The red planet. The next stop for exploration. The controversial topic of sending a man up to the planet Mars raises questions when thinking of the risks, and technology required to do so. When Kennedy addressed the issue of sending a man to the moon, he replied, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard” (Balogh 5). For the time, sending a man to the moon tested the limits, but that was the point. It has shown that humankind can succeed in reaching their goals that seem too out of reach. Sending people to Mars has the same effect. It will challenge technology and human limits, but sending a man to Mars would reestablish curiosity for the wonders of space, bring …show more content…
These robots are called probes. A probe is an unmanned spacecraft that has been designed to explore the environment it is inserted into and to transmit information about that environment back to the controller. In total, separate corporations or governments dispatched forty-four probes with twenty-four complete failures (“Historical Log”). As time has gone on, technological advances have increased the chance of success. Since 2001, there has been a total of eight successful missions out of the ten that were executed (“Historical Log”). The first six attempts to send a probe to Mars befell different difficulties that did not allow them to reach their destination, but on the seventh attempt, a US probe reached its destination. Probe Mariner 4 was a flyby mission, meaning as it passed by it took photos of the planet, that sent twenty-one photos back to mission control (“Historical Log”). With every failed mission, the scientists building these probes learned their mistakes and worked to fix them. With every success, they learned something they did right and worked to improve on that system. For example, after the Mars Observer disappeared and deemed a failure- which cost one billion dollars- the agency’s administrators and policy makers sat down and worked through what would be the new strategy for the agency: faster, better, cheaper. A demonstration of how this new strategy came about through the Mars Pathfinder which proved to be a success and validated the agency’s new method. Although probes aren’t as observant as humans, we have still learned a large quantity about Mars from them. We have learned that Mars is about .11 the size of Earth as well as having a slight pear-shaped appearance (“Mars”). We have learned that in spite of the fact that the Earth has a size edge over Mars, Mars has canyons that causes the