Perseverance landing dares us to dream
Pity our science fiction authors.
It must be getting harder for their imaginations to soar above reality, to create worlds different from our own. Look around you. The future is here, a universe filled with technological marvels unfathomable decades, even years, ago — iphones, driverless vehicles, gene editing. The list seems endless. What makes these inventions even more astounding is they will soon seem quaint, as if they were always part of our daily existence. And, for the young, that is true; they have always been here.
Let’s not take these breakthroughs for granted. Cue the Perseverance rover landing on Mars. The national networks reported the news, but it was the third or fourth item on most broadcasts, understandable in a week of catastrophic weather throughout much of the nation, including Texas. And yet …
The video was breathtaking. Perseverance descending 1,000 miles per hour, the aircraft blazing to what looked like a crash landing. And then, within the blink of an eye, the parachute opened, the fabric billowing like a sail, and the craft landed with a gentle thud.
With clouds of dust scattering as the rover approached the Martian surface, the soft landing was not a given. NASA staffers held their breath until NASA aerospace engineer Swati Mohan said: “Touchdown confirmed!”
It would be easy to say that it was, like the moon landing of the Apollo 11 in 1969, a once-in-alifetime event. But we know better. Scientists are so talented, science is so far-reaching, that we are sure to see such breakthroughs again and again. If the moon landing represented “a giant step for mankind,” the Perseverance landing was another footprint in the soil. Science fiction come to life. It merited the same kind of reaction that greeted the moon landing, the jaw-dropping, mind-blowing response of an entire generation. With high-powered drills that took years to develop, Perseverance will collect soil and rock samples to determine if life, at some point, existed on Mars. Follow-up missions, which have yet to be funded, will retrieve the samples and return them to Earth. The analysis, scientists say, may take years.
“What’s at stake,” Ken Farley, a project scientist, told reporters, “is the ability to really make the first step in answering the question of whether life exists elsewhere.”
There are critics who say we should spend the money — billions of dollars — elsewhere. We understand the argument. We have colossal problems we must confront and, ultimately, solve — hunger, racism, unemployment.
But it’s a shortsighted argument. We must also recognize that the flight of Perseverance represented a search for knowledge — a wondrous journey of discovery and enlightenment. That scientific endeavors breed innovation and deeper understanding. Nothing is more important to our future, whether the knowledge is acquired on Earth or in space. Knowledge has eradicated disease, improved communications, eroded the distance between nations and continents.
At a time when we seem powerless against nature — represented by both the weather and the pandemic — the rover landing showed the almost limitless capacity of humanity to achieve. Scientists break boundaries, allow us to see and experience what has never been seen or experienced. We should glory in that recognition during these hard times.
On Feb. 20, two days after the landing, NASA hinted at the existence of a secret message on the parachute. It consisted of red and white stripes, arranged in concentric circles. Amateur detectives, studying the images on the internet, cracked the code within hours:
“Dare mighty things.”