Page 34 - The Secret Museum

called Sistema Solare, written in 1859. ‘It is the first book I’ve found that talks about

the planets as real places you could walk around and have adventures on. Secchi
takes facts and then uses his imagination to bring it all together. This book started
planetary science. Before then, astronomers were far more interested in stars.
Suddenly the planets became “places” rather than dots in the sky. They became
things, not light.’

Guy showed me the Mars chapter of the book and pointed out where Secchi
describes Mars as having canali (Italian for ‘channels’) on its surface. Some people
thought, incorrectly, that Secchi was describing canals, like the ones on Earth, which

did much to encourage the idea that there was life on Mars.

Outside the library is Brother Guy’s domain: the museum and its collection of
space-related artefacts. There are different meteorites that flew around in space for
around 15 million years until landing on our planet. Brother Guy explained that
‘10,000 pieces of rock fall to the Earth each year, but we humans collect about five
of them, if we’re lucky. Most land in the ocean, or are lost because they look like
ordinary rocks.’

There are also three pieces of Mars. Each piece of Mars rock is from a different
part of the planet. How do we know they are from Mars? Firstly, because other

meteorites contain metals and Mars rocks do not. Secondly, they are a billion years
old, which is young, compared to the 4,568 billion-year ages of the other meteorites.
And, thirdly, bubbles of gas trapped inside them have been tested using a mass
spectrometer, and it turns out that they exactly match the atmosphere of Mars, as
recorded by the Mars Rover.

The Vatican also has a globe of Mars, showing the channels on the planet, and a
globe of the moon, the first ever made by NASA, given to the Vatican as a gift.

I asked Brother Guy if he had a favourite treasure in the collection. He said that it
changed all the time; he loves the Mars rocks, but his favourite meteorite that day
was Allende. There are two tons of it in the world and it revolutionized science. ‘It

fell in 1969, just before the moon landing. NASA had been buying all sorts of toys
with which to measure moon rocks, which they hoped the astronauts would bring
back to Earth. So they were able to test their toys on Allende. They discovered that
the little white bits inside the meteorite were dust from stars that existed even before
the planets were formed. This changed the way NASA thought about the solar system;
they had known it was about 4.6 billion years old but, thanks to Allende, they could

measure the age more precisely, to 4.568 billion’.
Brother Guy got even more cosmic. ‘It’s strange to think that we humans – who are

all made of stardust – look up at the sky to study galaxies, without often reflecting on
the fact that what we’re actually studying is light. The things we’re looking at are no
longer really there.’ That is one reason why he likes working in the meteorite lab,
among the ‘real stuff’, which he can pick up and measure.