[X] My Assistant

[dvandorn]

I'm not sure how to say this, but it has to do with the past, and it has to do with the future. So it belongs here.

We're all of us contemplating how we're going to react when one and then the other of the MERs die. But y'all are lucky --- as am I -- in this case. Because while the MERs will die, there will be thousands of exciting images coming in the next few years from MRO. And there will be new landings by Phoenix and MSL, which will provide all of us with fine armchair exploration experiences for many years to come.

When I was growing up, I followed Apollo like most of y'all follow the MERs. I vicariously experienced those first explorations of the Moon just as y'all vicariously experience these first robotic explorations of Mars. I looked forward to each new mission, soaking up the geology needed to understand the selenology that was happening. Examining each new landing site with all of the resources available to a teen-ager in the late '60s and early '70s, looking forward to each new landing, each new traverse.

But as of the end of 1972, no matter what might have been promised or speculated, it all went away. No more lunar exploration. No more visits to the magical place I had visited in spirit, if not in body.

We will all be able to follow the coming Mars explorations and can visit Mars again and again, in spirit if not in body. And that's a very good thing.

But just imagine if, once the last MER died, that was it. No more new vistas. No more new hills, rocks and craters. No more new insights.

Just a part of your soul that will always live in the past.

Just imagine that for a few moments, and then -- welcome to what my last three decades have been like...

So -- we're all lucky that these explorations of Mars will continue, with new vistas to see and new secrets to unravel. Let's all be sure we thank our various gods for that luck...

-the other Doug

[djellison]

The first post in the thread was very interesting. You took that and went in the political direction, and two other people followed. The thread stays - the politics doesn't.

Doug