Is There Any Hope for Planetary Big-Science Beyond Curiosity? Maybe Not

You’d think we’d never sent a multi-billion dollar rover to Mars before. Or sent a spacecraft there, or even seen the Red Planet up close for that matter. The PR push behind NASA’s latest big-ticket endevour was astounding. Times Square! It’s almost as if it was 1965 and NASA was sending its first spacecraft to the planet, Mariner 4, a flyby that cost $83 million in 1965 dollars. That was our first big revelation that Mars was mostly a dead moonscape of rocks and desolation. Six years later, Mariner 9 went into Martian orbit, revealing yet more sharp, desolate geography. Cost: $137 million.

Mariner 9 was the first man-made object to circle another planet, and it was also a rather harsh reality check. The event got a sliver of

The New York Times

front-page, with the story reporting, “[Mariner 9] is the first to get a close-up view of the Mars of fanciful dreams, of legendary civilizations and, in reality, of reddish deserts and craters, polar caps and occasional dust storms.” Five years later came NASA’s Viking spacecrafts, a combined one billion dollar mission made up of two orbiters and two landers, with the prior crafts revealing a chaotic landscape carved and torn by massive ancient floods, but still desolate as fuck. The landers, meanwhile, did experiments on the soil looking for metabolites and the organic compounds resulting from/neccessary for life to exist. After one false-positive, the landers turned up nothing hopeful.

Finally, in 1997, we got our first rover on Mars, the 11 kg Sojourner, at a cost of $171 million. In 2004, the Opporitunity and Spirit rovers arrived on the planet, costing $410 million each. Meanwhile, Curiosity’s run NASA about $2.5 billion. Over 20 missions, we’ve sent five flybys, nine orbiters, three landers, and three rovers to Mars, delivering hundreds of thousands of images and hundreds of terabytes of data back to Earth. But, almost a half-century later, our Mars missions are delivering dimishing returns, a News Focus in last week’s issue of Science argues. We can see Martian land features very closely now but, in terms of geology and spectral imaging, we’re mainly just confirming old hypothesis, not developing new perceptions of the planet.

Will Curiosity do that? Will it reveal a big something to change how we think of Mars? Well, once again we’re looking for bio-markers on the Martian surface, different forms of carbon that may indicate whether life has ever existed on the planet. To do this, it has a bunch of cool stuff capable of drilling and scooping, and then analyzing the content of all that scooped and drilled stuff via various extremely clever methods. Will it do anything other than reinforce old negatives from prior rover missions? The idea is that Curiosity has a much wider exploration range than its predecessors — that is still nothing given the size of the planet — so maybe. But we’ve also done a whole lot of poking at Martian dirt over the past 45 years (many terabytes worth of poking), so I’m not sure I’d be throwing down money on that bet.

The thing is that I don’t actually like Curiosity that much, to be honest, or NASA’s continued efforts to spend billions of dollars on science largely dictated by politics. I get that flashy projects that resonate with the largest possible cross-section of the public are in the interests of keeping NASA a well-funded entity, but at the same time, somehow Europe managed to deliver $9 billion for the Large Hadron Collider, whose scientific mission isn’t even particularly understandable for vast swaths of the people paying for it.

But the LHC and Martian exploration are different kinds of science, OK, and maybe I shouldn’t be comparing planetary science with particle physics. With Curiosity on the ground and doing science, we’re now onto figuring the next thing in planetary science. Last March, the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academies delivered its Planetary Science Decadal Survey, a broad polling of thousands of people in the U.S. planetary science community. The report actually looks at a few different price tiers of missions but, among flagship projects (the very biggest), the winner was a Martian sample-return mission. Which is just what it sounds like — collecting and returning to Earth samples of Martian stuff.

It would cost around $8 billion, and actually consist of three different flagship missions: one to get a rover to Mars, another to get samples into Martian orbit, and, finally, a mission to get the samples from Martian orbit to Earth. It’s insane actually, in terms of money and in terms of likely failure. But a sample-return mission is all we have; this is the logic driving the team that made Martian recommendations to the survey. That team, led by Arizona State’s Phil Christensen, went for an all-or-nothing approach, that, with respect to spending billions of dollars on them, we’ve gone as far as we can science-wise with rovers and orbiters. Our only option is a massive sample-return mission-suite.

“No one is going to let us keep sending rovers,” Christensen tells Science. The committee devoted to Mars anticipated that if it recommended anything but sample-return as a flagship future project — like more rovers or orbiters — Mars would have lost out with a ranking of seventh among other, non-Martian contenders. And it did not lose out to anything, however, and a Mars sample-return mission came out ahead of anything else on the survey’s list of potential missions. Among those missions, you’ll find relatively cheap trips to investigate the ice-covered Jupiter moon Europa, a Uranus probe, a return to Venus (that other, sadly neglected Earth-neighbor), and a mission to Saturn’s moon Enceladus and its enticing polar geyser, another potential zone for alien life. According to, again, Science that last mission would run about $1.9 billion, which in the world of planetary flagship projects is a bargain.

And that’s $1.9 billion for exploring somewhere we haven’t even been yet, let alone 20 times. Talk about returns — any perspective gained on Enceladus is a perspective changed. NASA planetary scientist Chris McKay is an Enceladus enthusiast. Last week he told NPR’s All Things Considered, “Of all the places in our solar system, It’s the only place I know of where right now we can check all the boxes for habitability: water, energy, carbon, nitrogen — check, check, check, check.”

What it lacks, however, is instant gratification. It would take 15 years to get there and back with samples. As a smallish space snowball with a difficult to pronounce name, Enceladus also lacks Martian sexiness. Nor does it have the presidential backing of eventual Enceladus human exploration. I can’t even think of a movie starring Enceladus.

Most of this is moot right now, of course. President Obama, the human Mars exploration supporter, chopped NASA’s Mars program by nearly half in his 2013 budget request, while also taking the axe to about a quarter of the agency’s general planetary science budget. That leaves any new flagship mission to rot, and probably for a good while. Let’s just hope that Curiosity doesn’t fall into a pothole.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

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