MYOUTERSPACE (Jeremy Lewit):  Martian Summer follows the Mars Phoenix mission, which by all accounts was extremely successful.  Having been with the team for such an extended time, seeing the day-to-day operations, what do you think was the least celebrated but most effective success of the team?

ANDREW KESSLER: Perchlorate! First off, I love the story of its discovery.  It caused a lot of heated debate inside mission control and then there was a very public media kerfuffle. The short short version is that the team found something they weren’t expecting, and they were very excited—no, extremely excited. The press got wind of a story and started poking around-- that’s their job.

Since the results were unclear, no one inside mission control was quite ready to comment. One bold reporter decided to go ahead with a story he believed was true: that the team briefed the President on some new potential for life. It wasn’t exactly accurate, but no matter, the Internet exploded with “LIFE ON MARS!” stories. Whoops. Then there was a round of damage control trying to convince the Internet there was no conspiracy – not an easy task.

The science team worked through it. They did their darndest to confirm the actual results: that they saw perchlorate in the soil.  So that was amazing. Still, it gets better. The amazing thing about this perchlorate stuff is that it’s probably the reason we haven’t seen any organic material on Mars. It burns up—it’s a strong oxidant—and it ends up hiding the signal of organic material. That’s cool. Then if we take a step back and get all stony, there’s a place, one of the most arid regions on Earth, called the Atacama desert. It’s not just super-dry but it also is one of the most similar places to Mars that we have here on Earth. We find perchlorate in the soil there. And we also find little microbes that eat perchlorate. So this substance (that’s toxic to humans and burns up like rocket fuel) is also food for these weird little bacteria. Awesome. So post Phoenix, we have evidence of water, a new way to think about the presence of organic material and even a potential food source for life on Mars. Boom. Sounds like a great mission.

MOS: You opened a “Monobookist” store in Manhattan, “Ed’s Martian Book”, which stocks only your Martian Summer.  In an age of closing bookstores, how did you manage this hilarious, nose-tweaking monument of marketing?

AK: Lots of amazing friends and supporters of books. Beer and meatballs helped too.

MOS: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are big names, when “The Right Stuff” is a quality shared by hundreds of NASA engineers.  Do you think Phoenix and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars have proven to people that some heroes really do sit in a room full of their fellows and change the world from a few million miles away?

AK: Yes. And these guys should be household names.  I’m tired of our celebs. You know she’s a sweet girl and all but honestly, **** Chloe Kardashian. I want to see Peter Smith on TV, TMZ and the cover of OK! The guys in mission control and the guys coming up with crazy ideas for missions are awesome and we should treat them as the bad***es that they are.  (Wow. That answer had a lot of **** in it.)

MOS: In the future, will you …

AK: … hover over my mailbox and wait for an invitation to the next Mars mission? Probably. But if it doesn’t come, I’ll write about more super-awesome scientists who do amazing things.  In the more near-term, lunch and then I think I have a meeting.

Profile, Ebook link and more: http://www.openroadmedia.com/authors/andrew-kessler.aspx

Martian Summer on Amazon

Kessler Interview Featured on NPR's Weekend Edition

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