Mars – Wow!

When I was but a lad age 10 or so my Uncle, with whose family I lived, worked as an electrician at Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL), Pasadena, California. This was the mid-sixties, and the Ranger Lunar Program was on. We, the USA, were trying to locate landing spots for the Apollo program, so we launched photographic satellites to take pictures.

What was interesting was that the Ranger satellites were, well… suicidal. They didn’t orbit the moon like our current Mars Surveyor. No, these million dollar babies began taking images continuously from the moment the moon was within camera range, right the way down to the surface where they crashed. They’re still up there you know.

I’ll never, ever forget my Uncle bringing home something really rare. He’d been given an entire stack of lunar images from the Ranger moon-shot. It was absolutely breathtaking to sit in our house and pour over actual black & white 8×10 prints of the surface of the moon. And not just anybody has these babies, no sir. Just people from JPL and the scientists at NASA. I was so excited, that I asked to take them to school for show and tell time. The class was glued to each image.

As I write these words today there are no fewer than three active spacecraft on the surface of Mars, and two of them have gone way off the record for endurance. These two intrepid explorers, Opportunity, and Spirit are solar powered, remotely controlled, camera-toting robots. Both are part of the Mars Rover Program. These multi-million dollar babies were designed to last a mere six months exploring Mars close-up. They are however currently into their fourth year of daily Martian exploration, eight-times longer than originally thought possible. And they show little sign of quitting.

Here’s the clincher; this fifty-four year old kid who still loves space can now get all the pictures he wants off the web, for free, in color, in black & white, and he can “go to Mars” on his own. This direct access to once rare images is a mind-blowing opportunity to personally share in the exploration of space and our nearest neighbors, the planets.

So… why not take your own stroll over the wind-blown dunes, or look at the sedimentary rocks deposited by what can only have been Martian water?

Explore. Enjoy. Grow.