Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [87]
But whether in single launches or in pairs, the spacefaring nations have clearly decided that the time is ripe to return robot explorers to Mars. Mission designs change; new nations enter the field; old nations find they no longer have the resources. Even already funded programs cannot always be relied upon. But current plans do reveal something of the intensity of effort and the depth of dedication.
As I write this book, there are tentative plans by the United States, Russia, France, Germany, Japan, Austria, Finland, Italy, Canada, the European Space Agency, and other entities for a coordinated robotic exploration of Mars. In the seven years between 1996 and 2003, a flotilla of some twenty-five spacecraft—most of them comparatively small and cheap—are to be sent from Earth to Mars. There will be no quick flybys among them; these are all long-duration orbiter and lander missions. The United States will refly all of the scientific instruments that were lost on Mars Observer. The Russian spacecraft will contain particularly ambitious experiments involving some twenty nations. Communications satellites will permit experimental stations anywhere on Mars to relay their data back to Earth. Penetrators screeching down from orbit will punch into the Martian soil, transmitting data from underground. Instrumented balloons and roving laboratories will wander over the sands of Mars. Some microrobots will weigh no more than a few pounds. Landing sites are being planned and coordinated. Instruments will be cross-calibrated. Data will be freely exchanged. There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the planet Earth.
IN THE COMMAND CENTER on Earth, in a special room, you are helmeted and gloved. You turn your head to the left, and the cameras on the Mars robot rover turn to the left. You see, in very high definition and in color, what the cameras see. You take a step forward, and the rover walks forward. You reach out your arm to pick up something shiny in the soil, and the robot arm does likewise. The sands of Mars trickle through your fingers. The only difficulty with this remote reality technology is that all this must occur in tedious slow motion: The round-trip travel time of the up-link commands from Earth to Mars and the down-link data returned from Mars to Earth might take half an hour or more. But this is something we can learn to do. We can learn to contain our exploratory impatience if that’s the price of exploring Mars. The rover can be made smart enough to deal with routine contingencies. Anything more challenging, and it makes a dead stop, puts itself into a safeguard mode, and radios for a very patient human controller to take over.
Conjure up roving, smart robots, each of them a small scientific laboratory, landing in the safe but dull places and wandering to view close-up some of that profusion of Martian wonders. Perhaps every day a robot would rove to its own horizon; each morning we would see close-up what had yesterday been only a distant eminence. The lengthening progress of a traverse route over the Martian landscape would appear on news programs and in schoolrooms. People would speculate on what will be found. Nightly newscasts from another planet, with their revelations of new terrains and new scientific findings, would make everyone on Earth a party to the adventure.
Then there’s Martian virtual reality: The data sent back from Mars, stored in a modern computer, are fed into your helmet and gloves and boots. You are walking in an empty room on Earth,