Back to Mars: ASU gets another shot with rovers' mission

By Kerry Fehr-Snyder

August 11, 2000 Web posted at: 12:22 PM EDT (1622 GMT)

TEMPE, Arizona (The Arizona Republic Online) -- Arizona State University will get another crack at Mars following Thursday's announcement by NASA that the space agency will send not one but two rovers to the Red Planet in 2003.

Red rover: The addition of a second lunar vehicle gives ASU scientists another chance at Mars

A second vehicle would improve the odds of finding water on Mars, a possibility enhanced by recent photographic evidence from a satellite circling the one planet in the solar system, besides Earth, that might be suitable for human colonization.

"Instead of all our eggs and 10 years of work in one basket, we have a second vehicle and a much higher chance of success," said an ecstatic Phil Christensen, an ASU geology professor involved in Mars research.

The university is already building a miniaturized version of a thermal emission spectrometer. Known as mini-TES, the device is designed to send back data on the mineral composition of rocks found on the surface of Mars.

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"For us, it's a big deal," Christensen said. "We just doubled our probability of succeeding."

Although final figures are not yet available, launching and operating the second rover is expected to add $200 million to the $400 million project.

The decision to send two robots instead of one comes on the heels of a pair of well-publicized Mars failures by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Two exploration crafts, including a lander, failed last year, forcing a reorganization of the space agency's Martian program.

Edward Weiler, head of NASA's office of space science, said that "celestial mechanics," an unusual alignment of Mars and the Earth in 2003, made a second mission an attractive and economical option.

The notion of launching what are known as redundant missions was popular with NASA in the 1960s and 1970s. In the '80s and '90s, the space agency began eliminating duplicate programs because it couldn't afford them. With the recent failures to Mars, the thinking has changed.

"Maybe we can't afford not to have redundancy," ASU's Christensen said.

Experts say learning the planet's water history is key to the possibility that life, in some form, once existed on Mars and still could. NASA plans to begin solving the mystery through the two space crafts, each carrying identical roving robots, that will launch for their 71/2-month trip in 2003 and then bounce, 18 days apart, to beach ball-like landings on Mars in January 2004.

The 2003 rovers will each weigh 300 pounds and will be able to roam about 110 yards each day. They will have six wheels that will run by solar-charged electrical power.

Each will communicate independently with Earth, using a pop-up dish antenna. Pictures collected by the rovers will be relayed immediately to a Web site, a popular tactic taken with the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997.

Each robot will have 10 cameras with 20/20 color vision. One camera will be used for navigation and will be linked to an onboard computer that will let the rovers look ahead and plot a wheeled course to specific destinations.

In addition, a single arm on the rover will contain a tool that can break open rocks, where microscopic views of grain-sized specimens will be taken. That data will be beamed back to ASU, which will monitor the infrared energy being emitted from the rocks to determine which minerals are present.

"It will be wild and crazy," Christensen said of the round-the-clock monitoring.

The inclusion of ASU in the second rover means that the university has equipment on the orbiter circling Mars, the original lander planned for 2003 and soon, the second rover.

"It doesn't get any better than this," Christensen said. "Having one there, one we're building and one we're planning for."

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