of course, being a team member, I got on the list early."

Crumpler sees the exhibit not only as a way to share his scientific passions with the public, but to alter perceptions of the museum.

"I think a lot of people think of the natural history museum as just the place where you go to see dinosaurs or maybe minerals, and there's a lot of other research going on here," he says. "People should know that we do things other than just fossils. And New Mexico is a great analogy for other planets. I mean, we get people frequently excited about other planets and then point them to something here in New Mexico that's exactly the same. It's just like being on that other planet."

So, if someone views Roving with Perseverance and wants to visit a New Mexico landscape similar to the setting for the Perseverance mission, where should they go?

"In the particular area where we are on Mars and this mission, there are a lot of sediments and things laid down by an ancient river," Crumpler says. "So I would send them out maybe to the Rio Puerco Valley, with the volcanic necks and all of the Cretaceous sandstones and mesas and things like that. That's pretty close to the landscape that we're in on Mars right now. And even in Santa Fe, I mean, all you have to do is go over to White Rock Canyon."

Pull Quote

On Mars, though, the temperature there could be as high as freezing and as low as minus-100.

The Rio Puerco Valley is a few miles west of Los Lunas, about 30 miles south of Albuquerque. A volcanic neck is the remaining trapped, solidified magma after the rest of a volcano eroded away; the rocky formation is shaped like the cap of a toothpaste tube.

Crumpler describes Mars' landscape as similar to Antarctica's, but without snow. Not surprisingly, works of fiction that envision human life on Mars must take some scientific liberties.

"The other problem you've got there is that it's extremely dry," Crumpler says. "And a lot of the soils are somewhat caustic. But the real issue is the atmosphere, of course. It's so thin, it's like being 200,000 feet up in the Earth's atmosphere. You can't breathe much above 40,000 feet."

If the helicopter is the future of Mars exploration, Crumpler says, the rover is its present. Those curious about the history of Mars exploration can view another exhibit on display at the museum. That exhibit features a replica modeled after the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed on the red planet in 2004. The Perseverance is far larger than its predecessors.

Roving with Perseverance's reach is limited by the high cost of transporting the replicas, which is done via truck — the same way the real rover and helicopter were transported to their launch site in Florida, Crumpler says.

"Yeah, they go in a big box that is just kind of unmarked," he says.

Mars is the fourth-closest planet to the sun in the solar system, and Venus is second-closest. One might wonder why Mars has captured the imagination — and scientists' attention — in a way Venus has not. Minus-100 degrees might sound inhospitable, but Venus has highs of more than 800 degrees and crushing air pressure — conditions more brutal than even those on Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. No rover has visited Venus, as the conditions are seen as too harsh for them to operate.

"We have done missions to Venus, but in the past 20 years or so it's been mostly missions to Mars," Crumpler says. "We really focus, with our missions, on the search for ancient life on Mars, and it has basically the most habitable environments [in the solar system], especially three and a half billion years ago. It was actually a little bit more like Earth in terms of the amount of water and whatnot."

Crumpler hopes the links between Mars and New Mexico get people thinking more about the state's inviting but sometimes intimidating landscapes.

"I think it borders on criminal that we just don't talk about the geology here," he says. "We don't talk about the fact that we have 1,000 volcanoes. You can spend thousands of dollars traveling the globe to see things that you could see just a couple of hours away here in New Mexico."