Neil Armstrong inspired millions with his moonwalk. Can a feistyrobotic rover exploring Mars do the same for another generation? With mannedmissions beyond the International Space Station on hold, the spotlight hasturned on machines.
While it did not rise to Armstrong's "one small step for man, one giantleap for mankind," interest was so high in the rover Curiosity's"seven minutes of terror" approach to the red planet earlier thismonth that NASA's website crashed after receiving nearly 2 billion hits. Therover last week beamed home photographs of its first wheel tracks on the Martiansoil since its daredevil landing
"There's something exciting about reaching another place in the solarsystem. If you think about the kind of interest the landing of Curiosity had,you get a sense of that," said Smithsonian Institution space curator RogerLaunius. It wasn't on the same level as Armstrong's feat, "but it waspretty darn exciting," he said.
When Armstrong, and then fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, stepped on the moon onJuly 20, 1969, an estimated 600 million people watched and listened."Virtually the entire world took that memorable journey with us,"recalled Aldrin after Armstrong's death Saturday.
Early in the Space Age, the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts were thepublic face of NASA's space endeavor while the unmanned lunar missions that pavedthe way were in the shadows. The public craved adventure and the mannedmissions delivered. Aiming for the moon was new and exciting — not to mentiondangerous — and the U.S. was locked in a Cold War space race with the Soviets.
Next, the space shuttle ferried a new crop of astronauts to low-Earth orbit,but after three decades of service, it became routine. And the Cold War thawedwith the Russians and Americans cooperating on the Russian space station Mirand the International Space Station.
With the space shuttle fleet retired, the space station is all that's left. Itscrew of six for the most part quietly goes about doing its job about 250 miles(400 kilometers) above the Earth. President Barack Obama nixed plans forreturning astronauts to the moon in favor of landing on an asteroid andeventually Mars.
These days, space exploration is carried out by robotic spacecraft — commandedby human handlers on Earth. Advances in technology have allowed unmannedspacecraft to go farther and peer deeper, with craft circling Mercury, Saturn,and the asteroid Vesta, and others headed for Jupiter and dwarf planet Pluto.The twin Voyager craft are still going strong at the fringes of the solarsystem 35 years after their launch in 1977.
American University space policy analyst Howard McCurdy said today's generationof explorers was raised on technology and tends to get more jazzed aboutdelivering a car-size rover to Mars.
"Robotic exploration has taken more of a center stage," he said."It gets more publicity now than the International Space Station."
When the first Mars rover Sojourner landed in 1997, science fiction writerArthur C. Clarke rephrased Armstrong's famous line and said the event was"one small step for the rover."
Three other rovers have followed including Curiosity, which landed Aug. 5 byexecuting an intricate routine that ended with it being lowered by cables tothe surface. Curiosity's acrobatics proved so popular that its Twitterfollowers surged from 120,000 the eve of landing to more than a million (thetweets are being written by the public affairs office at the NASA JetPropulsion Laboratory, which manages the $2.5-billion mission.)
Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger said Monday the wheel prints on Marsmay turn out to be an iconic image just like those first boot prints on thelunar surface.
"Instead of a human, it's a robot pretty much doing the same thing,"he said.
Henry Lambright, a professor of public policy and space scholar at SyracuseUniversity, said while Curiosity is inspiring, the world still needs to sendhumans beyond low-Earth orbit.
"It can't inspire to the degree that Apollo did because a robot can'tinspire the way a man can," Lambright said.
On Monday, NASA played a recording from Administrator Charles Bolden that hadbeen sent up to the rover on Mars and relayed back to Earth. In it, he thankedscientists and engineers for their achievement.
David Lavery of NASA headquarters said the hope is that someone will beinspired by Bolden's message and become the first human to stand on Mars.
"Like the great Neil Armstrong, they'll be able to speak aloud — the firstperson at that point, of the next giant leap in human exploration," hesaid.