Sorry, despite decades of exploration, Mars remains almost a total mystery

At first glance, it may seem that Mars is no longer the fashionable planetary exploration destination it once was. After all, NASA has been exploring the Red Planet since its flyby of Mariner 4 in 1965. But despite decades of exploration, billions of dollars, and untold hours of work, scientifically, Mars remains almost as mysterious as it was. when NASA’s Viking lander first landed in 1976.

A recent column in Atlantic The magazine “The Most Overloaded Planet in the Galaxy” implored the research community to expand its horizons of robotic exploration beyond Mars. But despite the arguments for rethinking what the author of the article, Marina Koren, calls the United States’ “scientific monopoly of Mars” in favor of some of the least visited outer moons in our solar system, scientific understanding of the red planet is probably still decades away.

It is true that other deserving bodies in the solar system may have been somewhat neglected in favor of Mars, as most planetary scientists will readily admit. But we still have little clue about:

– if it has never had or still harbors some kind of life, either at its poles or in its deep subsoil;

– how long it was habitable if it really and really was;

– whether its ocean or oceans were permanent enough or were simply transitory water masses which disappeared as soon as Mars lost its atmosphere;

– and if the beginning of March was really covered with ice caps, instead of flowing rivers, which melted to cut out a large number of networks of valleys which marked its surface.

That’s not to say that we haven’t made great strides in tackling many of Mars’ biggest puzzles. But remember that while the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s SHARAD (Mars SHAllow RADar Sounder) instrument has made great strides in mapping polar ice, we have yet to successfully send a lander to the poles. The last time NASA attempted to do so, its 1998 mission to Mars Polar Lander ended after crashing into the Martian South Pole at high speed.

It is also true that within our internal solar system, the planetary scientific community has a lot of catching up to do in terms of exploring Venus, our closest stellar neighbor; Mercury, which could use a sample return mission; and some sort of combined landing and / or sample return mission to the dwarf planet Ceres. New analysis of data from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft indicates that Ceres was once home to a salty global ocean that has long since frozen over.

As for Mars?

The planets are indeed making progress in understanding the basics of Mars; they have good evidence that Mars had lakes, rivers, and deltas of some sort with at least one large ocean. But the big questions about the timing of the evolution of Mars throughout the history of the solar system remain unanswered, as does the origin of its two odd moons, Deimos and Phobos.

Of course, it’s easy to watch movies like “The Martian” and think that NASA and / or some other space agency is really going to send multiple human missions to Mars for long-term speleology and harvesting. Don’t count on it. It would be an extraordinarily expensive science that could be more easily performed by robot. And personally, I wouldn’t bet on a human commercial mission to Mars of great scientific value either.

We humans are lucky in that clues about the beginnings and evolution of our solar system can be obtained here on Earth; four days on our beautiful but underused moon; and with increasingly sophisticated sample returns and robotic in situ missions to Mars and Venus. We can also visit asteroids and comet samples to learn more about the history of the solar system as it began 4.6 billion years ago.

So instead of not spending more on exploring our inner solar system, Mars included, we need to increase the stake.

—- We hardly understand earthly processes; Antarctica continues to amaze and amaze geophysicists.

—- We really only have a rudimentary understanding of Earth’s long-term climate, and we know even less about how the long-term vagaries of our Sun affect the climate here.

—- It is likely that we will never have a definitive answer on exactly where and when life began here on Earth.

So how can we expect to understand Mars when we have only visited a tiny part of it; let alone set foot there?

As for exploring the rest of the solar system?

It is a dilemma; How can we continue to deepen our understanding of Mars while not neglecting the rest of our solar system? One solution to broadening our horizons might be to encourage new players in interplanetary exploration – such as China, India and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – to continue and even step up their robotic exploration of Mars. This would allow more experienced entities, such as NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), to venture much further into our own solar system.

But the world is currently on a precipice unlike anything seen in contemporary history. These are dark times. Hopefully we can soon question our place in the solar system without being crippled by this invisible enemy.

And when we do, rest assured, a deep scientific understanding of Mars and our neighboring planets will take many more decades and dollars. And even then, we will still be left with fundamental questions.