Robotic Probes Quotes

When I was a kid, I was reliably informed that we'd have gone to Mars by 1985, and of course it's 2012, and we're still really no closer to a human expedition to Mars, but that shouldn't detract from the amazing achievements that are being done on a day-to-day basis by robotic envoys.

'The Martian' may be fiction, but at NASA, we are working to make it a reality.

If two billion people wanted to watch a robot fly by Pluto, imagine what it will be like when the first humans step on Mars. It'll be the most unifying event anybody could ever put on.

I'm one of the most durable and fervent advocates of space exploration, but my take is that we could do it robotically at far less cost and far greater quantity and quality of results.

Pascal Lee is a true pioneer of Mars exploration.

As we visit Mars multiple times, we will build up infrastructure on the surface to expand the capabilities and reach of humans on Mars.

While human space travel is daunting, machines - with their indefinitely long lifetimes - could travel the galaxy. It might make little difference to them that bridging the distance from one star to the next could take hundreds of thousands of years or more.

Chances are, the aliens will not want to land on our backyard, or even the White House lawn, with their flying saucers. They may have tiny, robotic self-replicating probes which can reach near light speed and can proliferate around the galaxy. So instead of the Enterprise and huge star ships, the aliens might actually send tiny probes to explore the universe. One might land on our lawn and we won't even know.

A permanent base on Mars would have a number of advantages beyond being a bonanza for planetary science and geology. If, as some evidence suggests, exotic micro-organisms have arisen independently of terrestrial life, studying them could revolutionise biology, medicine and biotechnology.

One thing that I find very unmotivating is the kind of Plan B argument: when Earth gets destroyed, you want to be somewhere else. That doesn't work for me. We have sent robotic probes now to every place in the solar system, and this is the best one.