Pale Blue Dot ( PDFDrive.com ) (1)

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 re-fly 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 oil 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, but to you
you are on Mars: pink skies, fields of boulders, sand dunes stretching to the horizon where an
immense volcano looms; you hear the sand crunching under your boots, you turn rocks over, dig a
hole, sample the thin air, turn a corner, and come face to face with . . . whatever new discoveries we
will make on Mars—all exact copies of what's on Mars, and all experienced from the safety of a
virtual reality salon in your hometown. This is not why we explore Mars, but clearly we will need
robot explorers to return the real reality before it can be reconfigured into virtual reality.