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This week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) successfully landed its most advanced Mars rover, Perseverance, on the surface of another planet.
“Perseverance” is NASA’s fifth rover to successfully land on Mars. When the mission ends, it will cost nearly $ 3 billion.
The new corona virus has devastated the world and the global economy is in trouble. This can be said to be the lowest period of time since humanity entered the space age. Why should we invest the best human science and technology resources on the cold, desolate, radiation-filled “desert planet” right now?
If you don’t understand why NASA wants a “silly” sand dune to take a small helicopter for a “trip” of 100 million miles. So the following three reasons, maybe you need to know.
Ecology of the fragile earth
There is evidence that Mars and Venus, the two planets closest to us, were once habitable. But today, they have become extremely bad ecological places.
The Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater, once thought to be the site of a large river delta that empties into the crater lake, and this environment has likely brought life to life.
But for whatever reason, Mars lost most of its atmosphere, dried up, and became the cold, uninhabitable world we know today.
The ecological environment of Mars, the process of change from good to bad, is worth exploring. If the two neighbors of the earth have a friendly environment for a bad environment for some reason, then we can explore the reasons for them, and perhaps we can prevent the earth from “repeating mistakes”.
We imagine the earth as a great floating ball full of life, but the reality is more fragile.
From orbit, there is a bright green line of oxygen above our planet, marking the edge of our atmosphere. This luminous line reveals the true fragility of the habitable zone of our planet. The habitable zone is not an entire planet, but a “small bubble” on the surface that extends from sea level to a height of several kilometers, not including the polar regions.
From this perspective, people almost feel that this bubble is easy to burst. The Martian bubble will burst, and perhaps Earth too.
Capture the next generation of technology revolution
Former US President Kennedy once said, we do this (to send people to the moon)Not because it is simple, but because it is difficult.
Of course, this is not a real reason: the Apollo program in the space age was largely motivated by military and geopolitical considerations. We wasted a great deal of GDP (gross domestic product) in the space race during the Cold War. It’s more about showing national pride and economic power than science and exploration.
But by entering space, we completely change life on Earth.
There are too many technological changes in communications, the Internet, and they all extend from Project Apollo. It began as a technological competition between great powers and has now changed countless aspects of the daily lives of billions of people.
Exploring Mars requires countless technological and engineering innovations. What we learn from meeting these challenges can unleash the next technological revolution and make 50 years of human life surpass anything we can imagine now.
Elon Musk: the earth is not safe
You have heard this. Elon Musk is currently one of the richest people in the world, he wants to build a city on Mars and turn humans into an “interstellar species”.
Has a point of view accepted by many people. Believe that the earth is not as safe as it seems. Large-scale solar flares, comet impacts, nuclear destruction, environmental collapse, and even disasters we’ve never thought of can destroy the earth.
So it makes sense for humans to have a “backup plan.”(Lei Feng(Public account: Leifeng.com)Red Lei Feng Red Lei Feng)
文章 来源 ： 《NASA Perseverance Rover Landing: Why Should You Care to Go to Mars?
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