The Little Robot That Could

I'm writing this on the Thursday of what has been a long week. The ACS national meeting began late last week, ran through the weekend, and is coming to an end today. I love ACS meetings, but they are grueling. And the news of increasing despair in the wake of Hurricane Katrina weighed heavily on all C&EN staff.

We're closing a terrific issue of C&EN today, but it seems many people here at the magazine are exhausted.

Looking at e-mail during a spare moment this afternoon, I opened a press release from the National Aeronautics & Space Administration titled "NASA's Durable Spirit Sends Intriguing New Images From Mars" and clicked on one of the images. A rocky, barren, red landscape came into view. Robin Giroux, C&EN's assistant managing editor for editing and production, came into my office with changes to the letters pages, and I said, "Hey, look at this."

"What is it?" she asked. "Iraq?"

"No, Mars," I said.

The Spirit rover landed on Mars in February 2004 for a three-month mission. It's still going strong, having now driven 3 miles across the martian terrain. The images that were the subject of the NASA press release--two of which we have reproduced here--were taken from the summit of an 82-meter-high hill that Spirit has spent the past 15 months climbing. During the climb, the mobile robot has been exploring the geology of the hill, especially looking for signs of water in the exposed rock.

NASA has taken a lot of lumps over the past several years in the wake of the Columbia disaster and the further mishaps with foam shedding from the external fuel tank during the recent mission of space shuttle Discovery. Much of the criticism has been well-deserved. NASA has done many things right, however, and deserves praise for them.

Most of the things it has done right have involved unmanned probes of the solar system. The panorama (with a portion of Spirit in the foreground) from a low martian hill--with an outcrop in the near distance, a low hill in the mid-distance, and a major mountain on the distant horizon--stirs the soul. The black-and-white image is of a region we have never seen before; Spirit, like a mountaineer, peers for the first time over the ridge it has taken so many months to climb. For all our flaws, we humans are remarkable creatures, and our exploration of Mars and the other planets and bodies of the solar system is one of our proudest achievements.

Thanks for reading.