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The Planetary Report

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The Planetary Report Officers CARL SAGAN, BRU CE MURRAY, President Vice President Space Exploration-Is It Worth The Cost? Director, Laboratory Director, for Planetary Studies, Jet Propul sion by Bruce Murray Cornell Univer sity Laboratory, California Institute LOU IS FRIEDMAN, of Technology Executive Director Weh ave come to the culmination of an extraordinary era in our exploration of the solar system. In th e last four yea rs we have seen pictures of Mars retu rned from the spacecraft Viking, and of Jupiter Board of Advisors and Satu rn from Voyager: Sophisticated chemical and biological tests were ca rried out over many DIANE ACKERMAN, SHIRLEY M. HUFSTEDLER, months on the su rface of Mars. Six of our spacecraft conducted atmospheric experiments on Venus. poet and author Secretary of Education This properly has been hailed as an unprecedented triumph of sc ience and tec hnology which cou ld JAMES VAN ALLEN, JAMES MICHENER, Professor of Physics. author presage still another era of exploration beyond limits co nsidered possible only a few years ago. U niversity of Iowa PHILIP MORRISON , We have been fortunate to live at that si ngular period in human history when we we re the first HARRY ASHMORE, Institute Professor, able to reach out from our ancestral home to investigate, like a growing chi ld, our so lar system Pulitzer Prize-winning Massachusetts journalist Institute of Technology environment. We were able to do so because we have lived in the most advanced technological ISAAC AS IMoV, PAUL NEWMAN, society the world has known; one that has freely chosen, thus far, to lead that exploratory process for author actor all humanity, present and future. The world has joined with us, the American public, in sharing the RICHARD BERENoZEN, BERNARD M. OLIVE R, sense of wonder and exc itement at th e space discoveri es of the last two decades. President. Vice President, American Universit y Research and Develop­ No one questions the sc ientific potential of th e space exploration program. But budgetary limits ment, Hewlett-Packard RAY BRADBURY , now threaten th e demise of the undertaking - already slowed by Congressional action, and lack of it. Corporation poet and author The question is being asked: is the program worth the cost? By one obvious measu rement the price HARRISON H. SCHMITT, JOHNNY CARSON, U.S. Senator, is high - between $200 million and $1,000 million dollars per mission. Spread over time, the total entertainer New Mexico space sc ience budget in NASA - covering astronomy as well as planetary sc ience - runs about $550 NORMAN COUSINS, ADLAI E STE VENSON, III, ed itor and au thor million per year, about 10% of the total NASA budget, or about one-tenth of one percent of the total U.S. Senator , FRANK DRAKE, Ill inois federal budget. The answe r to whether the costs are too high depends, of course, upon the priorities Director, National LEWIS THOMAS, assigned by those who make the budget and appropriate the funds. Astronomy and President, Ionosphere Center It is not possible to assign precise dollar values to a program without precedent. But it can be Memorial Sloan LEE A. oUBRloGE, Kettering Cancer shown that new knowledge and discovery has resu lted in new benefits, new understandings, and new former pr esidential Cent er awareness that helps us in our daily life, perhaps more so than many specific "application" projects. science advisor HAROLD C. UREY, For exa mple, it was scientists studying planetary atmospheres who first discovered th e possible JOHN GARDNER, Nobe l Laureate in founder, chemistry breakdown in the ozone layer due to aerosols, and the possible danger of a global atmospheric Common Cause greenhouse heating effect due to the co ntinual addition of carbon dioxide from th e burning of fossil fuels and the destru ct ion of forests, The Planetary Report is published six t imes Ou r understanding of climatology, still in its infancy, has increased significa ntly as a result of th e yearly at the editor ial offices of The Planetary comparative study of the planets. Planetary experiments and measurements help us understand the Society, 116 S Euclid Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91 101 Mail memberships, correspondence , processes that influence our own weath er. Leading sc ientists in my field, geology and geophysics, address changes and adjustments to have analyzed the internal structure of Mars, Venus and the Moon, and studied the craters and other The Pla netary Society, P.O. Box 3599, land forms on terrestrial planets and sate llites; knowledge of co mparative planetology improves our Pasadena, CA 91 103. Copyright © 19BO by The Planetary Society. understanding of the structure, historical development and dynamics of our own planet Earth. Last yea r's exciting Voyager encounter with the Sun's principal co mpanion, Jupiter, and its mini­ solar system, was a microcosm of the entire space exploration effort. To the layman, the flow patterns in th e Jovian atmosphere resemble an abstract painting from God; these pictures had Cover Photograph: The last picture an obvious impact on the American and world public, Scientists, studying these flow patterns, for from Voyager l 's approach to Saturn in which the entire planet and ring the first time co uld observe closely a rapidly rotating planet and exa mine the meteorologica l system can be seen in a single frame. developments in a heavy atmosphere on a short time scale; this provided new insights into the As the spacecraft moves closer to effects of rotational dynamics on the fl ow of storms and weather systems. the planet, it will view successively Discovery of th e first active vo lcano on another planet, 10, the nearest large moon of Jupiter, smaller areas with increasing detail. came about in the classic fashion - almost by accident. One of th e mission navigators looking PHOTO: JPLI NASA (continued on page 15) or all of human history the planets were wa ndering The ! F lights in the night sky, moving aga inst the background of the more distant constellations in complex, although Adventure of regu lar, paths. The planets stirred our ancestors, provoked th eir curiosity, encouraged mathematics and accurate re cord keep ing. Through th e work of Johannes Kepler and The Planets Isaac Newton, understanding planetary motion led to the by Carl Sagan develojilment of modern physics and, in a very real sense, opened th e modern age of sc ience and technology. In the last 18 yea rs - ever since the encounter of the Mariner 2 spacecraft with Venus - everyone of those wandering lights has bee n visited by space vehicles from Earth; everyone has revealed itself to be a world in its own right very differ­ ent from our own. We humans have landed exquisite robot spacecraft on Mars and Venu s and orbited both planets. We have flown by Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn. We have discovered the broiling surface of Venus, the windswept va ll eys of Mars, the sulfur rivers of 10, the great poly­ chrome storm systems of Jupiter. We have discovered new moons, new ring systems, puzzling markings, enigmatic pyram ids and have searched for life. Never again will the planets be mere wandering points of li ght. Because of the effort of the last two decades they will forever after be wo rlds crying out for exploration and discovery. And yet the pace of planetary exploration has slackened ominously. After the Voyager encounters wi th the Saturn system in Nove mber, 1980 and August, 1981, there will be a period of more than four years in which no new images LEFT TO RIGH T: BRUC E MURRAY, CARL SAGAN, LO UIS FRIEDMAN are returned from the planets by any United States space­ craft. The Soviet Union also shows signs of slowing its once ber a Congressman telling me that the only letters he had vigorous program of space veh icl e exploration of the Moon, received in support of the Galileo exploration of Jupiter Venus and Mars - although it is still spending probably two were se nt by people too yo ung to vote. or three times more per year on such enterprises as the And yet there is evidence of enorm ous support and United States. If we back off from the enterprise of the enthusiasm for the exploration of the planets. We ca n see planets, we wi ll be losing on many different levels simulta­ it in the popularity of motion pictures and television pro­ neo usly. By examining other worlds - their weather, their grams on planetary themes; in the topics discussed in the cl imate, their geology, their organic chemistry, the possibil­ burgeoning set of science fact magazines, and in the su c­ ity of life - we cali brate our own world. We learn better cess with which books on th is subject have recently been how to understand and control the Earth. Planetary explo­ greeted. In puzzling over th is apparent paradox, it became ration is an activity invo lving high technology which has clear to me and a number of my colleagues that the solu­ many important app li cations to the national and global tion would be a non-profit , tax-exempt, public member­ economy- robotics and computer systems being two of sh ip organization devoted to the exploration of the planets many examples. It uses aerospace technology in an enter­ and related themes - particularly th e search for planets prise which harms no one, which is a credit to our nation, around other stars and the qu est for extraterrestrial intelli­ our species and our epoch. And planetary exploration is gence. If such an organization had a substantial member­ an adventure of historic proportions.
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