Despite captivating our attention, wonder and awe of being Earth like, Mars still lacks a financial incentive for even visiting the red planet.
Although there are plenty of reasons not to go to visit this crimson world, all of these can be overcome technologically or medically if Mars displays a valuable resource for humanity to exploit.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may change all of this as it circles the red globe analyzing the Martian surface.
(Astrobiology Magazine) "We're finding that Mars has even more compositional diversity and complicated geology than had been revealed by instruments on other Mars orbiters," says Dr. Scott Murchie, CRISM principal investigator from the Applied Physics Laboratory. "With CRISM's help, this mission is going to rewrite our understanding of the planet."
"CRISM's high spatial resolution provides the means to not only identify a greater range of minerals on Mars but also to associate them with small scale geologic features," says Dr. Sue Smrekar, deputy MRO project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The result is a tremendous leap forward in interpreting the geologic processes and volatile environments that created different rocks throughout the history of Mars."
While the satellite is providing valuable data regarding rock formation (as well as hints of ancient water ways) hopefully it can be used to find out whether there are precious metals (i.e. gold, silver or platinum), iron or titanium on the surface.
After all if we are going to eventually live on the red planet, then we are going to have to find a way to make a living while camping away from "Earthen influence." If not, then Mars may at best be a boring tourism planet, where only geologists and scientists find great joy in exploring its surface.
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You can either visit the stars or watch them from afar.
But if you choose the former, you'll definitely get a better view.
~Darnell Clayton, 2007
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