After Venus, How About a Mission to Our Own Planet? : Exploration: We've mapped our celestial neighborhood, but 71% of Earth remains relatively uncharted.

After Venus, How About a Mission to Our Own Planet? : Exploration: We’ve mapped our celestial neighborhood, but 71% of Earth remains relatively uncharted.

By PETER J. WYLLIE

June 10, 1991 12 AM PT

<i> Peter J. Wyllie is a professor of geology at Caltech</i>

The other evening, television news programs treated us to a spectacular flight over the rugged mountains and volcanoes of Venus. Spaceship Magellan has pierced the cloudy veil of our neighbor planet with radar beams, and scientists at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have taken the radar images and turned them into colorful three-dimensional, stereographic pictures of the planet’s surface.

Project engineers have now managed to record detailed pictures of more than 84% of Venus’ surface.

This means that we now have a more complete map of Venus than we have of our own Earth, because only 29% of the Earth’s surface has been mapped in detail. The remaining 71% of the surface is beneath the ocean, and most of this is relatively uncharted. Many surprises on this hidden frontier await discovery.

That we have a better surface map of Venus than we do of the Earth is an enormous credit to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, JPL and the Magellan. At the same time, however, is it not an indictment of our national science policy that the study of Earth has lagged in some ways behind extraterrestrial exploration?

“We now have the technology and the incentive to move boldly forward on a mission to planet Earth,” states a National Academy of Sciences task group headed by Caltech geophysicist Don Anderson. “We call on the nation to implement an integrated global program using both space-borne and Earth-based instrumentation for fundamental research on the origin, evolution and nature of our planet, and its interaction with living things, including mankind.”

NASA has now adopted Mission to Planet Earth, which is due to begin its flight program in September with the launch of the upper atmosphere research satellite.

Earth scientists have become aware that it is both necessary and possible to examine the Earth and its various parts as one complete, interconnected system. New instruments are ready to monitor the whole Earth from space, to determine the Earth’s internal structure and workings and to analyze its smallest particles.

It would surely be a good investment for the United States to support an integrated space-borne and ground-based Mission to Planet Earth.