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By Rebecca Boyle and David W. Brown
Three government space agencies around the world are getting ready to return to Mars this summer. Along with China and the United Arab Emirates, the United States plans to land the fifth NASA rover, Perseverance, on the red planet (along with a small, experimental helicopter, Ingenuity). But the rover’s most important job will be scooping up and caching some samples that humans or robots may eventually retrieve.
The planetary clinical network will inspire those missions. But many researchers have begun to wonder, more powerful than usual, why we return to Mars again. So we invited Rebecca Boyle and David W. to much of the oxygen (and budget resources) in the rooms where the explorations of our solar formula are decided.
Rebecca Boyle: So we’re going back to Mars. Again, with rover. Two, perhaps, if NASA and the Chinese-area firm succeed.
Sigh.
Not that it’s disappointing. But there’s a sure point of déj vu with NASA’s Perseverance mission, so close to the style of the successful Curiosity rover in 2011. I’ve written a lot about the price of Mars exploration and the Earth’s qualities that appreciate it. But even I can’t wonder what will happen next in our quest to explore the solar formula and whether so many trips to Mars block other life sciences.
Three missions are heading to Mars this summer. They bring a wide range of tools to explore the red planet.
David W. Brown: There’s a total sun formula waiting to be explored. Since 2001, NASA has completed 8 successful consecutive missions to Mars, adding five landing blocks. Humanity now has a library of knowledge about Mars on servers that no one has had the opportunity to study. Data collected brief encounters of spacecraft with Jupiter’s moons, on the other hand, or the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, have dried up.
A.B.: And that turned the story of Mars exploration into a self-fulfilling story. The robots we sent to Mars were generally a remarkable good fortune and told us about vast waters in the remote reminiscence of Mars, adding alluvial plains where life may have surfaced. They told us about the Martian polar ice caps, the dry snow, the geology of the interior, the dim environment and the wind-eroded surface.
Every discovery on Mars brings new questions, cultivating a healthy ecosystem of Martian researchers. Some of these researchers end up at educational institutions, where they fund graduate academics and postdoctoral researchers who continue to ask more questions about Mars. And so continue the search.
But in recent years there has been a strong refrain that asks NASA to look elsewhere. Perhaps Venus, perhaps the Titan of Saturn’s moon, perhaps Uranus’s remote faceless turquoise orb, but not Mars, anywhere Mars, where we’ve been driving robots with wheels for nearly two decades.
D.W.B.: For many years, NASA has treated Mars almost as its own program with its own project lines and priorities. Every two years, anything would be inserted there.
But then, in 2010, in component due to budget cuts, the Mars program joined NASA’s global planetary exploration portfolio. Suddenly, other worlds were wiped out through a red star of death.
The Curiosity rover has surpassed its budget by nearly $1 billion, gnawing on other projects. Perseverance has also greatly exceeded the budget, and if the style remains, the final project of collecting samples collected through the rover would do the same.
While many still have doubts about the main points of the pattern transfer series, will the next one be a joint project with the Europeans, for example, or will nasa astronauts spend it alone, or will we pay SpaceX to do so? – this has been judged through the planetary clinical network as a billion-dollar “flagship” priority project.
That resolution killed a spaceship that would have put Europe, Jupiter’s ocean moon, into orbit. (A less expensive design, Europa Clipper, will be released in this decade).. While the surprise is still great, NASA opted for the Mars InSight lander for a well-regarded project in its less expensive Discovery elegance that would have landed a boat on Titan. Saturn’s largest moon, to navigate its seas of liquid methane.
To the spacecraft beyond Earth’s orbit.
R.B.: Rest in peace, Titan Mare Explorer. Meanwhile, as planetary scientists debated how to pay for their missions, some geologists salivated for a moment looking at Venus, the planet at the time of the sun.
Venus is about the same length as Earth, it’s rocky, it’s got an atmosphere. And it revolves around the sun in a domain where temperatures are best for liquid water and life.
“I was given my PhD in the volcanoes of Mars. I’m on three proposals from Mars. It’s not that I’m not enjoying Mars, it’s an amazing world,” said Paul Byrne, a planet specialist at North Carolina State University. . “But it’s not the only world.”
He told me that he lost to examine the clouds and the Venus environment because he had a chair that covers the maximum of his salary and commitments. This is not the case for many other scientists, who rely on federally funded grants and global exploration systems to collect their data.
Even in other countries, Venus attracts the attention of other worlds. Dr. Byrne told me that he had attended an assembly in Moscow in October committed to Venus’ long-term missions, adding a strengthened and fashionable edition of the Soviet Venera airship, until now the only spacecraft that has survived on the surface of Venus (the last, Venera 12, lasted 110 minutes). Only two Russian geologists attended the assembly.
“There is no culture among young Russian scientists to make Venus, like here,” he said. “There hasn’t been much effective promotion of Venus. It’s covered across Mars. And the other people who were funded for Venus, with a few exceptions, have gone ” to retirement or other projects,” he said.
We know Mars had water at some point in its past, but it’s been gone a long time. In contrast, Venus would possibly have had oceans more recently and for longer periods, and may also have been comfortably habitable for billions of years.
“Why don’t we put a fleet there?” Mr. Byrne says.
Why in fact?
D.W.B.: Aircraft that sniff the Venus environment are late. Certainly, since the retreat of the space shuttle, nothing in NASA’s portfolio, with the exception of SpaceX’s recent launch to the International Space Station, has aroused the enthusiasm of the planetary science program.
Pluto’s flyover from New Horizons, the Cassini project to Saturn, the stunning photographs of a Jupiter submerged in Juno’s blue, as others communicate about NASA’s “moments,” communicate about planetary science.
Perhaps the exception is the Hubble Space Telescope, which produces so many amazing photographs that it has a kind of ubiquitous technicolor cultural static. We don’t even realize it anymore, which is a testament to its success.
A.B.: I think that also applies to photographs of Mars, in a sense. We’ve been receiving them in bright colors since the last 1990s, and they’ve also become a kind of static. Curiosity has a high-resolution camera, and others were captivated by his photographs after he landed in August 2012, but no longer realize it.
He used to check his downloads from time to time, a program called Midnight Planets, created through Michael Howard, an app developer. It would download raw photographs as they were transmitted through Deep Space Network antennas. It was a lot of fun to see what the rovers were seeing, almost in real time. But Mr. Howard stopped updating his site about a year ago and noted that “I moved to other projects in life.”
I only found out because I checked it for the first time in over a year. What a statement, isn’t it? We can’t get excited about nighttime photographs since March. March.
Curiosity, the first project to Mars that landed in the era of social media, and others around the world saw it on Twitter and live on television in Times Square. It’s electrifying. But the attention has faded.
Is it because Mars seems so familiar? For now, we just have to wonder what the public’s reaction would be to like a ship on Titan.
D.W.B.: At least one Titan quadcopter is in process. The challenge for the rest of the sun formula is that NASA’s S doesn’t mean “science.” The company is primarily an organization of manned spaceflight. This is where your genuine money goes, and robot projects to Mars are the beneficiaries of herbs. Astronauts cannot travel to Europe with existing technologies and cannot land on Venus. But humans in spacesuits can do it on Mars, meaning that each and every robot project to Mars is more than an abstruse wind geology or physics. No, each and every project to Mars is a human precursor project. Every dollar spent on mars rovers reduces the threat inherent in long-term astronaut adventures.
Culturally, Mars has been deeply vital to NASA since its inception. A human program for Mars, designed before Apollo, was the herbal successor to the lunar program. For multi-planetarium, NASA has known the need for reusable area shuttles, an area station, rockets at least as resilient as the Saturn V and other area infrastructure. Although the glory days of Apollo’s investment are dead, the basics of Mars exploration have not been: all of those things were built, albeit for a much longer time era.
A.B.: The other explanation for why it’s the personal industry. It’s easy to throw anything on Mars; each and every 26 months, the planet is in the same aspect of the sun as the earth, so the adventure takes only six months.
Approximately with the same chronology, SpaceX C.E.O. Elon Musk makes an ambitious and indistinct announcement about his plans to launch cruises on Mars, dressing other people who can live there forever. A few years ago, a Dutch start-up called Mars One even tried to launch a show of agreement on a truth TV show, before breaking.
Although Mars is horrible, it’s the least inhospiit position to go, maybe the moon. That’s achievable. The impressions on the red regolith seem achievable. That’s why, in the generations that followed Apollo, we still see rover tracks in the red regolith over and over again.
D.W.B.: In a way, the Perseverance rover confirms the toughest criticism of the Mars program. It was sold as an affordable price of $1.5 billion of the Rover and The Curiosity Lander, built using spare parts and with another payload of clinical instruments.
In the end, Perseverance exceeded the budget by more than $500 million, and they added a helicopter!
Almost everything has been improved. The rover does not have the same length – the wheels, the chassis, the camera – new logo. Even the spare heat shield is not used. This ambitious overhaul may have been worth it for a full Discovery-class mission and inconvenience other major missions in NASA’s portfolio.
But Russia’s experience with Venus explains a big part of NASA’s need to push the envelope of Mars engineering. To cease building Mars landers — to stop daring mighty things like helicopters — is to lose the institutional knowledge necessary to do the Red Planet successfully. The U.S. has been launching humans to space since 1961, but once we stopped, it took almost a decade to figure out how to do it again.
A.B.: The confusion and frustration surrounding the Mars program is a manifestation of NASA’s basic existential struggle. As he noted, it’s still an astronaut agency, with human exploration in its DNA. But when presidential administrations reposition their scouting passes every 4 to 8 years, it’s harder to plan for the long term. NASA wants a position to pass and Mars is the next apparent step from the moon.
But the company and the country are likely to ask: what is the genuine long term we want? What is the end of the game? Is this a piece of rock that can also tell us more about the beginnings of The History of Mars? Or would we possibly be very fortunate and report a rock that has evidence of fossil bacteria? Or is it just to load layers, like Martian sedimentary rock, evidence that Mars is attractive enough that humans would possibly ever walk there?
D.W.B.: The “long term” is the force of mars exploration as a whole and the wonderful mystery of this mission. No one knows when samples bottled through Perseverance will be returned to Earth. They may simply accumulate red dust for fifteen years before the robot pulls them out and boosts them here for study. The existing or extinct choice of life on Mars has been raised and caused and has not been conclusive since viking landings in 1976 thanks to Curiosity’s methane detection in 2019.
Perhaps the samples will answer that question, or perhaps, as Dr. Tim McCoy, the curator of the meteor collection at the Smithsonian Institution, tells me that the samples that NASA’s noted lately are probably not too useful scientifically.
“How do you know they will answer the urgent questions that will exist in 15 or 20 years?” he asked, explaining that the planetary clinical network would possibly have moved on to an absolutely different set of questions over time when the Earth of Mars reaches Earth’s labs.
A.B.: When Perseverance starts exploring Mars, I hope it helps keep squirrels away from the most attractive rock in the solar system. But until we locate him, there are so many other options we haven’t even been to.
As a supporter of the moon, I would like to return and take samples of one of the largest craters in the solar system, the South Pole Basin-Aitken. I’d love to see the airships shape a cloudy city of Venus. And IArray needs this titan ship.
D.W.B.: Venus is behind for a flagship mission. Earthly situations on its clouds mean that the discovery of life is not yes, but when.
You’ll also have to explore ice giants, and creative missions like the Trident spacecraft on Triton, Neptune’s moon, result in this being done on reduced budgets.
For now, I love that landing a nuclear-powered car on Mars is boring. In the 1980s, investment disorders allowed the global clinical network to fight to survive. Today, we are in the golden age of area exploration.
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Rebecca Boyle is a science journalist in Colorado and is writing her first book, a clinical and cultural hitale of the moon. David W. Brown is that of The Mission (Custom House, January 2021), the true story of a team of scientists who spent decades conspiring to bring a spaceship to Europe. He lives in New Orleans.
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