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06 February 2004

What's next in space?

by Forrest M. Mims III

 

Mars Rover Opportunity peers back at its lander as it slowly drove 3 feet away from it last Saturday morning. Notice the tracks in the martian soil. Photograph courtesy of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Click image to enlarge.

Last Saturday morning, the second Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, rolled down a fabric ramp onto the surface of Mars.

On the opposite side of Mars, the first Rover to land, Spirit, began sending amazing pictures again after the Jet Propulsion Laboratory corrected a serious software problem.

Spirit landed inside a huge crater whose sandy, orange floor is sprinkled with small angular and rounded rocks.

Opportunity came to rest inside a small crater only 70 feet across. Geologists can hardly wait for Opportunity to study a band of rocks that encircles the upper edge of the crater.

The simultaneous success, of two highly complex missions to Mars has provided a huge boost to the morale of planetary scientists, who study other planets.

Meanwhile, there is gloom among astronomers, for there will be no more money to service the Hubble space telescope. NASA officials charged with completing the space station have run out of time and money.

There is also gloom among Earth scientists, who are concerned about the future of satellites that monitor dozens of Earth's key environmental parameters, including the ozone layer.

There is concern this research may be transferred from NASA to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

These and other major changes in the U.S. space program have stimulated serious debate among scientists and politicians.

Should NASA's Earth science research move to NOAA, there is concern that the satellite data that NASA has traditionally provided without charge on the Internet will no longer be free. That's because NOAA charges hard cash for much of the data it collects, including much of its weather data.

Some earth scientists wonder why NASA is spending so much money to explore an inhospitable, distant planet, when there is so much that remains to be understood about our own planet.

Other critics ask why NASA is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to find evidence of past or present life elsewhere in the Universe, when Congress long ago withdrew funding from NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project.

Then there are the ongoing debates over manned space travel. Should we send astronauts back to the Moon? Should we send them to Mars?

While those debates rage on, there's no denying the spectacular nature of those astonishingly clear images streaming back from Mars. Those images, and the unprecedented science being conducted by the two Rovers, prove that considerable research can be accomplished using robotic spacecraft.

Those images also provide persuasive proof that Earth, despite its problems, is an infinitely better place to live than a cold, barren desert where the air is 95 percent carbon dioxide and contains only about 1 percent of the oxygen in the breath of air you just inhaled.

People may visit Mars someday. Meanwhile, the place is six-wheel drive robot country with twelve wheels on the ground and rolling and cameras recording.

Forrest M. Mims III and his science are featured online at www.forrestmims.org.

This feature was originally published in Forrest Mims's weekly science column in the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, Seguin, Texas. The column is written for a general audience.