If machines could ever think and feel just like their human creators, the Mars rover Venturer would probably say on a day like today, “Ho-hum. Another day, another dollar.”
It was dawn on Mars. As the sun rose above the great Valles Marineris canyon, illuminating the rust-colored landscape in a brilliant array of golden light, Venturer came to life the moment the sun's rays reached it's solar panels atop the vehicle. It rested during the night behind a large boulder at the mouth of the canyon on it's southernmost tip, parked there for safekeeping by it's operators back at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Once it's systems were up and running to full capacity, it trodded forward into the canyon.
Venturer was the third in JPL's fleet of exploratory rovers sent to the red planet, six months behind Spirit and almost a year behind Opportunity. Even though Mars was half the size of Earth, there was still overall a lot of ground to cover. It was the smallest of the three rovers, about the size of a child's radio-controlled toy car, built from processed titanium alloys. It was loaded with sensors which sampled everything from the quality of the Martian atmosphere—about ninety percent carbon dioxide and ten percent nitrogen—to the porousness of the rocks and boulders. High density 360 degree cameras with pan, tilt and zoom lenses documented every step of Venturer's travels and transmitted the data over ten million miles back to the JPL laboratory, where it's operators pieced together the awe-inspiring photos into stunning mosaics of this strange new world as yet untouched by man.
Many from the old school of space exploration, namely the graying astronauts from the old Apollo and space shuttle missions, argued that the rovers were poor substitutes for the daringness of the human spirit that fathered the quest for space in the first place. “Why bother sending men,” they balked, “when robots can do all the work.”
But there would be plenty of time for this ancient majestic frontier to fall under the stampede of human feet. Plenty of time to excavate, carve and cut away pieces of the land to make way for towns and cities, and atmospheric plants to breathe man-made life into this long dead world. Plenty of time to litter and pollute the landscape with landfills of trash and newspapers blowing in the Martian wind. Plenty of time to pave a highway through this magnificent canyon so one day millions of cars and trucks moving through could clog the atmosphere with their exhaust fumes and ignore it's splendor.
Plenty of time, indeed.
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