Curiosity: Martian Rocks, Up Close and Personal...

If you're like me, following the progress of our robotic explorers over the years, then you must surely share my amazement at the imagery pouring out of the Curiosity rover mission on Mars.  The photo at right (as usual, click to enlarge) is a fine example.  Yes, it's just a rock.  But (a) it's a rock in glorious, high-resolution color, and (b) it's just one of thousands of such images already returned from Curiosity.

And of course, the imagery is just the first bit that gets our attention – vision being an important human sense.  The other science instruments are no less spectacular.  For example, below is a graphic showing the first results from the X-ray diffraction instrument (part of the Chemical & Minerology package) on board Curiosity.  If you know what you're doing (which I most certainly do not!), you can read this result to determine what minerals are in the sample you're analyzing.  This instrument, in its normal form on Earth, is many times larger, heavier, and more power-hungry than the astounding miniaturized version now operating on Mars.

One of the arguments proponents of manned space flight use is that by putting a human “on the ground” in places like Mars, much more science work can get done than is possible with robotic explorers.  This argument, in my opinion, had a reasonable amount of merit back in the '60s and '70s.  Technology had not yet advanced to the point that multiple sophisticated instruments and high-resolution cameras could be reliably flown to distant planets.  That started to change in the '80s, and has continued advancing to the point we're at today.  With a payload that is a tiny fraction of what it would take (both in weight and in cost) to support a single human on Mars for a couple of years (not to mention returning him or her), the Curiosity mission has put an array of very sophisticated instrumentation on Mars.  The capabilities of this instrument array greatly exceed what any human geologist could bring to bear.

Maybe someday the federal government will figure this out, and transform NASA into an agency dedicated to robotic exploration of the Solar System.

I must be dreaming.  I just posited a government agency pursuing a logical path...