Tom Carlone will be joining us on MyMoon this Wednesday (November 28) at 8 pm ET for a live webcast. He will be discussing and fielding questions about the Polaris rover project, a prototype for a rover that will be searching for volatile substances on the Moon like water, oxygen, and methane. Be sure to drop by and learn more about the Polaris rover project!

In the meantime, we can talk a little bit about robotic missions. Many people argue that robotic missions could never inspire the public in the same way a human mission would. I don’t think I agree with that. This summer, in early August, I attended a large viewing party on campus for the Curiosity rover’s landing on Mars. Once the first pictures from the surface of Mars started coming back, there were loud and happy screams in the room. If I hadn’t known, I could have easily mistaken the cheering for a human landing. Yet, it slowly caught up with me that we were all ultimately cheering at just a distant collection of metal, not a human at all. And we weren’t alone. The NASA website was repeatedly crashing under the unexpectedly high number of people visiting it, and thousands gathered in Times Square in New York City at nearly 2 am to watch the rover touch down on the surface of Mars. With all that excitement, I found it hard to believe that a robotic mission could not generate public inspiration. What is so special about rovers, essentially just a collection of metal, that captures our imagination?

Mars Curiosity Rover Landing Broadcast at Times Square, Earth by navid j

For me, what has been special about Curiosity and all the other robotic missions being developed to explore the Moon and the Solar System has been that these missions are essentially representations of our biggest achievements and our biggest questions. These faceless and emotionless robots still hold on to our attention because they remind us about what big projects we can accomplish by working together. They also help answer some of our most fundamental questions. How did the Earth and Moon form? Do the same things we find on Earth, that could be crucial to life, exist elsewhere? It kind of makes all these robots much more human to me. (Maybe that’s why I follow an anthropomorphized rover on Twitter…)

What do you think? Do you think that robotic space missions could ever inspire the same way a human mission would? And if you think they could, what makes robotic missions so special to you?

by: Abhimat G.

Tuesday Nov-20-2012