[meteorite-list] Robots To Scrutinize Mars' Rocks

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:53:34 2004
Message-ID: <200212110053.QAA21427_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.nature.com/nsu/021209/021209-7.html

Robots to scrutinise Mars' rocks

NASA unveils plans for pair of Mars rovers.

TOM CLARKE
Nature Science Update
December 10, 2002

A year from now, NASA hopes to be making tracks on Mars once again, this time
with two robotic six-wheeled rovers. The agency announced the mission's
objectives this week at the American Geophysical Union's meeting
in San Francisco.

The Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) will be launched separately in May and June
2003. Swaddled in air bags, the roving twins will bump down on different
sides of the red planet in January 2004, if all goes according to plan.

And it must - NASA's last attempt to land on Mars in
1999 failed when contact was lost with the Mars Polar
Lander as it careered into the planet's atmosphere.

The MER team is confident: "These missions will not fail," says
Mark Adler, the mission's manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Planetary scientists have their fingers crossed too. "We expect a
phenomenal number of new observations, new data, and new
questions," says William Dietrich of the University of California,
Berkeley. Unlike their low-profile 1997 predecessor Sojourner, the
MERs have a primarily scientific mission.

The rovers look like overhead projectors on wheels. Each sports a
metre-high mast on which is mounted a binocular camera with a
visual acuity akin to that of human eyes. "They will show you Mars
like you've never seen Mars before," promises the mission's chief
scientist, Steven Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

The cameras will allow the largely autonomous rovers to
cover about 100 metres of martian surface each day. They'll
look for the most interesting rocks using an infrared imager
linked to the camera. "It's all about the rocks," says Squyres.

Experts hope that trapped within different rock types are clues to the
planet's past, uncorrupted by weathering and radiation. Each MER
will also carry a grinding tool, a sensitive spectrometer and a
microscope to examine the rocks' physical and chemical properties.

But the missions will succeed only if the robots land in the right
places. A list of 185 potential sites has been whittled down to just 4.

The pair must touch down somewhere safe - "rocks bigger than half
a metre are bad things", explains Matthew Golombek, the project's
landing-site scientist. And they must land close to targets of
scientific interest.

Gullies that may once have contained water, or debris from extinct
martian volcanoes are high on the agenda. Final landing sites will be
chosen in April 2003.
Received on Tue 10 Dec 2002 07:53:23 PM PST