http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Jun/06012003/nation_w/62146.asp
Since 1960, humans have lobbed roughly 34 unmanned spacecraft at Mars, in
part lured by the prospect that the Red Planet may harbor extraterrestrial
life.
Life has yet to be found by the spacecraft, most of which died a robot's
death trying to reach the planet. Of all the U.S., Soviet, and later,
Russian missions, two-thirds ended in failure.
"Getting to Mars is very, very hard," says Dave Lavery, who oversees the
U.S. Mars exploration program.
Despite the odds, the first of three more missions are to set out for
Mars this week on two continents. The European Space Agency's Mars Express
orbiter with its British-built Beagle 2 lander is scheduled for a liftoff
Monday from Kazakhstan. The United States is set to launch the first of two
Mars Exploration Rovers next Sunday at Cape Canaveral, Fla.
A fourth space vehicle, sent up in 1998 by Japan, continues to attempt a
Mars orbit but is having problems.
If these missions succeed, the international parade of robotic
spacecraft will undertake the most intensive exploration of another
planetary body since the Apollo moon missions three decades ago. Beginning
in December, the spacecraft from Europe, Japan and the United States should
begin to arrive at the planet, joining two other U.S. satellites already in
orbit.
"One can expect a glut of information about the planet," said Colin
Pillinger, lead scientist on the British Beagle 2 lander.
If past performance is any predictor of future results, two -- maybe
even three -- of the missions will fail, said Lavery, program executive for
NASA's $800 million mission to send twin rovers to the planet.
Of the current $2 billion fleet, Japan's Nozomi will try again to get
into a Mars orbit, but damaged electronics may prevent it. The satellite was
designed to probe the Martian atmosphere and image the planet's surface.
Last-minute glitches also cropped up on the European Space Agency's Mars
Express and NASA's twin Mars Exploration Rovers. The missions have since
been repaired and cleared for launch.
"We've had a lot of problems, and we caught a lot of problems because we
did a lot of testing. Our confidence is high," said Richard Cook, flight
systems manager for the rover missions at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The launching of so many spacecraft at once is no accident: Celestial
mechanics are bringing Mars and Earth closer together than they have been in
tens of thousands of years, scientists said.
The clutch of missions broadly seeks to answer questions about the
geology, climate and resources of Mars, as well as its potential -- past or
present -- for life.
If successful, NASA's identical twin rovers will mark the space agency's
return to the surface of Mars. In 1999, its Polar Lander likely plunged to
the surface and was smashed to pieces when its descent rockets were
prematurely shut down. Two smaller probes it carried were never heard from
again.
The loss came just weeks after the destruction of the Climate Orbiter, a
satellite that flew too close to the planet and burned up in a
well-publicized mix-up between English and metric units.
The two rovers are designed to operate as robotic field geologists
hunting for evidence of past water activity on Mars. That should reveal
whether the planet was ever hospitable enough to allow life to gain a
toehold.
The Europeans' instrument-laden Beagle 2 lander is bolder: It is
designed to look directly for signs of life on Mars -- something that has
not been done since the twin Viking landers' inconclusive results in 1976.
The British lander should dig into Mars to hunt for organic materials
and sniff the atmosphere for traces of methane produced by living organisms,
Pillinger said.
Project manager Rudolf Schmidt said the mission is the European Space
Agency's first to any planet -- and the last to Mars for the foreseeable
future. NASA, in contrast, plans to launch either a lander or orbiter to
Mars every two years through 2009.
By late January, scientists hope to have the four orbiters zipping
around Mars, the two rovers rolling across its surface and the small Beagle
2 lander actively digging into the rusty soil that gives the Red Planet its
distinctive tint. The missions include contributions from scientists and
engineers from Europe, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
"The view that I tend to put out personally was that Apollo was one
nation trying to get to the moon first," NASA's Lavery said of the
international effort.
"This is one planet going out together to investigate another."
xponent
Civilization Bandwagon Maru
rob
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