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VOICES OF OUR TIME - Alan Binder

Clearly the 1900s' most important development is space exploration. Apollo didn't open doors for further space exploration because we threw the opportunity away. The big political development was the fall of communism. It's nice to have nuclear annihilation threats gone. Now we can beat swords into plowshares and explore space. Necessity is the mother of invention. Until now, war was the mother of necessity. Space offers better alternatives: expansion beyond Earth. 100 years will bring well-developed moon, Mars or even Mercury colonies. We'll explore our solar system with manned or unmanned missions and send unmanned probes to other solar systems.
Gilroy resident Alan Binder, founder and director of Lunar Research Institute and principal investigator for the Lunar Prospector spacecraft which crashed on the moon, moved to Tucson AZ to research Prospector's data.

A swarm of cunning robots - some only several inches wide - soon may swarm, float, walk, swim, fly, creep, burrow and hop across alien worlds. Skateboard-size Mars robot Sojourner ventured like an excited puppy sniffing Mars' soil and bumping into rocks. A July 2002 U S - Japan mission goes to an asteroid the diameter of 6 football fields, its gravity 1/100,000 Earth's. Escape velocity is 3 feet per second (compared to several miles per second for Earth) strolling pace for a long-legged adult. The robot would move 8 inches per second, 100 or more meters (over 300 feet) up.

Aerobots with TV cameras float above Mars and Saturn's moon Titan. A balloon on Venus floats 30 miles up, dropping cameras toward a searing-hot surface typically veiled by an extremely dense atmosphere. Another balloon periodically lowers measuring instruments to Venus' surface, rising to cool off so instruments won't melt on a surface hot enough to melt lead. Another balloon's robot gathers rock samples. Rising, an onboard rocket fires it into orbit to rendezvous with another rocket ferrying the samples to Earth. A balloon surveys Jupiter's multicolored mega-hurricanes. An Earth-like hydrogen balloon, not buoyant enough to float in Jupiter's hydrogen-rich atmosphere, would be kept aloft partly by heat absorbed from sunlight and by large amounts of internal heat Jupiter emits as it slowly contracts under its enormous gravity.

4-legged nanobots as big as cigar boxes explore asteroids or other worlds and establish colonies. Nanobots get cold easily. Smaller objects cool faster than large ones because smaller object's surfaces are bigger relative to overall volume than larger objects. This is one reason why small planets like Mars apparently have no active volcanoes: Their internal heat escaped to space long ago. Nanobots will be too small to carry on-board heaters. Heat shields could keep them warm and protected from high-speed interstellar particles called galactic cosmic rays. Added weight of shielding would obviate the advantage of small size. Nanobot electronics must endure deep space temperature extremes from boiling-hot daytimes to nighttime temperatures -300 degrees F. 3 8 x 16 inch octagons, Nanosat Constellation Trailblazers, launched in 2003 will test new electronics and other equipment's ability to survive near the boundary of Earth's protective magnetic field.

3 to 6 foot worms 1 1/2 inch thick drill at least a mile into Mars' crust looking for buried microbes in ground water. The robot, connected to the surface by long wires and capillary tubes, would transmit electric power from solar panels on the surface. The tubes, filled with liquid CO2 condensed from Mars' atmosphere, would pump subsurface grains and maybe microbes to the surface. The worm would drill through the crust by repeatedly firing a tungsten hammer into the rock. Its technical name is robotic subsurface explorer or SSX, a self-hammering nail. A spherical robot floats aboard ship, allowing busy astronauts to check on experiments in other labs, or dangerous situations such as gas leaks. Robotic submarines in an icy Europa ocean seek life forms. Mini-helicopters maneuver through Mars' atmosphere. 2-legged walking robots navigate rough terrain.