[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 18 (Thursday, February 12, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E168]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                NASA'S MARS ROVER AND SPACE EXPLORATION

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                          HON. LAMAR S. SMITH

                                of texas

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, February 11, 2004

  Mr. SMITH of Texas. Mr. Speaker, few scientists write as well as Seth 
Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, 
California. This column he wrote about the Mars rover for the San Jose 
Mercury News offers compelling arguments for pursuing scientific 
discoveries and exploring space.

             [From the San Jose Mercury News, Jan. 7, 2004]

           Geologist On Wheels Takes Human Curiosity to Mars


               OUR DRIVE TO EXPLORE LEADS TO BETTER LIVES

                           (By Seth Shostak)

       One hundred million miles away, the mechanical innards of 
     NASA's Spirit rover have begun to hum in the brittle cold of 
     the Martian air. The rover is a synthetic geologist on 
     wheels, small enough to fit in your kitchen, and the space 
     agency is reveling in the fact that Spirit has managed to 
     elude the silent death that has claimed so many of 
     humankind's envoys to the Red Planet.
       The boost to NASA's confidence, badly eroded by the loss of 
     the shuttle Columbia, is surely a good thing. If Spirit and 
     its sister rover, Opportunity, perform well, the Bush 
     administration may support a major new space initiative, 
     perhaps a return to the moon or a human expedition to Mars.
       Those would also be good things, but such judgments, 
     coming, from a scientist, may seem obvious and self-serving. 
     American taxpayers will rightfully ask why it's important to 
     shell out $800 million to send a pair of cybernetic 
     skateboards to another world.


                            Martian charisma

       One answer is the interest and value of the science. For 
     two centuries, Mars has beguiled us with its Earth-like 
     appearance. Venus is closer, but Mars is charismatic; it is 
     sufficiently similar to our own planet to warrant the hope 
     that it once spawned life. And the possibility of discovering 
     life beyond Earth is a siren song to anyone with curiosity, 
     even if, as is surely the case for Mars, that life is no more 
     sophisticated than bread yeast.
       NASA's approach to learning whether microbes ever populated 
     the Red Planet is to look for signs of ancient lakes, rivers 
     or oceans. Spirit will explore a flat-bottomed crater that 
     may once have held a body of water half the size of Lake 
     Erie. Its mission is to find evidence for this erstwhile lake 
     by examining the rocks littering the crater floor.


                             signs of life?

       If Spirit discovers that water once ebbed and flowed on 
     Mars, the next questions are: For how long? Long enough to 
     germinate life? NASA will send a string of robot explorers to 
     address this question, and to ultimately seek out microscopic 
     Martians. The carrot that hangs before us is deliciously 
     seductive: If another world--the next world out from the 
     sun--is proved to have supported life, that would imply that 
     the cosmos is drenched with living things. We could concluded 
     that planets with life are as common as phone poles.
       That's the science, and it's exciting. But science is no 
     more than curiosity imbued with logic. Surely, in a world 
     awash in political upheaval, epidemics and poverty, curiosity 
     is a dispensable luxury.
       It's not. Curiosity is hard-wired into our behavior because 
     it has survival value. For 300 millenniums, it has driven us 
     to exploration and understanding. The former has encouraged 
     the discovery of new resources, and the latter allows us a 
     comfortable life in a pitiless world.
       Curiosity is the silent motor of progress, without which we 
     are condemned to a steadily worsening existence as we burn 
     through our resources.


                          answering questions

       Humans display many behaviors that separate us from the 
     beasts. Art, music, poetry . . . the list is easily 
     formulated. Curiosity, neither incidental nor trivial, is on 
     that list. In simpler times, it drove our ancestors to wander 
     across the mountains and, on occasion, to find a valley that 
     was better than where they started. Today, scientific 
     curiosity turns up answers to questions that previous 
     generations could barely ask.
       The Spirit rover is a small actor in a long play with a 
     large cast. It is aptly named, for it represents not only the 
     best of our enterprises, but also an essential quality of our 
     being. Spirit is mechanical in construction only. It is 
     quintessentially human.

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