As of today, we have a robot explorer in orbit
around Mercury with a year's rent paid up
(and hopefully the lease will be renewed if
it does good).
We also have a presence in orbit at the planet
Venus, working there since 2006, and mappers
clicking away in our own backyard, at the Moon.
Mars is crawled with rovers, orbited by imagers,
and being mapped to a sharper resolution that
we have charted our own planet, and more of
our machines are readying to join them.
Out at Saturn, Cassini, a plutonium-powered
robot will carry on its long investigation of that
entire miniature solar system out there. And
Spring is starting on Titan!
We have been poking our noses into comets
this year, after smacking them to see what
happens, and snatching pieces and bringing
them home.
This summer, another of our robots will visit
a large asteroid (No. 4) for the first time. In a year
or so it will move on to the largest asteroid, while
the most ambitious of long-haul robots dashes
toward Pluto. We will be at Ceres when it gets
to Pluto... and Cassini will still be working Saturn.
There are only three planets we're not already at
nor going to. We are all over the place. Does this
qualify for a Golden Age? (The first one being the
Voyager Grand Tour.)
If the Aliens are watching, they probably have the
Sol System in their books as one that already has
a dominant species, have written it off for colonization,
and are getting ready to move on.
No, the Aliens are not the problem. I worry instead
about the Wise Men of the Potomac who want to
beach the fleet and burn it on the shore in order to
save the Republic from the perils of exploration.
Sterling K. Webb
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