The Brown Daily Herald Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Campus News 3
Mars rover to explore largest crater yet Rohde ’90 affirms value By Kate Nussenbaum Senior Staff Writer
Opportunity, the Mars Exploration Rover, is on the edge of a great endeavor, literally. The rover, launched in July 2003, is now positioned to begin exploring the 14-mile diameter Endeavour Crater as soon as Mars’ winter ends, said John Callas ScM ’83 PhD ’87, project manager of the NASA Mars Exploration Rover Project. A crowd of about 50 people congregated in Metcalf Auditorium last night to hear him speak. Callas took his audience through the eight-year history of the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, giving them a glimpse of what he described as the “exciting adventure that still continues.” In his introduction, Professor of Geological Sciences Jim Head recalled sitting with astronomer and author Carl Sagan and examining pictures from the 1976 Viking missions to Mars. Unlike the Mars rovers, the Viking was stationary and frustratingly tantalizing, Head said. “It enticed us to think about what was over the horizon,” he said. “We were just fundamentally itching to see what Mars had in store for us.” Callas said he felt that same
itch, especially after the 1996 Mars Global Surveyor provided a map detailing the topography of the planet and revealed a “very low and smooth northern hemisphere,” he said. “Did Mars have an ocean? Did Mars have an abundance of water? If so, what happened to it, where did it go?” Those questions led to even more exciting inquiries. “Is Mars habitable? Was it habitable? What does it mean for our own planet if Mars could change drastically?” Callas asked. He then showed the audience photographs of the rovers— each with six independent wheels, nine cameras, a robotic arm with four unique tools and solar panels to provide power— that would begin to answer those questions. “This is a robotic geologist,” Callas said. The mission was initially designed to last for ninety days. Callas said when Spirit landed on Jan. 4, 2004, scientists could see hills in the distance through its cameras. At the time, Callas and his colleagues did not know that Spirit would eventually climb those hills in the first ever “martian mountaineering” attempt and that Opportunity would travel over 34 kilometers, exploring three craters and sending back evidence
that liquid water once existed on the planet. Spirit eventually became stuck in loose material and lost power in 2010. But before it stopped communicating with Earth , the rover discovered water-altered rocks and evidence of a hydrothermal system — a hot aqueous environment that may once have been a source of liquid water, energy and potentially even a thriving ecosystem, Callas said. Spirit’s sister, Opportunity, has also sent evidence of water to Earth, including images of sedimentary rocks, Callas said. Opportunity was also able to drive into craters, he said, revealing older parts of rock and giving scientists a “powerful set of measurements.” Opportunity is now poised to enter its largest crater yet, and a new nuclear-powered rover, Curiosity, is slated to join it on Mars this August. The new rover, which cost between $2.4 and $2.5 billion, is five times the size of Spirit and Opportunity and is equipped with an analytical chemistry lab to detect the presence of organic molecules, Callas said. “There’s an ongoing armada of surface exploration on the planet Mars,” Callas said. “We are trying to answer great questions about the planet.”
Q&A with David Rohde ’90 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Rohde ’90, adjunct professor of English, spoke about investigative reporting and the future of online journalism last night. After the talk, he sat down with The Herald. The Herald: What has it been like teaching? How has the transition been from working full-time to also teaching students? David Rohde: Oh, I’m very impressed with the students and the creativity and vision of their stories. And it’s a learning process. I hope my teaching becomes as good as their ideas. And this semester — working here as well as being a journalist — how is that different from your experiences working in the field? It’s nice to be able to hear what young journalists are interested in and concerned about. And to have time to reflect on the state of journalism. Have you learned anything from those reflections? That there’s — I mean, I’ll just be honest, I learned a lot tonight. The talk and the questions were all about the viability of journalism as a business. And I wished I had prepared a lecture more focused on that, to be honest. Because I think some organizations like ProPublica and the Atlantic and Reuters are doing interesting things. You know, expanding online in different ways, looking at different funding models. And I think there’s — no one has an answer yet, but many more organizations are trying.
How does working as a full-time journalist influence your take on your job at Brown? It helps me give students very practical advice. But I want to make sure that I encourage them also, and they should use this time to experiment with their writing and their reporting. I want to strike the right balance between their last semester as students and the real world that awaits them. I took only seniors — and there’s two graduate students. I’m trying to strike a balance, because there’s a creativity here, and that’s a very special thing. It should be relished in academia. Is there any favorite part you have about being an instructor? Oh, reading the students’ stories. The quality is wonderful — the ideas are wonderful. The creativity is wonderful. You touched a lot upon the idea of ground truth and going out into the field and really reporting and talking to people. If you can summarize in a few words — why do you think ground truth matters today? There’s a danger that technology lets us pontificate without going out and finding out facts first. There’s a danger of less face-to-face human interaction that helps us bridge political divides. How do you think that kind of reporting fits into modern journalism? I believe people will be drawn to original and compelling quality of reporting. The sea of information on the web will hopefully drive people to look for filters — reliable
filters. In a way, journalists are more important than ever. People have so much information hurtling at them. And your own experiences — how do you think those have influenced your feelings about reporting or ground truth? When you meet people in red states or blue states, on the ground they’re not red and they’re not blue. And if we don’t end these divisions, I really worry we won’t overcome our problems. And what kind of role do you think reporting will have in shaping that kind of unity? I think that fact-based reporting plays a vital role in sorting out the false claims from extremists on both sides of the political debate. Now, it’s more important than ever. If students took away one thing from tonight, what would you want it to be? That great storytelling will be needed no matter what technological changes happen. That great ground reporting and storytelling will be needed no matter what. Do you have any advice for Brown students — maybe who are pursuing journalism? Write. You may have to take jobs that aren’t the ones you dreamed of. You may end up in places you didn’t expect, but you may achieve more after a very rough start. You will be just fine in the end. You’ll find your way. -Shefali Luthra
of ‘basic reporting’ continued from page 1 columnist at Reuters. And this spring, he took up a teaching position at Brown. Rohde, who won one Pulitzer at the Monitor and one at the Times, recounted his experience working on stories for which finding “ground truth” proved invaluable. In Bosnia, he saw the importance of ground truth in a “very visceral way,” he said, and when he was later held hostage by Taliban members for seven months, he used the experience to “understand the Taliban.” “The more familiar you are with the place, the more you speak the language, the more you understand where people are coming from, the more people will trust you,” he said. In the modern world, Internet-based research is helpful to reporters, but “basic reporting” remains invaluable, he added. Rohde, who is now a foreign affairs columnist at Reuters, cited an example where he traveled to Raleigh to research a column about universities promoting development in surrounding communities. When he arrived, Rohde discovered the center he was writing about — the Raleigh High Tech Incubator — was situated in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods and was teaching residents employment skills. He took a tour of the area, talked to locals and overheard conversations between administrators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He discovered a different story than the one he came for. In his reporting, he heard about the struggling local middle class and about dissent within the university, where one faculty member referred to its chancellor as a kind of “Darth Vader.” “What was supposed to be a
staged interview (with the UNC chancellor) sort of fell apart because I was there, because I was able to meet people,” Rohde said. Though journalism is changing, Rohde said, “The key thing is going out and meeting people.” He encouraged students to be “reporters, not curators” and to write, edit and rewrite. Rohde shared one of his own old college papers — one where his professor had written “rewrite.” Rohde had spelled “wit” with an “h” in the middle and included a statement that had caused his professor to write, “this adds nothing.” “He urged us to keep at it, to keep writing our papers,” Rohde said. During the question-and-answer session, Rohde spoke about the value of fact-based reporting, especially with the proliferation of online news sources and politically charged cable news. As people turn to more biased outlets, he said, ground truth and talking to people become more valuable than ever. “Once you get out there and meet people, you break through those barriers,” he said. Rohde offered the example of a pastor he met when covering a story in New Orleans who asked him why the Times had not covered claims that President Barack Obama was Muslim. Rohde stayed the night with the man. By the time he left, he had convinced the pastor that Obama was a Christian — because, he argued, if Obama were a Muslim, then-Senator Hillary Clinton would have addressed that in the primaries. One audience member asked what advice he had for aspiring journalists. Rohde said adapting to the changing media climate is key. “You’ll find your way,” he said. “I don’t think human storytelling will ever go away.”