The lab’s website is adorned with images of her and her colleagues combing rocks and sands in Antarctica, Australia and the Atacama Desert in Chile, looking for signs of ancient life. She is also a visiting scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where she is part of a team working with Curiosity, NASA’s oldest rover now climbing a mountain in a crater on Mars. And she hopes one day to analyze the rocks that returned from Mars in her laboratory.
Upon arriving at Zoom in Kentucky, where he was visiting his family, Dr. Johnson radiated an easy and unflappable way. She answered the questions with a wide smile, as if the light had just broken on her face and a prolonged “Yes” as she reflected on her answers.
In “Sirens of Mars,” Dr. Johnson recounts the personalities, surprises, frustrated expectations, and claims, made and abandoned, of the discovery of life on Mars. It is also a personal chronicle; The expiration date of his first pregnancy, in August 2012, coincided with the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars, temporarily derailing his chances of participating in the largest Mars mission so far. He watched his colleagues in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on television, saddened that Mars might be escaping.
“Opportunities only come up so often,” he writes. “The planets aligned and then separated.”
She had not set out to become a character in the book, she said. The project started with the habit of writing moving and suggestive things that would never become scientific journals, and grew from there.
“I guess at some point I felt that Mars deserved a different kind of treatment,” he said. “You know, something that will capture much of the mystery and wonder of all the effort, all the pursuit of life.”
“The more we study science, the more you are struck by beauty and depth,” he continued. “And it makes you reflect on your own life and existence and geological time scales, and what it is like to be so small in a vast universe.”
