PASADENA, Calif. - To further extend humankinds reach into the cosmos during the next century, future planetary missions will depend on establishing robotic outposts, Edward Stone, director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Tuesday.
Speaking at the 46th annual meeting of the American Astronautical Society, Stone said such outposts are a necessary next step in the 40-year history of exploring the solar system.
While the first wave -- or era -- of planetary missions, beginning with Mariner 2 in 1962, focused on merely getting there, two subsequent pushes have concentrated on exploration, first on a global level with the Vikings, Voyagers, Galileo and Cassini, and now on a local level, with NASAs ongoing Mars campaign.
"The third era will set the stage for the next era, which is going and staying," Stone said.
One of the chief facilitators of permanent outposts will be the rise of NASA calls the "interplanetary internet," a far-flung constellation of communications nodes that will speed the transfer of information to and from outer space.
While Mariner 4 dribbled back the first digital images of Mars at slightly more than 8 bits a second, information can now be beamed to Earth from the Red Planet at 100 megabytes each martian sol, or day. By 2005, with a swarm of micro-communications satellites in orbit around Mars, that could jump to 3 gigabytes a sol, Stone said.
"Effectively, we will be able to bring back the 'out there' here with communications," Stone said, "[and] make it as much Earth as any part of Earth here."
A cluster of robots working in unison would also allow more in-depth study of a planet, including the time- and power-consuming use of lasers to drill deep into its surface, thereby revealing its geological history.
Outposts would also allow for the in-situ production of many of the means necessary to stay even longer, including oxygen for fuel.
By establishing a permanent presence on another world, the popular imagination would also be charged, Stone said, paraphrasing the late Carl Sagan.
"He [Sagan] pointed out perspective was the fundamental return of planetary exploration," he said.
During Tuesdays session, Stone was presented the American Astronautical Societys Sagan Award for his contributions to the advancement of exploration of the cosmos.
"Ed Stone has been a remarkable leader, first with the Voyager missions, then of JPL during a time of incredible change," said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a space exploration advocacy group he founded along with Sagan and former JPL director Bruce Murray.
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