Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

AAAS: JPL’s status report from the golden age of the robots

The head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory takes stock of what's in place and …

I would claim that, in scientific terms, we're living in the golden age of genomes, while the full promise of robotics has yet to arrive. Dr. Charles Elachi, the head of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, would argue that robots are actually having their golden age right now; they're just having it in space. He gave the audience at the AAAS meeting plenty of reasons to agree with him as he recapped the missions in progress and others still in the works.

It's hard to say anything new about the Mars rovers; they simply continue to be amazing. They're starting to show their age, with a jammed wheel and a frozen shoulder, but, given that they were supposed to die from dust-covered solar panels years ago, they're aging gracefully. Elachi also mentioned the next Mars mission, which will touch down to explore the Martian polar permafrost on Memorial Day in late May. He said you could set your watch by the landing, but they'd still be watching carefully to make sure that will be a soft one.

Next up, he highlighted Cassini, with its discoveries of the geysers of Enceladus and the discovery of methane lakes and oceans by its companion probe, Huygens. Managed properly, Cassini will continue to function for at least eight more years, and scientists are already planning to fly it through the plumes of Enceladus' geysers to get a better sense of the material that's being shot into space from an unseen liquid reservoir.

Elachi told a great story about the Deep Impact probe, which slammed a projectile into comet Tempel-1 and observed the resulting debris plume. That plume surprised JPL, because it was much larger than expected—so large, in fact, that it obscured the crater until after Deep Impact was past the comet. Fortunately, someone found a solution: the Stardust probe, which dropped off a sample of material from a comet's tail to earth, was still operational and its path could be tweaked to swing it by Tempel-1. That flyby, and a closer view of the impact crater, should be happening in the near future.

A number of yet-to-be-launched missions were also highlighted. These include GRAIL, a pair of satellites that will orbit the moon to do detailed gravitational maps of its internal composition; this follows on the success of a similar system orbiting the earth. The two largest asteroids, Vesta and Ceres, will be getting visits from Dawn, NASA's first craft with an argon ion engine. The efficiency of this engine is key to allowing one craft to orbit Vesta for a few years starting in 2011, and still maintain enough power to move on to Ceres in 2015. Elachi also mentioned a new Jupiter orbiter, Juno, that's on schedule for 2011.

Elachi moved on to describe space-based observatories, a topic he introduced by highlighting the success of the Spitzer space telescope, which has allowed us to image stars that represent nearly every stage of the stellar lifecycle. He went on to describe a series of missions that might get us our first detailed view of extrasolar planets, and mentioned the prospects for creating an orbiting gravity wave observatory. A number of earth-focused observatories were also discussed, the most intriguing being a satellite that will be capable of mapping carbon fluxes in real time.

Overall, Elachi made a strong case that it's a good time to be a robot, especially if you're in outer space. Given that he's probably much smarter than I am, I won't be arguing with him.

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