We need space exploration; without it, we heirs of Western civilization risk becoming a frontierless folk culture engaged in endless self-reflection. The Galileo robot spacecraft's continuing tour of Jupiter's mini-s olar system is an important part of this late twentieth century adventure. The images and data we are now getting from December's encounter with the Jovian moon Europa promises to provide exactly the kind of cultural infusion our society needs.
     Our history since the Renaissance shows a strong correlation between geographic exploration and general cultural vitality, sa ys Stephen Pyne, an historian at Arizona State University West. Pyne sees important similarities between what space exploration offers our civilization and what the exploration of the world contributed to Europe after the Middle Ages.
     To properly understand the potential that awaits us, we should look at the societal impact of the first great age of discovery, five centuries ago. When Europeans first encountered the new world they were suddenly exposed to new geographies, new materials, new peoples, new cultures, new ideas - a virtual avalanche of new information, far more than could ever have been generated in any other way in such a short time. When this information was brought home to Europe, it swept away many of the old certainties about what the world was like.
     A good example is in the field of cartography. The great map of Fra Mauro published in 1459 was revered as the undisputed atlas of the world in pre-Columbian times. On it, the world consisted of one great land mass, "The Isla nd of the Earth", comprising Europe, Asia and Africa and occupying six-sevenths of the globe. The remaining one-seventh was ocean. There was no "terrae incognita" and certainly no other continents or oceans; there was simply no place to put them.
     By the middle of the next century this arrogance had all but vanished. Most of the maps of this new age of discovery bore the legend "All the world which has been discovered up to this time". The Europeans were now engaged in what historian Daniel Boorstin calls "Negative Discovery". They were coming to understand that they actually knew very little about the world around them.
     This kind of information shock occurred in many fields, bringing about a radical transformation of European civilization. Exploration and the consequent challenging of old ideas soon became highly valued. People began to feel that the future could be different from the past, that they weren't caught in an endless cycle and that they really were learning things that the ancient world couldn't have imagined. In this way, Pyne explains, geographic exploration became a crucial pa rt of what made Western civilization dynamic. The act of exploration and discovery had become a core value of our culture.
     Seen in this light, space exploration fulfills a critical role in today's world, providing precisely the kind of informa tion input we need. Unlike other forms of discovery which usually come gradually out of existing institutions of science and scholarship, the information we get from space exploration comes in great gulps. For example, during the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptun e, discoveries were being made so quickly that one scientist compared it to "trying to drink from a fire hose".
     Pyne is not alone among social scientists in his outspoken advocacy of continued space exploration. Carleton University anthropologist Charles Laughlin strongly supports it as well, maintaining that we explore because it is a basic part of us -- a characteristic of the way in which the higher orders of our nervous systems function. Laughlin explains, "I think there is an internal drive in sentience to go where no one has gone before, to expand outward."
     University of Hawaii anthropologist Ben Finney agrees and labels humans "the exploring animal". Finney maintains that a withdrawal from the exploration and development of space would put the brakes on our cultural and intelle ctual advancement. Of course, Carl Sagan has been popularizing this thesis for years, assuring us that the human expansion into space is genetically driven, an inevitable part of the natural evolution of the universe.
     Whether the drive to explore is simply a characteristic of particular cultures, as Pyne believes, or is hardwired into the human psyche, there is no question that our civilization needs space exploration. Exploring the final frontier is important not so much for what we'll find out there but for the renewal in spirit it encourages. "Choosing to explore the solar system will not, by itself, assure us continued status as a world civilization," Pyne says. "That requires much mor e, a broader cultural GNP, if you will. But choosing not to explore will ensure that we will not retain that stature."
     Happily, this message seems to be getting through to governments. Besides Galileo's continuing mission, 1996 marked the inauguration of NASA's new "Discovery Program", a series of missions oriented around small, inexpensive r obotic explorers. These diminutive automata promise to give us the thrill of extraterrestrial exploration and discovery on a regular basis for at least the next decade. Whether humans eventually follow the robots to these distant worlds remains to be seen . However, in the meantime, there is a new optimism in the space community -- we're back in the planetary exploration business!

Tom Harris is an Ottawa Canada-based professional speaker specializing in space exploration, environment and human survival.

Mars Base 0 is the name given by the International Space Exploration and Colonization Company (ISECCo) to their greenhouse in Fairbanks, Alaska. This greenhouse is an intermediate step in the Nauvik project, which ha s the ultimate goal of producing enough air, food and water to support one person in a closed environment. The greenhouse will be used to design plant ecostructures and develop planting techniques. This data will be used to determine what size to make Nau vik.
     Mars Base 0 at a glance may look just like an ordinary greenhouse, but upon closer inspection it is rather complex. It mea sures 24 feet wide and 44 feet long. The crop growing area uses 80 percent of the total area with the remaining area for living space, fish, chickens, and a furnace. Such a structure would be very similar to that needed for colonizing Mars.
     The greenhouse will be shaped like a Quonset hut (half cylinder). It has a sealed concrete floor. Two foot high concrete walls will contain the soil for crops. The south wall, to the top of the roof, will be glass (or some ot her clear material, like lexan). The north side of the cylinder's walls will be made of plywood coated with fiberglass and resin to seal it. The axis of the structure will be oriented east/west, with the north half super-insulated. The concrete, plywood a nd all glass junctions will have an airtight coat of fiberglass cloth saturated with epoxy resin. Vents will be cut in both ends and when we want air closure we'll seal them. The door will be an old freezer door.
     We expect to import air, water, and some nutrients. How far we can carry closure of Mars Base 0 depends in part on how well we manage to seal our structure. During the summer we will not attempt closure of air or water becaus e we'll be using vents to prevent overheating. In the winter, however, we will be able to shed excess heat and keep the structure partially sealed.
#160;    Excellent progress was made on the construction of Mars Base 0 during the summer of &1996. A local company donated rebar for us to use. All labor for ISECCo is volunteer. Early in the summer we got the site excavated and level ed. A long, full day was spent by thirteen volunteers pouring the concrete pad. Next, we built forms and hung the rebar for the concrete walls. Finally we poured the concrete walls. They were filled by hand with wheel barrows and buckets (this was the mos t economical way to do it).
     During 1997 we plan to finish construction and get our first greenhouse crops planted. However, we have not been ignoring the most important aspect of our research: gardening. We have had gardens almost every year since ISECC o formed in 1988, with this year's being the largest.
     Planting techniques in Mars Base 0 will be more complex than the usual backyard garden. We will be experimenting with ways to maximize yield while minimizing the area planted. We have already begun doing so in our garden with mixed success. The most successful area this summer was the carrot patch. We planted a four-foot by four-foot square. The carrot rows were 3 inches apart and the carrots in each row were 2 inches apart. Ninety days later we harvested thirty pounds of 4 i nch carrots from that square.
     Other crops we planted this summer were turnips, rutabaga, beets, zucchini, tomatoes, wheat, potatoes, cauliflower, broccoli, peas, green beans, peppers, yellow squash, sunflowers, brussel sprouts, kohlrabi, kale, radish, let tuce, and canoli (re-seeded from last year). Our garden was thirty by eighty feet and produced 713 pounds of crops.
     Wheat took up a quarter of the garden. The wheat had poor productivity possible due to the cold summer, not an Alaskan crop, o vercrowding, improper planting (we planted it by hand, and just made up how to do it!), or lodging (fell over). Potatoes were planted in different areas of the garden, but still took up thirty percent of the total area planted.
     We planted a triangle of leaf lettuce with an area of sixteen square feet. Although less than half of the seeds germinated, by the end of July we had more leaf lettuce than we knew what to do with. Other crops that were extre mely productive were rutabaga, turnips, and kohlrabi.
     Our brussel sprouts, cucumbers, sunflowers, onions, and head lettuce had no productivity. They were probably affected by the unusually cold summer. The temperature also limited productivity of the beets and yellow squash. In Mars Base 0 we will be better able to regulate temperature and moisture to limit loses of this sort.
     Weeding was a major job in the garden and is expected also to be in the early stages of Mars Base 0 and Nauvik. We held a four hour meeting every week to weed. There were usually two to five people at these meetings. In a gar den you get weed seeds imported from the surrounding area. Also we had lots of weeds because we only used horse manure for fertilizer, and horse manure is loaded with weed seeds. In a closed system, like Mars Base 0 and Nauvik, once the weeds are kept und er control for a year, the next year there will be fewer weeds until ultimately (with proper diligence) there are no more weeds.
     Gardening on Earth may seem only like a relaxing hobby; especially when a quick trip to the supermarket is all it takes to get dinner. However, considering the enormous cost of shipping goods into space, gardening becomes a n ecessary component of living in space. Developing the technology needed to provide enough food for people while in a closed system is a relatively unexplored aspect of space research. The International Space Exploration and Colonization Company is vigorou sly pursuing this goal.

Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of the planet Pluto and father of the astronomy research program at New Mexico State University, died Friday, Jan. 17, at his home in Las Cruces. He was 90.
     "He was truly one of the great men of science," said Jack Burns, associate dean of arts and sciences and former astronomy department head at NMSU.
     Tombaugh was 24 years old when he made world news in 1930 by discovering the elusive ninth planet using a photographic telescope at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. He came to New Mexico State University in 1955 and began the u niversity's research program in astronomy, which today is regarded as one of the nation's best.
     He remained active long after retiring as a professor emeritus in 1973, lecturing on an occasional basis and going to his office regularly. In the 1980s, he went on an extensive lecture tour to raise money for an astronomy en dowment at NMSU.
     Rene Walterbos, head of the NMSU astronomy department, said he was in the process of selecting the top candidates for the next Tombaugh Scholar appointment when he received a phone call Friday notifying him of Tombaugh's deat h.
     "This is a great loss for the department and for science," Walterbos said. "It was a pleasure to know him personally -- he had a great sense of humor."
     Tombaugh is survived by his wife, Patsy; son, Alden Tombaugh, of Las Cruces; daughter, Annette Tombaugh, also of Las Cruces; five grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
     Plans for memorial services are pending.
     Born on Feb. 4, 1906, on a farm near Streator, Ill., Tombaugh moved with his family to a farm near Burdett, Kansas , during his high school years. He shared his father's keen amateur interest in astronomy, and when he wanted a telescope more powerful than his 2 1/4-inch Sears Roebuck model, he began grinding mirrors and making his own.
     Using a hand-made 9-inch telescope, he made meticulous sketches of Jupiter and Mars and sent some of them to the Lowell Observatory. He thought he might get some advice from the professionals. Instead he was offered a job. It happened that the observatory was looking for a good amateur astronomer who could operate a new photographic telescope.
     Tombaugh was hired in 1929 as a junior astronomer to join in the search for a "Planet X" beyond Neptune, a search begun in 1905 by Percival Lowell. Working through the nights in a cold, unheated dome, he made pairs of exposur es of portions of the sky with time intervals of two to six days. These were scrutinized under a device called a Blink-Comparator in hopes of detecting a small shift in position of one of the hundreds of thousands of points of light -- the sign of a plane t among a field of stars.
     On the nights of Jan. 23 and 29, 1930, Tombaugh made two such photographs of the region of the star Delta Geminorum. On the afternoon of Feb. 18, comparing the plates with the Blink-Comparator, he detected the telltale shift of a faint, starlike image. The discovery was confirmed with subsequent observations and announced to the world on March 13, 1930.
     Tombaugh continued searching the skies at Lowell Observatory over the next 13 years, with time out for a college education. No more planets showed up, but he discovered six star clusters, two comets, hundreds of asteroids, se veral dozen clusters of galaxies and one super-cluster.
     During those same years, he entered the University of Kansas on a scholarship (1932), married Patricia Edson of Kansas City (1934), earned his bachelor's degree in astronomy (1936) and went on to get his master's (1939).
     After teaching at Arizona State College (now Northern Arizona University) and the University of California at Los Angeles, Tombaugh moved to New Mexico in 1946 to become chief of the Optical Measurements Branch in the Ballist ics Research Laboratory at White Sands Missile Range, where German V-2 rockets were being tested. He came to New Mexico State University in 1955 and started the Planetary Group, an astronomy research program.
     He was instrumental in designing and obtaining funding for the university's Tortugas Mountain Observatory, a 24-inch telescope that captured its first images in 1967 and is still in service taking data for the National Aerona utics and Space Administration.
     Tombaugh was largely responsible for the astronomy program becoming a separate department at NMSU in 1970. Today the department is a member of the Astrophysical Research Consortium, which owns and operates the Apache Point Ob servatory in New Mexico's Sacramento Mountains. NMSU manages the observatory.
     Tombaugh remained active long past retirement and never lost his passion for stargazing. When the Smithsonian Institute asked if it could have for its museum the telescope he made in 1928, "I told them I was still using it," he said in an interview. The 9-inch telescope, with which he made the drawings that impressed the Lowell Observatory staff, was built with parts of discarded farm machinery and a shaft from his father's 1910 Buick. Tombaugh ground the mirrors himself.
     Until frail health prevented it, Tombaugh continued observing the heavens through that 9-inch telescope and a larger one he made himself, from his back yard in the Mesilla Park community of Las Cruces.
     While he was in his 80s, Tombaugh toured the United States and Canada with his wife, Patsy, giving 75 lectures during a three-year period to raise money to bring astronomers to NMSU for post-doctoral research. The Tombaugh Sc holars Fund now is a permanent endowment.
     By the time he retired, he and his NMSU astronomy staff had confirmed the rotation period of Mercury on its axis, determined the vortex nature of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, and developed a new photographic technique for the sm all Earth satellites search he was supervising.
     Of the decades of discovery since he made the history books, and the thousands of hours spent at his telescopes, Tombaugh often said: "I've really had a tour of the heavens."

[Ed. Note: for more information about the life of Clyde Tombaugh, visit http://www.klx.com/clyde/ .]