While we are busy searching within and focusing our attention internally we must not forget that others are searching without, peering at the skies to find out what lies beyond our world.
The only extra-terrestrial body to have been visited by humans is the Moon. The first man on the Moon was neil Armstrong who landed on the lunar surface in July of 1969 together with Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon. It was the Apollo 11 mission that delivered the first human beings to the Moon. Apollo 17 delivered the last crew comprising Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt and Ronald Evans to the Moon in 1972.
We have not been back to the Moon since then, most of America’s NASA’s efforts being directed at other bodies than the Moon. In 1976 an unmanned spaceship delivered the Viking lander to Mars. For the first time, pictures of the Red planet were taken from the surface and sent back to Earth. The first spacecraft to have landed on Mars was the Soviet Mars 3 which landed in 1971 but stopped transmitting after 14.5 seconds.
The Venera missions, launched by the Soviets, attempted to land spacecraft on Venus, with varying levels of success. On December 15, 1970 Venera 7 became the first probe to land on another planet when it landed on Venus. It appeared to have crash landed and so it only transmitted for 20 minutes from the Venutian surface. Venus has some of the harshest planetary conditions in our solar system, with temperature in the region of 470°Celcius. Besides, it has excruciating atmospheric pressure (90 times that on Earth). Subsequent Venera probes did not last long on the surface of Venus.
We have had more success on Mars in the sense that the landers have persisted for much longer than those on Venus but we have had as many or more failed missions to Mars. Apart from Viking landers, some of the successful Mars lander missions were Sojourner, Pathfinder, Phoenix, Curiosity and Perseverance. The last one landed in February of 2021. I covered its landing, albeit after the event, on this column. Perseverance was accompanied by a mini chopper called Curiosity which was expected to attempt mechanical flight on another world for the first time. It has been hugely successful!
NASA is planning to send humans back to the Moon in 2025. The Apollo missions were named after a Greek god. The god Apollo had a twin sister called Atermis. Several trial Artemis missions have been deployed so far, and it looks like we are ready for a human revisit of the Moon. The crewed lander mission is scheduled for 2025. Among the crew members will be at least one woman and one person of colour. NASA is trying to diversify space exploration missions by taking on board people from minority groups.
Why on Earth would anybody want to go to the Moon, a world that is bare and barren – no water, no air, only sand, sand, sand? I can briefly give three reasons. The first one is basic exploration, finding out what lies out there, where only few people have been before. People have different personalities. Some are open to new experience while others are not. The former would derive a great deal of pleasure from discovering new worlds. Secondly, the Moon could be a source of some minerals not found on Earth. Those that will have a foothold on the Moon will have the advantage of accessing such resources before anybody else. The third reason is that there are plans to establish an intermediary landing station on the Moon where people would stop over on their way to outer space.
Mars has not been forgotten. This Perseverance probe was designed to seek signs of habitable conditions in Mars’ ancient past and to look for evidence of past microbial life on the planet. It has mechanism to scoop Martian soil, package it into several packages that will be left on the surface of Mars for future missions to pick them and bring them to Earth for careful scientific analysis. Mars is of great interest to humans because it is believed to have hosted simple life in the past and may do so again now, after the necessary interventions to terraform it.
We still continue to explore the outer Solar System. Two spacecraft, namely Voyagers 1 and 2 have left the Solar System and are now cruising in interstellar space.
In 2026 NASA will launch the Dragonfly mission to Titan, Saturn’s Moon which is bigger than the planet Mercury. It takes 8 years to get to Saturn, so Dragonfly is expected to arrive in 2034.