From Mars to Earth
A year after NASA’s Perseverance Rover landed near Jezero Crater on Mars, Christopher Riley returns to his Worlds Apart project, to reveal an image of its twin Earth location in central India. His quest to capture it offers a message for our times.
A year ago, I mapped NASA’s first eight Martian landing sites onto their equivalent locations here on Earth, to draw attention to climate change. But a ninth location was about to enter our consciousness — as their Perseverance lander prepared to make its final approach to the red planet, for an audacious sky crane descent to Jezero Crater.
Hours after touch down on the 18th February 2021, with the new landing site pinpointed (18.445°N, 77.451°E) I’d mapped this latest Mars ground station onto a farmer’s field on the border of the Indian states of Maharashtra and Telangana.
The search was on to find someone to capture a photograph of this spot on the ground, to contrast to NASA’s first glimpses of their new Martian vista. Perseverance is the first Martian lander location to map onto a place anywhere near a populated area here on Earth, and I was optimistic that in a country of 1.38 billion people I’d soon find someone local who could snap me a photo.
Surprisingly this would prove far harder to pull off than I expected, but the outcome would turn out to be more profound than I could have imagined…
Google Maps identifies a small school about one kilometre south of the spot, in the tiny village of Sawali, and a polytechnic about two kilometres west, near the town of Loni. I reach out to both of them but don’t hear back. I tap my network of friends in London with connections to the country, but India is vast and no one has links to anyone nearby. Astronomer’s Without Borders feature my request on their next Facebook event, but still can’t hook me up with anyone close enough.
Then the BBC World Service’s programme Digital Planet gets in touch. My challenge has captured the interest of presenters Gareth Mitchell and Bill Thompson, who have a devoted listener and correspondent in Telangana called Gowri Abhiram.
We connect on Facebook. Gowri’s excited by the idea of a trip to the field, but Telangana is large. From her home, near the sprawling city of Hyderabad, 230km south of the location, it’s a tiring ten-hour round trip by road. On top of that, COVID is raging across the country, bringing India’s health service to its knees and forcing lockdowns to halt the spread of the virus. This is not the time to be asking for frivolous favours. A photo will have to wait.
I’d assumed it was NASA who’d first created a Martian coordinate system, when they’d started dispatching robotic explorers to the red planet in the 1960s. But Mars’ latitudes and longitudes were defined long before that; in the early 1830s, by German astronomers Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich Madler. The pair were eager Mars mappers, scrutinizing our neighbouring planet, from their Berlin observatory, as it turned on its axis every day. One clear circular feature revolved into view each day in the middle of the planet. It felt like a good prime meridian to pick for their “Greenwich” point. So starting with this line as their zero longitude they marked 180 degrees east and west around their Martian globe and 90 degrees of latitude towards Mars’ north and south poles.
By the 1870s Beer and Madler’s meridian feature had been named Sinus Meridiani (meaning “Middle Bay”) and their coordinate system was being used by influential Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, to chart his most detailed maps of Mars. Almost a century later, when our first robots reached the red planet, their coordinates would underpin these missions too.
Meanwhile, back on Earth as COVID continues to stalk us through 2021, on Mars the Perseverance rover is still exploring the Jezero Crater region. NASA’s named its new landing site after the American science writer Octavia E. Butler, and my quest to capture a photograph of the twin location in central India continues with further podcasts and conversations.
Then in early 2022, Gowri gets back in touch. She’s not used to going to unknown places on her own, but she seems determined to make the trip and will take her husband Abhiram and her son Karthik for support. A flurry of emails and WhatsApp messages follow as we discuss cameras, lenses, shot lists and other logistics.
They book a driver to make the trip on Saturday the 22nd of January.
Leaving home around 7.30 am the driver, Mr Bobby, whisks them north, out of the Hyderabad suburbs and across flat fields of parched farmland stretching off to the horizon. A steady stream of optimistically overloaded vehicles and colourfully decorated buses and trucks trundle by.
Midway they cross from Telangana into the neighbouring state of Karnataka. Farm machinery toils in the fields and a herd of goats on the road brings them to a halt. Crossing the wide Manjira River the fields grow greener and the tarmac road eventually gives way to an unsurfaced track. They cross another border into the adjoining state of Maharashtra and half an hour later a small clutch of eclectic shops selling supplies for the rural community signals that they have entered Sawali, the closest village to the site.
Turning right takes them onto a track where new tar is being prepared and construction equipment blocks their way. Undeterred, Mr Bobby slaloms around the obstacles, bouncing his car north as they zero in on the spot.
The fields here are even greener — crops of well-tendered onions, tomatoes, cauliflowers, watermelon and chickpeas growing in neat long rows beside the track. Mr Bobby gets them as close to the coordinates as possible, pulling up at a little rural hamlet called Andegaon Wadi. Their arrival surprises a group of farmers at work in the nearby fields.
Gowri’s family are warmly greeted and offered food and water. The farmers are curious to know why they have all come this way. They speak a local language called Andh — a mixture of Marathi and Hindi. Gowri’s mother tongue is Tamil and, having lived in Telangana for 40 years, she also speaks Telugu but not Marathi. Luckily she’s picked up a bit of Hindi over her life and can understand some of what they are saying. But she has to look up the Hindi word for “Mars” on her phone — “Mangal-Grah”.
Standing here on this very spot, she marvels for a moment at her bond with NASA’s miraculous Perseverance rover, sitting there on the surface of another distant world; and the Cosmic connections which have brought her to this equivalent site here on Earth.
Interested but ultimately unimpressed that their allotments are twinned to a robotically explored location on Mars, the farmers are more surprised by the fact that people from the city have taken the trouble to come and visit them. They seem quite overwhelmed with this fact.
Sensing the Abhiram family’s fatigue from their long journey, one of the farmers, Mr Ashok, takes his guests to a small, shaded structure, where he and his friends sit during the day to eat and rest. There he spreads out a neat carpet and invites them to sit down for some refreshments, and gifts of tomatoes, cucumbers and green chickpeas.
Before they leave Mr Ashok insists they stop at his house for a cup of tea. The walls are lined with pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses and a portrait of the great Maratha King Chhatrapati Shivaji, a regional 17th-century monarch. Sitting beneath shelves of family photos they all sip refreshing black Assam tea with a hint of sugar. Mr Ashok talks of his concerns about how little profit they are making. Farming is getting harder these days and his future feels uncertain.
As they are leaving, he accompanies them to a small temple nearby. It’s dedicated to Hanuman — a divine Hindu monkey God, whose worship encourages perseverance during hard times. It feels like an extraordinary piece of serendipity, an extra connection to NASA’s Perseverance rover that none of us had been expecting.
Gowri and her family head north to avoid driving back on the freshly tarred road. The longer route circles round to Bidar, where they stop for a break, before continuing south, back into Telangana state, reaching home after dark at 9pm having travelled 467km. This is, to our knowledge, the first journey anyone has ever made knowingly to a spot on Earth that matches the latitude and longitude of a robotic presence on the surface of another world.
This latest twinned Mars-Earth spot in central India is the first to show visible signs of humans through agriculture; upon which our entire society is based. It provides an even starker contrast to Mars, and where climate change could lead. Despite being much closer to a large city than any of the other twinned Mars locations, it was still almost as hard to get a photograph from here as it was from the other more remote spots.
Perhaps this is because the majority of us who live in cities today have little contact with rural communities, as Mr Ashok’s reaction to his visitors proved. In truth most of us are so removed from the natural world, we might never grasp the impact we’re having on our planet, and our future, until it’s too late.
The Hindu monkey deity Hanuman, whose temple sits near the twinned spot to NASA’s Perseverance landing site, is a God of wisdom, strength, courage, devotion and self-discipline. They are the qualities we all need to draw on, as we strive to reach a more sustainable net-zero way of life.
You can listen to Gowri’s reflections on her journey to this twinned Earth-Mars site on the BBC’s latest Digital Planet podcast.
