Last Tuesday, August 27th, Mars was closer to earth than it had been for 60,000 years. Therefore this week's Pic of the Week (actually five pictures joined together) represents my attempts to capture at least a semi-decent image of the planet on this historic occasion. The top three reddish splotches represent photos of Mars taken through an upstairs window of my home on August 23. The bottom two were taken at the local university observatory at BSU on August 28. Basically, I just stuck my camera lens, fully zoomed, up to the viewfinder of the telescope and clicked. I have no idea why the two images are so different from each other in terms of size, color and brightness. If you'd like to get a slightly better look at Mars, you can check out the Hubble images, taken with moderately better equipment than I have.
It's rather unfortunate when one considers just how much impetus NASA has lost since the early 70s. We've lost a golden opportunity. With the close approach of Mars, now would have been the ideal time for a manned mission. Travel time there and back would be minimized, and that would have cut down on costs and increased safety. We can still do it at a later date, of course, but the planets don't line up this way for our convenience very often, and it's not as if didn't know decades in advance that this would occur. The last time it did, neanderthals walked the earth. Perhaps if Nixon had not made that fateful decision to cut funding to Apollo in favor of developing the space shuttle, inertia alone might have carried us forward so that today the first astronauts to Mars would be there right now, completing their mission and preparing for the trip home, perhaps even leaving behind a small band of colonists. Another opportunity was missed in the 1980s when Russia, through Gorbachev, expressed a desire to set up a joint US/USSR Mars mission, and Reagan refused to commit. (Sorry, I couldn't find a good reference for this.) I truly cannot fathom the lack of vision by our leaders. Even a simple trip to moon is no longer within out grasp; the old Apollo crafts were not even mothballed -- they were scrapped! It would take us years to design and build the equipment again.
Perhaps our only hope now lies with such private organizations as the Mars Society and the X PRIZE Foundation. The may lack the funding and resources of the US government, but at least they've got vision.