Digging on Mars

One of my lifelong passions has been air and space related topics. I think from the time I was a kid up until now, I have been fascinated with things that could fly. I have been a long supporter of continued efforts to explore space and though the fire that was there in our country back during the Moon Race and at the tail end of the 20th Century with the frequency of the space shuttle flights has died down quite a bit, there are still those out there who feel that there is definite merit in exploring space. This past weekend, the lovers of space got a definite boost with the successful landing of the Phoenix Lander on Mars.

The Phoenix Mars mission is landed this past weekend and will spend the next 90 days collecting data before the harsh Mars winters set in denying NASA the chance to continue exploring the surface of our mysterious red neighbor. The challenege came in avoiding the mistakes of the past. What people tend to forget is that when dealing with space travel it isn't at all like in most space movies where ships are flying here and there with wonton abandon. Rather it's a slow and cumbersome process (at least for now) whereby you have to plan out in exact detail the moves you are going to make because otherwise, you could end up at Jupiter instead of Mars and that could really spoil your day. The Phoenix mission was unique in that it was to be the first where a ship would record it's landing remotely. After traveling 420 million miles, the spacecraft was slowed down from nearly 13,000 miles per hour using parachutes and pulse thrusters and made a successful landing on the surface.

But what's the point? Many people who don't believe as strongly in the space program and the exploration of our solar system wonder what the big deal is? Why bother exploring the cosmos when we have enough problems here at home? I agree that there are problems on Earth but that shouldn't preclude us from exploring and learning more about the universe around us. If we weren't curious about what was over the horizon, we would probably still be thinking that the world is flat. If no one had bothered to try and fly, we'd still be sailing from one continent to the other (provided again that we assumed that the world wasn't flat). We wouldn't know about medicines or the history of our planet. We wouldn't know a lot if it wasn't for that one unique of human traits and that's the desire to know more.

Perhaps there is evidence on Mars of what Earth could have been like billions of years before or perhaps it will reveal to us how Earth could eventually become long after the human race is gone. Man has been to the moon and after that we never went anywhere else. Astronauts after the famous Apollo 11 mission were often asked why bother going back to the moon after landing there once; the simple answer that they often gave was what would have happened if Columbus crossed the Atlantic but never bothered to do it again? Who knows what the history of our world would have been like had it not been for that singluar incident. So why should we go to the moon or anywhere else in our solar system for that matter?

Well it's far easier to get to other points in our solar system when you can leave from space. Half of the propellant needed is often expended in just getting the spacecraft off of Earth. In space, the absence of appreciable amounts of gravity would speed up the process. It's important because it will be the launching ground for exploring our neighboring planets and eventually leaving our solar system for any of the billions that we see in the night sky. Perhaps it's a flight of fancy or a result of watching too many science fiction movies, but I'm interested in finding out more. I want to know what else is out there. And I want there to be truth to the observation that if there's no other intelligent life anywhere else in the universe then it's a tremendous waste of space.