The Journey Ahead

Caltech’s Grotzinger has called the recent period of Mars exploration a “golden era.” He has marveled how missions have built systematically on one another. The coordination and integration of missions have, he wrote, “brought us ever closer to fathoming the broad range of environmental processes that have trans­formed the surface of Mars, beginning over four billion years ago.” Mars ex­ploration is going from following the water to searching for the building blocks of life.11 Beyond that is the investigation of Mars samples for past and present life itself. Optimism among scientists about Martian life has returned as a prime motivator of national and international planning.

The achievements in science and technology would not have been possible without organization and politics. NASA has pulled the components of a dis­tributed multimission big science program together and obtained resources for implementation. Orbiters and landers have been linked, and they pointed the way for the best places for rovers to go to search for traces of life. The pro­gram has not gone as consistently or smoothly as Mars advocates would have liked. The journey has been anything but steady. Science may provide a “guid­ing light,” but politics influences how fast and how well government and the researchers it supports can follow it.12 The political process can result in a pause in activity, as well as acceleration.

The history of robotic Mars exploration has been one of progress, setback, and renewed dedicated effort.13 It is filled with human drama that is at times heroic and at other times tragic. The future of Mars exploration will likely emu­late the rhythm of the past. It will advance, hit barriers, and then advance again. Over the long haul, Mars exploration moves forward. What gives the robotic program direction is that it has relative consensus on a clear technical goal akin to the Apollo lunar landing. For scientists, engineers, and NASA Administra­tors, it is called MSR.

That goal ties together individual missions distributed over time. It is a siren call for most Mars specialists. It has been the compelling goal for decades—and many of the most important conflicts around Mars policy have entailed issues of when and how to reach the MSR objective. For virtually everyone, specialists and general public alike, the goal is also a means to answer deeper and broader questions about life which underlie Mars. A culmination for the robotic pro­gram, it is seen by NASA and its Mars constituency also as a potentially big step toward human spaceflight.