Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium

We as a species are coming of age in our Solar System.With due respect to Carl Sagan, I'm not sure I can agree that we're ready to come of age in the Milky Way, but the Solar System -that's another story.We are in a great age of exploration, in which whole planets and systems are being revealed for the first time; spacecraft are discovering moons not every ten years, but by the dozen every year; and our robotic avatars roll across worlds that just a few years ago were only blurry disks in the most powerful telescopes.Just this year alone, we have seen the second largest asteroid in the asteroid belt go from a few pixels in a Hubble Space Telescope image to a geologic world in its own right, thanks to the Dawn spacecraft.Cassini continues its historic mission to Saturn and its many moons, revealing shepherd moons, methane atmospheres, and ice volcanoes on worlds where the Sun shines barely brighter than the background stars.And at the end of the year, NASA plans to launch the largest autonomous roving vehicle in history to Mars, where its primary mission is measured, not in days, but in years.What intensely exciting times we live in!