The Other Neighbor

While we all give ourselves well-deserved pats on the back for the success of the Mars Rover (and in six days, a second one will make the perilous descent to the surface, so we might have all-new vistas at which to marvel), let's not lose track of Venus in the meantime. Though we don't seem to talk about it much here, the Soviets spent a lot of time, money, and effort from the 60's through the 80's sending spacecraft to Venus during their Venera program, with successful missions of 3 atmospheric probes, 10 landings, 4 orbiters, 11 flybys or impacts, and 2 balloon probes of the clouds. Some of the surface photographs beamed back from the landers (which don't survive long in the extreme heat) can be seen here. A couple have been colorized but it's something of a guess since Venus' atmosphere filters out blue light.

The Europeans have a Venus orbiter scheduled to launch in 2007 and the Japanese aim to launch one a couple years later. There are still many strange behaviors of that planet's system for which astronomers have no definitive explanations. This RedNova article engages in some self-admittedly wild-assed speculation on how some very alien forms of simple life may yet exist there and might explain some of the odder behaviors.

And now I will segue poorly, if at all. I've not yet said much about Bush's Mars plans. On their face, they would be a good thing, but tinfoil hat or no, I don't take anything this administration proposes at face value. I have a sneaking suspicion that it really is about getting the moon base set up and establishing military supremacy in space - a goal set for 2020, the same time frame as Bush's proposed lunar base. The Chinese announcement of their own moon exploration plans is surely playing some role. And he hasn't begun to explain how he's going to pay for it, which has generally meant that he has no intention of doing so (see: hydrogen cars, No Child Left Behind, and AIDS money for Africa).

But most disturbingly, Bush is proposing scrapping or scaling back all programs that do not support this one mission. NASA just announced they will no longer service the Hubble Telescope - an instrument that has taught us vastly more about our universe than all manned missions combined - dooming it to an almost certain demise somewhere in the next three years, with the next large space telescope not scheduled for deployment until 2011 at the earliest.

The amount of knowledge we are gathering from the various robotic probes is overwhelming, and getting cheaper to deploy. I'm all for manned space exploration, but doing away with our best means of deep space observation in order to blast meat-based observers to Mars a decade or two from now just seems terribly cart-before-horse, if not downright perverse. Keep your eye on which companies get the contracts for Bush's Mars project - once the list starts to fill out, count how many of them are defense subcontractors.