Mars has been getting a lot of attention recently, with the Phoenix
Lander capturing the most exciting Martian images outside of "War of
the Worlds". But a global team of scientists is already planning an
even more awesome mission - getting there and back again.
All the investigative missions so far have been one-way trips, and we
count ourselves lucky if the probes even survive that. This strategy
makes the missions much likely to succeed (with a minimum of "Carrying
and igniting huge chemical explosive rockets" stages) but also limits
the experiments that can be done. The craft have to carry every
instrument they want to use along with them, and in the case of
problems - like the recent Phoenix oven short-circuit - you're slightly
outside of the maintenance callout zone.
The next stage is a mission capable of returning samples to Earth,
the greatest gift to interplanetary scientists outside of Santa
stuffing stockings with moonrocks instead of coal. The returned rocks
would then become the focus of every planetary scientist on Earth, and
subjected to the kind of intense analysis that would make Sherlock
Holmes look like Ray Charles.
Such a mission presents incredible new challenges - landing
something capable of (at least partly) taking off again, redocking with
the orbital craft that delivered it and then coming on home. It's a
spectacular vision and one that might unify the world's space
agencies. Not through co-operation, or camaraderie, or even the
realization that interplanetary exploration makes the artificial
boundaries of state seem ridiculous. No, they'd do it because it costs
too much.
Professor Colin Pillinger, at the Open University, who led Britain's
unsuccessful Beagle II mission to Mars in 2003, told the Guardian that
returning samples would allow scientists to carry out much more
sophisticated analyses on the rocks and permit a more detailed search
for simple Martian life forms. "Everybody knows this is what you have
got to do if you want to really get to the bottom of Mars," he said.
But he said avoiding contamination would be extremely difficult.
"There's
a big caveat when you start playing with Mars, and that's planetary
protection. You have to be very careful not to bring anything back that
might be harmful to Earth," he said. "Your mission has to be
guaranteed, and I really mean guaranteed, to get into the Earth's
atmosphere without damaging itself."
Samples have been returned
successfully from space by robotic vehicles, but the first attempt to
bring samples from beyond the moon ended disastrously. The Genesis
probe, which carried particles collected from the solar wind, crash
landed in the Utah desert in September 2004. If the returning
spacecraft blew up on re-entry scientists could not be sure that
Martian life forms on board would be destroyed in the blast. It would
also be impossible to know what they would do to life on Earth.
The estimated budget is eight billion dollars, or as you might
picture it, four times the gross domestic product of North Korea. This
truly staggering bottom line could force agencies from around the globe
to work together. That sound you can hear is utopian science fiction
authors crying - because even as mankind reaches for space, it's only
capitalism that can force us to put aside our differences.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
Related Galaxy posts:
Twittering From Mars -NASA's Tiny URL
Twittering from Mars: The Phoenix on Ice
Will the Mars Phoenix Mission Clear the Way for Manned Missions?
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