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The Best Of Planetary Explorers
An anonymous reader writes "NASA's timeline is published today on the top seventy five events in recent planetary explorations. Since June and July inaugurates three new landers going to Mars, it is curious to see their selected images: Venusian crust hot enough to melt lead, comets colliding with Jupiter, Europa's frozen ocean. But the most precious discoveries may be those chalked up as nearly free riders: the fifteen Mars rocks that annually are found among Antarctic meteors [100 grams total] and all those four and half million personal computers doing SETI@home CPU cycles."
I think SETI@Home has been successful at something many of these other events also achieved -- capturing the imagination of the populace.
... awestruck.
... that's something.
I remember as a child, reading magazine articles about the moons of Jupiter, seeing an artist's conception of Jupiter rising behind a Volcano on Io, and being flabbergasted
Whether it was picturing running on the moon in the low gravity, or gazing out the window at Jupiter as a passenger spaceship did a loop around the gas giant on its way to an unknown destination, my imagination was completely dedicated to space travel.
Years later, I run SETI@Home for the same simple reasons. The thought of having some small part in what could arguably be the biggest discovery ever
If SETI@Home never finds anything, it has still succeeded in giving me some measure of joy and excitement, that I'm doing my own small part.
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
I grew up in a small, conservative USian town and so the education that we got about space exploration was exclusively about USian missions (in fact, the school board prohibited the teaching of information about Soviet successes since they deemed such information to be unpatriotic.)
.. all of this in an environment where the temperature is 900 degrees (Fahrenheit), the atmospheric pressure is 100 times what it is on Earth, and it rains sulfuric acid. The Venera landers only operated for a few minutes each, but it's a wonder that they were ever able to operate at all! Mars looks like a cakewalk by comparison.
But the fact of the matter is that the Venera landers were a marvel of human engineering. They were able to touch down on the planet's surface, take instrument readings, and even return pictures of the planet's surface and skyline
A lot of what we know about conditions on Venus comes from the Russian missions, and it's unfortunate that more schoolchildren (at least here in the US) are not taught about it because of some skewed nationalistic agenda.