Cav's Place

The article about Mars from this month’s National Geographic Magazine somehow managed to make me suddenly realize that we’re really there, wandering around on Mars and taking pictures at ground level. By “we” I mean humanity, even if only through machines.
This is not news, of course. As far as rovers are concerned, Pathfinder has landed on Mars back in 1997. Not to mention Spirit and Opportunity, which have landed in 2004 and are still wandering around. But apparently it took the pictures from that article to make me fully realize what it means.

Yes, for now we are just playing in the dust, but even that is very significant. The Moon is just a satellite, what happened there matters far less. Now we actually have a presence on another planet! And soon enough it seems that we’ll be having a mobile laboratory there too.
But this also means we have a great responsibility. We must make sure we won’t poison Mars as we did Earth. The materials used must be carefully considered so they won’t cause any damage to the environment. There may still be a chance of finding some simple life forms there, perhaps buried in the ice, and those could be easily wiped out by introducing foreign substances into their environment.
This makes me be very worried by the proposed nuclear power supply of the next rover to be sent to Mars. Even if there will be no accidents, it will be left there after the mission will end, when the power will run out, and the plutonium will be left there with it, obviously. Not to mention that using such a power supply means the mission duration is pretty much fixed, which is not the case for a solar powered rover. (Keep in mind that Spirit and Opportunity were planned to be operational for 90 days, but they’re still wandering around and collecting information even now, after nearly five years!) This doesn’t seem to be the best course of action from my point of view…

Personally, I’m in no hurry to send humans to Mars. I think that increasingly complex, sturdy, efficient, reliable and independent machines could explore the red planet well enough, and then they could even build a base for a potential future manned mission, meaning that humans would find suitable conditions when it will be feasible to send them there.
But I wonder how much those who operate those rovers are still aware that they’re just machines. Especially if we’re talking about Spirit and Opportunity, which have been there for so long and done so much. I’m sure that only extremely dedicated people could be assigned to them and it seems very likely that they’ll develop some sort of emotional attachment in the process. It saddens me to think of how much those people will suffer when their “babies” will inevitably cease to function.

On the other hand, as surprised as I was by how much we know about Mars, and how much we are actually doing on its surface, something else is what truly shocked me these days.
Looking for information on the current status of the exploration of our solar system, I was shocked by how little we know about Pluto. It may no longer be considered a “real” planet, but we should know more about it! Right now it seems to simply be “out there”, treated as not even being a part of our solar system…