Technology Watch—Robots - The Future For NASA?
Friday, January 22, 2010 at 03:11PM 
Robots - The Future For NASA?
By Doug Wetzel
Impossible. That's what the 2009 Augustine committee reported about prospects for NASA's human exploration of space, at least for the next seven years. NASA's budget issues remain at the top of the list holding humans from space but the same future may not hold true for its robots.
Two recent robot adventurers, rovers Spirit and Opportunity, lend credence to the idea that NASA's future may rapidly become reliant on robots to carry out missions in space. The Mars exploring rovers cost the agency more than $400 million apiece but have returned nearly six years of insightful data and imagery from the red planet's surface.
Contrast this against the charge for merely launching human passengers into orbit via space shuttle, at roughly $450 million per launch, and the fiscal benefits become quickly apparent. Not to mention, space shuttles such as Endeavour cost the agency almost $1.7 billion to manufacture alone.
NASA's Space Faring Robots of the Past
The Mars rovers aren't the first robots to plumb the mysteries of space for NASA. In fact, robots have investigated and visited more locations in our solar system than any human--oftentimes to locales an astronaut couldn't survive.
In 1973 the robotic space probe Mariner 10 traveled to the inner system planets of Mercury and Venus while its younger sister, Mariner 9, made the trip to Mars more than thirty years before Spirit and Opportunity. Alongside, Pioneer Venus 2 ejected robotic probes which dared an actual foot landing on the surface of Venus, a vacation spot bragging temperatures well over 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
One of those probes managed to survive the risky descent and dutifully report back for 45 minutes inside roasting temperatures and atmospheric pressure that no sane human would tempt. Clearly robots can take an exploratory role that would be too costly and too dangerous for a person.
