23.02.2022
Carl Sagan stands in front of a Viking lander model in Death Valley, California.
NASA/JPLThe late Cornell University planetary scientist, astronomer and author Carl Sagan was not only a masterful science communicator but had the gift of pushing humanity to think in innovative ways. His experiment to remotely detect life on Earth from NASA’s passing Galileo spacecraft is the stuff of legend. And we are still debating the results of astrobiology experiments that Sagan championed on NASA’s Viking landers to Mars. But a quarter century after his death, it’s hard not to wonder what he’d think about the current state of space exploration.
Somehow, I think Sagan would be extremely perplexed and ultimately disappointed in what the U.S. and its space-faring allies have yet to accomplish on three major fronts.
Firstly, we’ve yet to find evidence for life on Mars.
True, the rovers have given us tantalizing reason to be hopeful, but with each new twist and turn about the possibility of ancient or even extant water on Mars, the potential for astrobiology on the red planet becomes more convoluted.
“By the standards established before launch, two of the three [Viking] microbiology experiments have had a positive outcome-if comparable results had been obtained at some spot on the Earth the existence of a terrestrial microbiology would have been considered established,” Sagan wrote in a 1979 special issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. “But Mars is not the Earth and in particular the chemistry of the soil, bombarded by ultraviolet light from an ozone-free sky, may be very different on the red planet than it is here,” he writes.
In truth, we will have to wait on NASA’s Mars sample return missions to bring any clarity to controversy surrounding the fact that mars may have once harbored microbial life.
I also think that Sagan would be bitterly disappointed that we humans have yet set foot on the red planet.
Secondly, even though Sagan had his sights set farther afield I also think he would be disappointed that it’s been more than 50 years since astronauts have walked on the Moon.
True, NASA has plans to return astronauts to the Moon by 2025. But I’m sure that it would be difficult to find even the most sanguine odds-maker in Vegas to accept a bet that NASA astronauts would in fact walk on the lunar South Pole by then. In fact, the original much-touted landing date of 2024 has already been pushed back by a year.
Quelle: Forbes