Roving the red planet

摘要

There are Martians among us. Hundreds of them, living on Earth but working on Mars, telecommuting to and fro as part of the interplanetary science and exploration programme conducted by NASA and other space agencies. These Martians are the men and women who help to control robots such as the Mars rovers on the red planet's surface, or any of the three satellites orbiting Mars and acquiring remote-sensing data. But both the media and the public tend to anthropomorphize the rovers as the explorers in this frontier world.