People sometimes ask why we need to explore other planets. The answer is if we want to understand
how the earth fundamentally works for the origin of life on Earth, we need to explore other worlds.
My name is Joe Michalski. I'm a planetary geologist
and I use infrared remote sensing to study the mineralogy of Mars.
The thing that's most interesting to me about Mars is that 4 billion years ago,
the Earth and Mars were very similar. Because the Earth is so geologically active,
we're missing the first billion years of our history. Those rocks have all
been eroded and recycled. But that ancient rock record exists on Mars, and it's intact.
By studying those rocks, we can understand by analogy what the early earth was like.
And that's critical because we think that's the time period when life emerged.
Satellite images of Mars revealed a desolate volcanic landscape
and vast sheets of volcanic sand.
They also show very specific types of minerals which indicate
that volcanic rocks have been altered by water, ice and snow.
To better understand their significance. We need to explore the geological processes that
created them. The problem is, right now, it's impossible to go to Mars.
So we need to visit Mars like terrains on Earth
I've just arrived here in the Oscar region of central Iceland. I'm here
with my colleague Robert Armstrong to investigate the geology of the Central Highlands in Iceland.
The first time I came here, I was struck by the vast volcanic landscape here and how similar it
is to what we see on Mars. There are these blocks of jagged volcanic rock in a sea of volcanic sand.
One of the incredible things that's going on in Iceland is it's a volcanic landscape,
but yet it's glaciated. And both of those things are very similar to what we see on Mars.
The interaction of water with hot volcanic rocks results in these past hydrothermal fields.
There's reason to believe this may be the kind of site where
life could have originally formed on Earth. We think that the common ancestor to all life on
Earth is something called the thermal vile bacteria that thrive in hot environments.
And that's why we're looking for places like this beyond Earth on Mars or in other planets.
Geologically, this is a really exciting place to be.
We can see rocks being altered by hot fluids which have come from below our feet.
And what we see is the original rock changing colour to reds and yellows and whites.
Significantly from space. These multicoloured minerals within the hydrothermal deposits
are strikingly similar to those observed on the surface of Mars using satellite data.
If we're right, it indicates that the conditions for microbial life existed there too.
But perhaps more importantly, they provide a window into the early missing geological
history of the earth. Whether or not we will find actual evidence for life, we don't know.
But whatever we find, it will teach us about the uniqueness of our environment
here on Earth and give us insights into our place in the cosmos.
So my name is Michael Benson and I'm a photographer and a
writer. My work over the last decade has focused largely on planetary science
For the first time, after centuries of wondering, we have the technology to send camera systems
up there and look. And as a result, we've seen a suite of landscapes
that the science fiction writers of the pre spaceflight era could only dream of.
This show is, among other things, a retrospective look at an entire
genre of photography, which started in the in the sixties. And up till now.
So for example, this post from 1967, and it's an image of the crescent moon with Earth beyond
it that was taken a year before a human being saw that one. Apollo eight went to the moon.
Right now, there's a lot of activity in planetary exploration.
All of what I'm producing comes from that effort. The scientists go in looking for
evidence to support their theories about the atmosphere of Jupiter, about volcanoes on Mars.
I go in looking for extraordinary vistas and images that can give us a sense of our larger context.
One of the images I'm particularly proud of in the show is a moon Enceladus.
It's a perfect studio situation because you have the sun lighting one hemisphere. You have this
bright crescent and then Saturn is huge and nearby and the sun is bouncing off Saturn and lighting
the dark side of Enceladus. So you have this beautiful sense of volume in the image, you know.
And then up top, you see these guys are shooting up into space, you know. All of the images,
with some exception. You know, I'm going for something that is as close to the true
colors of what we see as possible. I'm going for realism. And yet, you know, in some of the images,
they really seem abstract because they're extraordinarily complex.
They can be very hard to read in particular a Europa, it's an ice covered moon.
Is there life in that ocean? We don't know. There's this kind of ambiguity there lurking
there, which gives the picture some power. I think, you know, several layers of meaning.
I've been doing this work for more than a decade, you know, and only recently have I discovered a
way to take black and white images of Earth from weather satellites and merging it with colour data
from other sources to get glorious colour images of earth that can be printed two meter square
as I've been processing these images, it has had a profound impact on me.
You see the planet in context. You see the beauty of the planet. We
don't have any other worlds in the solar system remotely suitable for human life.
All images are ambassadors between phenomenal reality
and ourselves. We tend to need signs to understand, you know, we bring the complex,
opaque, vast, powerful universe into a scale that helps us to understand it.
And certainly photography is one way we do that.
I'm looking for a different type of revelation, you know, a different type of understanding.