Given the national jubilation that attended NASA landing a robotic spacecraft on Mars yesterday, you’d think it was as novel as man landing on the moon … for the first time.
Yet the most daring part of this mission was avoiding not just landing on paths its spacecrafts already blazed on eight previous missions. It also had to avoid crashing into spacecrafts from the UAE and China that landed there just last week.
The NASA Perseverance rover safely landed on Mars after its 292.5 million-mile journey from Earth, the agency confirmed at 3:55 p.m. ET Thursday. The rover landed itself flawlessly, according to the mission’s team.
‘Percy,’ as the spacecraft is affectionately called at mission control, sent back its first images of the landing site immediately after touchdown, which shows the rover’s shadow on the surface of its landing site of Jezero Crater. …
The rover will explore Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake that existed 3.9 billion years ago, and search for microfossils in the rocks and soil there. Follow-up missions will return samples of this site collected by Perseverance to Earth by the 2030s.
(CNN, February 18, 2021)
Indeed, the NASA scientists who celebrated landing this spacecraft, like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers celebrating winning the Super Bowl, insist this mission is different. Reportedly, because their $2.7 billion robotic explorer is equipped with such high-tech cameras, instruments, and gadgets, this mission is different. It will be tantamount to suddenly being able to use a chainsaw to cut through wood after laboring to do so with a hand saw
The problem, however, is that they’re still cutting through the same wood. Granted, Perseverance might send high-resolution images of things other rovers have taken. And it might even provide evidence that some form of life existed on Mars thousands of years ago. So friggin’ what!
Frankly, at this point, the hosannas to NASA’s exploration of Mars reeks of the hosannas to Trump’s subjugation of the Republican Party. Only a willing suspension of disbelief explains this. We’re spending billions to explore the prospect of humans living on Mars when it’s clear that no form of life has existed there for thousands of years. Not to mention juxtaposing that spending with humans standing in bread lines and even freezing to death in the richest country on Earth.
If only Morley Safer of 60 Minutes were still here to ridicule the manifest absurdity of NASA scientists waxing scientific about the pictures of dirt this Mars rover beams back to Earth; you know, the way he used to ridicule art experts waxing artistic about the monochrome paintings of contemporary artists.
But who knows, perhaps dinosaurs once roamed that planet too. Whatever the case, we should probably be humble enough to let Mars evolve on its own the way Mars let us.
In any event, you might say I am as convinced that scientists will find signs of life on other planets as I am that only born-again Christians will go to Heaven, and everyone else will burn in Hell. (Here’s looking at you Ronald Reagan…Jr.)
Therefore, I see no point in commenting on this latest mission beyond what I wrote two years ago, which previewed this very mission. I argued then that mankind will never cease exploring for signs of life in the universe, but we already have convincing clues that there are just galaxies of nothingness out there.
iPINIONS would be more impressed if mankind cleaned up the mess we’ve made of our own planet before exploring for other planets to mess up too.”
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