「媒库文选」从前，在火星上(2)

Perseverance and Ingenuity operate on very long leashes: 12 minutes of light-travel time — and signal delay — across the ether from Pasadena， where their creators and tenders wait to see what they have accomplished lately. Like the teenagers you let out the door with the car keys， Perseverance and Ingenuity are no more intelligent and responsible than humans have trained them to be.
Those rocks will be picked up and returned to Earth in a five-year series of maneuvers involving relay rockets， rovers and orbital transfers starting in 2026 that will make the retrieval of the moon rocks look as easy as shipping holiday cookies to your relatives. The rocks that return starting in 2031 will be scrutinized for years， like the Dead Sea Scrolls， for what they might say about the hidden history of our lost twin and，perhaps， the earliest days of life in the Solar System.
The generation that followed World War II carried out the first great reconnaissance of the solar system. It could be the destiny of this generation to carry out the next great reconnaissance， to discover if we have or ever had any neighbors on these worlds. In Jezero Crater，the dream lives on. We may not ever live on Mars， but our machines already do.