Spirit & Opportunity

The compelling story of the Rovers continues to fascinate me.

They have lasted so much longer than anyone ever dreamed that it's hard not to think of them as alive.

I heard an announcement today that the next mission will be to the Martian North Pole to look for water. They said that they cobbled the vehicle and rover together from leftover parts from other missions. I'd love to raid their junkyard.


Imagine explorers finding the little rovers some day. Would future museum chroniclers want to preserve the little rovers exactly, or restore them to full functionality? Just cleaning off the solar panels, as the occasional dust devil does, will restore full power. Cleaning the dust out of the tires might restore them to full functionality. Of course, if explorers were there, there wouldn't be much need for the probes.


This next rover should have an atomic power source, which would make it last a really long time. Solar plus nuclear energy would make it conserve its fuel and function at night and through the winter. They also need a way of cleaning off the solar panels. I've heard that they are starting to figure a way to run a static charge through items and make them shake off dust like a dog shakes off water.



I am very interested in the possible terraforming of Mars, which is what I keep thinking about when I hear reports about the human induced climate change on this planet. If we become experts at how to start and stop holding heat onto a planet's surface here, maybe we can do it on Mars (or reverse it on Venus). They had an ocean there once, so maybe it's a matter of restoring the environment, rather than creating a situation for the first time. Martian terraforming efforts would also involve extending our asteroid shield to Mars (after we make one for Earth). What happened to Mars' molten core? Maybe they need a large satellite like our moon in order to get the constant tidal forces to generate heat in the core.



This is our future. When we think about getting our eggs out of one basket, the first logical place to look is at our neighboring planets and the first thing we need to consider is how we can inhabit them. Right now Mars is first on the planetary exploration list, but the real interesting exploratoin challenge would be Venus. Can you imagine coming up with a probe that could withstand the pressure (90 times that of earth) and temperature (930°F) of Venus? The Russian Venera 7 did, but only for 23 minutes on the surface. I'm thinking something like a giant solar panel out in space acting like a sun shade for the planet's surface and providing power to the inhabitants, too.

The only bad thing about dreaming about all these wild achievements is being born too early to see any of it.