Is there Life on Mars?

Today, the 3rd and largest Mars exploration robot by far, Curiosity, landed on the Mars surface. It incorporates quite a lot of what was learned from the first 2, particulalrly:

- It used a heat generating plutonium source for thermo-electric power, rather than solar cells as it was found that the solar panels dust up and there is not a lot of light in winter
- To get it to places other rovers haven't reached, by using a retro-rocket firing drop-frame and a winch-down rather than airbags, this is a huge increase in complexity as well as a major advance in technology used - this starts to look like the Sci Fi dropships of the movies. (see video above)
- It is a lot bigger (the size of a small car), so can do more things for longer, and go farther.

A rather nice touch is the Curiosity (@MarsCuriosity - sadly, @curiosity is already someone's dog) team twittered the rover's descent, and it landed with the statement:

I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL

I wonder if it will carry on twittering, telling us where it is day to day like Jodrell Bank does?

Apart from the excitement of getting another rover on mars, I am very interested by what it implies for robotic technology, as the overall system is at a far higher level level of complexity than what was deployed before, and is literally more complex than anything on earth. And of they can make this work on Mars, the potential is huge. This is another step forwatd for mankind, but it is truly a great leap forward for robotkind

Co-incidentally, last week I attended a talk by Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who talked a bit about the manned missions that he believes should follow this work, and be able to stay on the surface awhile. Aldrin believes that we need to do this, because it is hard, and the benefits will be greater than the moon programme. When I was growing up I read Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars" as a science fiction book about Terraforming mars (albeit very well researched), but now - who knows?

(Aldrin also made some pertinent points about using a Mars Landing as a way of motivating the very best "next generation" scientists, technologsts, engineers and mathematicians to have an alternative career path to designing systems that make imaginary money move, or sell advertising to internet eyeballs)