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COPYRIGHT 2007 International Technology Education Association
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What is the weirdest, most alien, eye-popping, nose-shocking, skin-crawling place you can think of?
Ponder these destinations:
1. Clouds rain gasoline, forming huge lakes.
2. Volcanoes spew red-hot lava and the sky is full of poisonous sulfur gas.
3. As far as you can see in all directions is bright white ice, broken only by dark, rough rivers of more ice.
4. It is far colder than Earth's South Pole all the time.
5. It's hot enough to melt lead, and the atmosphere weighs down on you as if you were diving far beneath the ocean's surface.
These would not be healthy places for humans or just about any other Earthlings.
But, believe it or not, all these environments are real places in our own solar system.
They are, in order ...
1. Titan (moon of Saturn)
2. Io (moon of Jupiter)
3. Europa (moon of Jupiter)
4. Mars, Pluto, and most places in the solar system
5. Venus
No person has ever visited any of these places. Then how do we know what they are like? Because we have sent our technological "spies" to investigate, and they have faithfully reported back their often surprising findings.
Build 'em Tough
We have sent light sensors, image makers, rock sniffers, matter analyzers, magnetic field sensors, temperature detectors, particle counters, pressure indicators, and sample collectors. These instruments, for the most part, have given us information that even our own five senses would not be able to tell us had we gone to these places personally--that is, if we could survive and operate in these harsh surroundings, which we couldn't.
All the instruments we have sent into space were designed and built especially to operate in these harsh, alien environments. They are tough enough to withstand huge temperature extremes, intense radiation, and the vacuum of space. They are sturdy enough to withstand the bone-rattling vibration of being blasted off the surface of Earth on a rocket.
How do NASA engineers know what kinds of planetary instruments to develop in the first place? Well, they ask. What do scientists want to know about space and about alien worlds? And, once engineers know the questions to be answered, they use their know-how, ingenuity, and imaginations to come up with the kind of "sense enhancer" that will get the right kind of information and be tough enough to survive its task.
Expanding Our Senses
Here...
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