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Annika Cline / KJZZ
Dr. Tanya Harrison is holding a copy of the news of Ira Sweet Bunker.
You can refer to Tanya Harrison as "Dr. Harrison," but there is another title that she likes too.
"I am what I like to call a professional martian," she said.
This is a geologist who is exploring Mars through the eyes of NASA's rover Opportunity, which recently celebrated its 5,000th Martian day on the dusty surface of the planet. Harrison is also director of research for the NewSpace initiative at the USS.
"I spend a lot of time watching pictures of Mars, which is really exciting, especially if you do something with rovers, you could be one of the first people in history to have seen this picture. Mars of the rover, "she said.
"I've always been interested in space." I grew up watching a lot of Star Trek with my parents.But in 1997, when the Mars Pathfinder mission landed, NASA released a small Photo animation of the rover that left the LG on the surface of Mars, "recalled Harrison. "And I remember seeing it and thinking, we're driving a robot on another planet tens of millions of miles away, and my brain just could not understand how awesome it was. so I focused on the general space – I really want to work on Mars. "
So she did it. Not literally, but as close as anyone can get it now. Every image she sees of the rover reveals another little mystery about the red planet.
Then last year, his mother made a discovery.
"So, my mother is really in the genealogy," Harrison said. "And she told me at one point recently that she had met my great-uncle, whose name is Ira Sweet Bunker.And she discovered from her obituary, of all things, that" there is no one else. " he had written a story called: "A Thousand Years From Where, Or, Surprising Events in the Year 3000."
Subtitle: "A trip to Mars, incidents passing by".
Tanya Harrison via Twitter
The story was under Tanya's nose all the time at ASU.
It turns out that Mars is interested in the family. But this story was published in 1903 and had been lost since then. It did not seem to be online except for references.
"I turned to Twitter and I was content to mention that I thought it was an interesting discovery that someone from my family had written a story about Mars, and a hundred years later I was working on the rovers March, "Harrison said.
The Twitterverse delivered. And she discovered that the story of her great-uncle had been under his nose all this time – in the ASU's microfilm collection.
"An ASU library librarian took it out of the microfilm, scanned it for me, and sent it to me without asking for it," Harrison said. "And that's what happened in my email one day, which was pretty cool."
It was then that she saw Mars through the eye of Ira Sweet Bunker. The story begins with this line:
"You may think that the date is strange, but it's only a year in the center of two eternities – the past and the future."
"And there are a lot of things in there that are more … forward-thinking, shall we say?" Harrison laughs.
"Thousands of men and women of all ages were sailing in the air …"
Everyone wears anti-gravity jackets in the year 3000; and at one point, the President of the United States pulls a black bear with a kind of laser gun, like a futurist Teddy Roosevelt.
"A blue spark was emitted by the instrument …"
"And then they end up coming to Mars and he ends up meeting the Martians, and they live in that utopian society where everyone is happy and everyone is equal," Harrison said.
"We slowly approached the most beautiful landscape I've ever seen – covered with large evergreen trees, which have been intertwined [sic] with vineyards … "
Bunker had no idea what the real planet looked like. But, to be fair, no one has done it.
"That's what we thought of Mars looking through a telescope," explained Harrison. "You can see dark areas and bright areas, and for a while some people thought that dark areas were maybe vegetation and lighter areas were deserts." And so, that was a theme common in many stories of the time.
"There are no evergreen trees on Mars," Harrison said. "There is no beautiful society full of beautiful Martian women – which he also talks a little about in history."
Bunker would he be disappointed? May be. But Harrison would also like him to know that the real Mars is not a boring rock.
"There are landslides, avalanches, weather conditions," she said. "The pieces of the puzzle are still coming in. We do not have the full picture yet, and so I want to be long enough to understand what this picture is."
In the meantime, she honors her great-uncle by sending her to Mars – or at least her name. Some craters on the planet are named after sci-fi writers who wrote about Mars. Harrison applied for one of those to be named crater Ira Sweet Bunker.
Maybe one day – in the year 3000 – someone who has always dreamed of going into space will stand at the edge of this crater, on the surface of March. It remains 982 years to discover.
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