IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 56
Part I: challenges
Part II: voyage
{ spac e 2 . 0 }
mars for the rest of us
Part III: strategy
B et te r came ra s , greate r bandw idth, and bigger display s put mars
mero
withi n reach of armch air explo rers + + + b y j o s h u a j . r o
www.spectrum.ieee.org
june 2009 * Ieee Spectrum * nA
Part Iv: exPloratIon
I s l o w l y s c a n t h e n e a r b y r o c k s a n d c r a g s , letting than 1400 images, which NASA digmy gaze drift up toward the horizon. My eyes are searching itally stitched together into a single
for a recognizable shape-anything that's not a rock-to give 130-megapixel panorama. Standing in
me a sense of scale. I come up empty.
the middle of it is so immersive that I
Mars is all around me, here in the StarCAVE, a virtual real- immediately feel the urge to explore
ity enclosure at the University of California, San Diego. Five the scene, to peer around rocks and see
projectors transform a room the size of a walk-in closet into a what's behind them.
360-degree panorama of the view from the basin of the large
"You can go into a room, and you're
Gusev Crater.
on Mars," says Larry Smarr, direcFor the near future at least, only robots will touch Martian tor of t he Ca l i for nia Inst itute for
soil. But even after the rusty surface becomes a trampled mess Telecommunications and Information
of human boot prints, we-you and I-probably won't qual- Technology, or Calit2, which runs the
ify for the trip. So even if "mankind" one day reaches the Red StarCAVE. The idea of re-creating Mars
Planet, most of us are destined, at best, to experience its explo- here sounds appealing, but it is not just
ration secondhand.
fantasy-only by maximizing what can
The good news is that such secondhand participation is be done from the ground can NASA
likely to be a lot better than it is today. Improved communica- make Mars exploration politically sustions, imaging, and visualization technologies will allow NASA tainable and financially worthwhile.
to bring much of the experience of being on Mars back to those
From their inception, U.S. and Soviet
of us stuck on Earth.
space agencies recognized the value
To obtain this one view, for instance, the Mars rover Spirit in connecting with the public directly.
parked on a small hill near the Home Plate plateau and began When Sputnik became the first artifisnapping a few pictures a day as it waited out the Martian cial satellite, in 1957, it carried a radio
winter in 2006. Over the next four months, it gathered more transmitter instead of a scientific pay-
65
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2009
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - Cover1
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - Cover2
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 1
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 2
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 3
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 4
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 5
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 6
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 7
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 8
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 9
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IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 15
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IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 20
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IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 27
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 28
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IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 31
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IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 47
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IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 58
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 59
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 60
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 61
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 62
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 63
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 64
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 65
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 66
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - 67
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - Cover3
IEEE Spectrum June, 2009 - Cover4
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