Photographic panoramas from Mars and flyby shots of Pluto often give lay observers the illusion that they are witnessing planetary exploration firsthand. But such images offer no view of the actual human work of planetary exploration. The scientists and engineers who work on planetary missions tend to be eclipsed by the technologies they have developed or the discoveries they have made. That situation is not helped by the fact that all of planetary exploration is undertaken by large, bureaucratic space agencies. The women and men who explore the planets remain mostly unknown.
The human side of planetary science and exploration is difficult to capture. Studies of planetary scientists suffer from the standard problems of describing scientific activity in general. It is hard to explain the motivations of scientists working in areas of arcane knowledge and even more challenging to demonstrate how that knowledge and the practices that produce it connect to the world at large. The problems are exacerbated by the special nature of planetary science, in which robotic spacecraft and rovers do so much of the work remotely.
In light of those problems, Lisa Messeri’s new book, Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds, is a welcome addition to the literature on planetary science. Not only has Messeri achieved what has eluded so many writers—putting humans at the center of the account—she has also succeeded in crafting a compelling narrative of discovery.
Messeri, an anthropologist at the University of Virginia, describes her research field as “social studies of outer space.” She has a background in aerospace engineering, which comes in handy when she interacts with scientists and engineers. But the primary toolkit she brings is the theory and methodology of science and technology studies. Her focus is not on how a probe takes a picture of a planet and sends it home for analysis, but on what the human activities surrounding the probe can tell us about our culture and our way of understanding the world.
Readers unacquainted with sociology or anthropology need not fear. Messeri’s book is informed by theory but is not limited to theoretical discussions. It is a journey through the terrestrial places of planetary exploration, places populated by the scientists Messeri meets and colored by the stories they tell. One of the book’s great strengths is its clear and energetic narrative style. Messeri has a rare talent for bringing readers along, in a sense allowing them to witness the interactions with her research subjects, which inform her analysis and conclusions.
Placing Outer Space focuses on the scientific efforts to make distant planets into tangible sites of scientific investigation. She proposes that four activities dominate the work of planetary scientists: narrating, mapping, visualizing, and inhabiting. This work produces stories that connect Earth to the solar system, domesticate the strange and unfamiliar, make visible the invisible, and imagine life on other planets.
The four main chapters of the book explore those activities in four research centers. In the first, Messeri visits a simulated Mars habitat in the Utah desert, where she joins a team of space-suited explorers enacting a Mars mission. In the next, she visits NASA’s Ames Research Center, where she observes a team of computer scientists working to produce high-resolution three-dimensional maps of the Martian surface. Then she heads to the lab of exoplanet researcher Sara Seager to observe the discovery of planets orbiting other stars and the study of their possible characteristics. The final chapter looks at the effort to find potentially habitable worlds among the exoplanets and examines observatories’ efforts to connect life on Earth to life elsewhere.
Messeri’s work suggests that the imagining of planets as places to be visited and explored is a mode of understanding in its own right. It produces a perspective that connects Earth to its sister planets in the solar system and to solar systems around other stars. Those places are beyond human reach, at least currently, but the activities of science have connected them to our understanding of our own world.
Matthew Shindell is curator of planetary science at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.
