Re: ....Question? Have They Found a Reason to go 'To the Moon and Mars' Yet???


<Ordover@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1144709693.319606.209610@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
You're assuming there is something interesting enough on the Moon or
Mars to be worth sending a manned mission, and if we haven't found it,
we must not be looking in the right place. Perhaps there simply
-isn't- that much that's all that interesting about the Moon or Mars.
You really have to accept that as a possibility.

I'd be inclined to accept this argument if we had already sent both robotic
and manned missions to the moon, Mars, several asteroids, a few comets, and
etc. In this case, if a robotic mission finds an asteroid that looks like
several already explored in depth by manned missions, then yes, it should be
skipped.

But we've only set foot on one body other than the Earth. I think it's safe
to say that even after sending robotic missions to Mars, there is a lot we
simply don't know. I personally think there is enough we don't know about
Mars to justify a manned mission. You can collect a lot more data from a
manned mission simply because you can do more with a man on the site than
not. This is especially true if the astronaut on site actually has a degree
in geology or another science area that's of interest.

Even on the moon, I think we need manned missions to interesting places like
the lunar poles. There is evidence of frozen water, but it's extremely hard
to understand exactly what that means without sending a geologist down to do
basic things like take core samples and examine them on site. Once the
person in the field finds an interesting sample, they can go back out and
take another sample at the same location and store that sample for
examination in a more sophisticated earth bound lab.

Using a robotic mission for something like this is not only hard in terms of
extracting the core sample, but is incredibly difficult when it comes to
examining the core sample. If you resort to taking the core sample back to
earth for examination, how to do make sure you've got an *interesting* core
sample to begin with?

In other words, your three step program isn't complete. Step 3, the manned
missions, include scouting out interesting samples to bring back to earth,
which leads us to step 4.

4. Interesting samples brought back from manned missions are examined in
labs on earth because they're *always* going to be better equipped, in terms
of equipment and people, than any manned mission. The labs on earth
determine which sites are so complex that for whatever reason, they must do
sophisticated examinations on site.

5. Manned scientific bases are established at sites which are found to be
such that manned scouting missions aren't enough. Note that this is similar
to the base at the South Pole, which is one of the ultimate outcomes in
terms of exploration on the planet.

Jeff
--
Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.


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