“There is much to be learnt from the Indian Mars Orbitor Mission,” said Astronomer Royal Martin Rees on Wednesday at the Commonwealth Science Conference here. “Mars has been a jinx for many previous missions and India has got some well-deserved acclaim for making it in the first attempt.”
The octogenarian astrophysicist, who had his large audience alternate between rapt attention to rapturous laughter as he delivered his lecture ‘From Mars to the mutliverse’, said that however, “there would have been footprints on Mars by now” had the momentum been maintained after NASA’s Apollo programme 40 years ago.
While robotics have made manned missions less practically necessary, he hoped people continue to venture into space, and to Mars. “But I see future manned missions as privately funded high-risk adventure, and not for any practical purpose. The first to Mars will have to be on a one-way ticket. I have said I will go when I am a bit older. Not now.”
NASA’s Curiosity, which has landed a rover the size of “a small car” at the edge of one of Mars’s craters and has travelled 20 miles already to study the geology. Prof. Rees later told The Hindu that while MOM was “more modest in scope and scale” compared to Curiosity, “we have had several past missions fail from silly mistakes, and MOM succeeded”.
There could be as many as a billion Earth-like planets in the galaxy, he said in his lecture. “What people really want to know is: could there be life on them – even intelligent life?”
Perhaps the cosmos teems with life, said Prof Rees. “On the other hand, our Earth could be unique among the billions of planets that surely exist. That would be dressing for the searchers. But it would allow us to be less cosmically modest. Earth, though tiny, could be the most complex and interesting entity in the entire galaxy.”