Robot Explorers - Where No One Has Gone Before
Robot Explorers - Where No One Has Gone Before
When I was a college student in the late 1970s I remember a debate in the science community about whether it was better to explore space using people or robot explorers. At the time, unmanned space missions had experienced significant successes beginning with the launch of the first satellite in Earth orbit two decades earlier. Manned missions were also experiencing a high, having just completed six triumphant crewed missions to the Moon. Excitement about space exploration--both manned and unmanned--was high. The debate among scientists and engineers in this country centered around this question. Should we employ our limited national resources to put people or robots into space?
It turns out that there are some things in which people excel and some tasks robots are better equipped to do. People are tenacious problem solvers and are by nature discoverers. It is in our blood. When the unexpected comes up (and it often does in space), there are generally better outcomes if someone is there to fix things. Additionally, nothing beats the thrill of living vicariously through the experience of space explorers. If you were alive 50 years ago, who didn’t feel immense pride when we saw images of people from Earth walking on the Moon.
Here is the rub. People are fragile. Space explorers have many more requirements than robots. People require air to breath, food to eat and water to drink and these necessities for life must be carried into space at great cost.
Robots can conduct remote sensing, make scientific measurements, be hardened to operate in extreme conditions, and even gather samples and return them to Earth. They can be programed to manipulate tools, aim cameras and move across the barren landscape of the planet Mars.
When we began launching our unmanned probes into the far reaches of the solar system, we did not yet have the capability to send people anywhere beyond a low Earth orbit and the Moon. The robot explorers of the last 60 years went by names such as Surveyor, Mariner, Pioneer, Voyager, Cassini and New Horizons. They ventured throughout the Solar System. They made flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus and Pluto (and many of their moons). Robot probes have orbited Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn.
They landed on Venus, the Saturnian moon of Titan and Mars (our favorite target). By 2017, all the major worlds, dozens of planetary moons and the dwarf planet Pluto had been surveilled. What they have discovered has been amazing and in some cases unexpected. To date, dozens of probes have been deployed by numerous nations and alliances of nations. The exploration continues. New space missions are currently in the pipeline and more are being planned. A large percentage of our current robot explorers are still operational, robustly beaming their knowledge back to Earth every day.
Tribute is due to the robots who have explored in our stead and have taught us that of all the places we have been the Earth is so special. Our home planet remains the only place in the known space where life thrives. As we celebrate the achievements of the past 60 years and prepare to send humans to Mars, we should not forget that there will always be room in science for both types of explorers whether they be human or robot.
Mitch Luman, Director of Science Experiences
