With the
successful landing of NASA’s latest Mars Rover, Curiosity, we will now get to
see a side of the red planet we’ve never seen before. We will finally have data verifying if Mars
has, or ever had complex organic life. On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a good
investment for the $2.5 billion spent on the project, but that would be
discounting the other half of the mission.
Most of the
attention surrounds Curiosity’s ability to analyze soil and rock samples for
complex carbon compounds, but that isn’t what fascinates me. The radiation detectors on the rover can tell
us more about space travel, and living on Mars than anything ever sent into
space. Until now, we have only assumed
that interstellar travel is safe, but we never understood just how much
radiation the crew would be subjected to during an extended mission.
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| Courtesy NASA |
While it is
true that we have sent manned missions to the moon, they have primarily been within
the protective magnetotail of the Earth’s magnetic field. This is because all Apollo missions were
conducted to coincide with the full moon to optimize communication with the
astronauts. During that time, the moon
is within the magnetotail, and therefore protected from the radiation normally associated
with interstellar travel. It is also
true that several probes have been outfitted with instruments that detect
radiation, but none within the protective shell of a space capsule. Curiosity changed all that.
While en route
to Mars, NASA engineers turned on Curiosity’s radiation detector to see how
much radiation would actually penetrate the protective walls of the capsule
carrying the rover. This allowed
Curiosity to simulate the environment an astronaut would encounter on the same
trip. During this time, the sun had a
number of X class solar storms that affected the capsule. The data is invaluable for manned missions.
The true
test of this ability will occur over the next two years. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Mars does
not have a magnetosphere. This means
that anyone who ventures onto the surface will be exposed to more radiation
than found here on Earth. Curiosity will
tell us exactly what that exposure will be.
This is vital, because we have only had rough estimates and guesses
until now. Without reliable data, we
could be taking unnecessary risks with future manned missions. We could discover that manned missions are
too dangerous to send people for any length of time, or we could find out that
the exposure is far less than we expected.
The point is that we wouldn’t
know for sure without Curiosity’s radiation detectors.
I am not
trying to detract from Curiosity’s primary mission, which is to check for carbon-based
compounds. There are profound implications
if it succeeds in confirming the existence of organic organisms. If there ever was life on Mars, it could have
decomposed into oil. It could also raise
serious issues for any astronauts. We
could be exposed to new and highly lethal organisms, which could make the
astronauts sick, or even kill them. These
could pose a problem if they were brought back to Earth. Then there is the ethical issue of seeding a
planet with earth organisms if we were to colonize Mars, and begin agriculture
on the surface. It all depends on what
we find.
The other
question would be if Mars seeded Earth with life, or vice verse. We could eventually understand the process of
how life begins on a planetary scale.
This isn’t as impressive as the information Curiosity will tell us about
Martian resources. The rover has the
most sophisticated suit of instruments ever sent to analyze Martian soil. It will tell us more about the chemical
makeup of the planet than any previous rover has.
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| NASA Curiosity Mission Controller's Celebrate. Courtesy NASA |
With all the
talk and speculation of manned trips to Mars, we have very little practical information
to help make the informed decisions necessary for success. Curiosity is the key to the future of our
manned space program. With all that’s at
stake with this mission, I think we owe the EDL engineers a debt of
thanks. They were innovative, and solved
one of the most difficult problems involved with getting to Mars, which is
safely landing. Now we just have to
stand back and see what Curiosity can tell us about our little red neighbor.
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