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NASA Announces Mars 2020 Rover Payload
An anonymous reader writes with news that the Mars 2020 experiments have been chosen: In short, the 2020 rover will cary 7 instruments, out of 58 proposals in total, and the rover itself will be based on the current Curiosity rover. The selected instruments are: Mastcam-Z, an advanced camera system with panoramic and stereoscopic imaging capability with the ability to zoom. SuperCam, an instrument that can provide imaging, chemical composition analysis, and mineralogy. The instrument will also be able to detect the presence of organic compounds in rocks and regolith from a distance. Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL), an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer that will also contain an imager with high resolution to determine the fine scale elemental composition of Martian surface materials. Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) — This one will have a UV laser! The Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE), an exploration technology investigation that will produce oxygen from Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide. Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA). This one is basically a weather station. The Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Exploration (RIMFAX), a ground-penetrating radar that will provide centimeter-scale resolution of the geologic structure of the subsurface.
Can't decide if the UV laser or the ground radar is the coolest of the lot.
Can't decide if the UV laser or the ground radar is the coolest of the lot.
Are you joking, or just straw-manning? Space exploration has forced humanity to come up with new and useful technologies. Try something hard, and you will inevitably make other things better. Nasa spin-off technologies have built the world.
They include:
Enriched Infant formula and other foods - which has probably done more for the collective intelligence of mankind than almost any other single effort in the history of humanity.
Water purification advances
Solar power
Firefighting advances
Safety grooving on highways
Aircraft Anti-Icing
Those ones are obvious, and easy to trace in their benefits, long term and short. See Wikipedia for a more complete list
But more important than any one single benefit, eventually we will run out of room. This is not some abstract theory. Sure, we can populate the desert and the ocean, sure we can die from disease and war, but eventually, Earth will not be enough. Betting on exploration is betting on humanity, in the long, long haul.
Our ancestors built dugout canoes 40,000 years ago. If dugouts had been a waste of a good axe-stone, when there were rival tribes to murder, Columbus would have never found the new world. I am betting that humans are a viable species. I am betting that mankind has nowhere to go but up. Look to the future, embrace exploration, it is the only way that mankind can last another 40,000 years.