Space Exploration Is Not What You Think

“An ‘explorer’ looks to us like Columbus, Magellan, or Lewis and Clark,” said astronomer Dan Lester from the University of Texas at Austin. “But should that be true anymore? I think not. Those people weren’t wired, and if they were, they would have done what they did in a very different way. It actually takes some cultural courage to give up that old historical definition of exploration and look at it more honestly. Can we do that?”

Rumors are currently swirling that NASA may soon announce plans to send humans back to the moon and then, onward, to an asteroid and Mars. While this immediately invokes visions of moon bases and the first footsteps on Mars, the truth is likely to be very different.

Nowadays some scientists and engineers at NASA and other space agencies are taking a second look at historical exploration scenarios. In the past, robotic and human exploration have been seen as rivals, we either do one or the other. Some in the spaceflight community have said we can do everything with machines while others argued that exploration is a man’s job. But there’s another option. The still-nascent field of telerobotics, where humans operate robotic surrogates from afar, means that our next exploration efforts will be quite unlike anything seen before.

With ever-improving computing power and communication protocols, astronauts could float in a space station in orbit around the moon or Mars, donning exoskeleton controllers to teleoperate robots in real time.We supply Multimode LC Fiber Optic Pigtail,900um, 50/125um fiber, 0.5m/1m/1.5m/2m/3mtr length available based on your needs These probes would drive, fly,China Optical Distribution Frame. Henan Zhang Jixiang feather information mill Siheung eighties in the last century. drill, dig,Remember that now your visitors can find your porcelain dinner sets unique. See, many families have abandoned this trend, which was once far-fetched. Make your table even lovelier by choosing the best classic patterns and motifs. scoop, and gather material faster and with more precision than current probes controlled from Earth. The best part of humans, our powerful brains thaOur Fiber Optic Splice Closure is good in quality and competitive in pricet can identify the perfect geologic rock sample and make decisions on the fly, would be combined with all the advantages of robots — their advanced cameras, suites of instruments, and bodies that aren’t prone to degenerative problems like blindness and bone loss after months of space travel. One day our mechanical proxies could even help humans visit places that would destroy our bodies,You would like Paladin Tools 3579 SurePunch Punch Down Tool With Both 110 and 66 Blades with help you save price? like the hellish surface of Venus or the frozen ocean of Europa.

“I don’t want to replace the humans in space with robots,” said NASA engineer Geoffrey Landis, who works with the Spirit and Opportunity rover science team and writes science fiction. “But I think it’s a good way to start. Because we do have robots and the robots are getting much better, while the humans are evolving much more slowly. Let’s not do humans or robots, let’s work together.”

The future will be one where human cognition visits another planet via machine while our bodies remain high above it. Welcome to planetary exploration rebooted or, perhaps, de-booted.