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NASA Sets Its Sights on Travel to Mars

Posted on: Tuesday, 9 August 2005, 15:00 CDT

CAPE CANAVERAL -- All eyes here are on shuttle Discovery's scheduled landing this morning, but in reality NASA considers the fleet of shuttles to be outmoded flying cargo trucks soon destined for mothballs. The agency is increasingly turning its full focus to the goal that truly drives it: placing humans on Mars.

This week the National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to launch the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, an unmanned satellite-like probe that will study the red planet for signs of past life and of existing water supplies -- as well as potential landing spots for manned missions.

Meanwhile, NASA officials have said the shuttle fleet will be permanently grounded in about 2010. Plans are underway to construct its replacement, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, which will be designed to carry at least 40 people beyond Earth's orbit and eventually to the moon and Mars.

"What we want to do is determine: Was Mars ever habitable? And are there any habitable environments today? Is life possible there?" said Michael Meyer, NASA's Mars exploration program chief scientist, who called this week's planned orbiter launch "a very grand step" in this quest.

The orbiter will send back a rich stream of data to scientists for years, documenting in unprecedented detail the water content, topology, mineral content, atmosphere, and weather of Mars, as well as conduct the most extensive search to date for signs of previous life there.

This anticipated wealth of information stands in sharp contrast to the current Discovery mission. Aside from transporting supplies to the International Space Station, the mission's main purpose was to establish an effective video-monitoring system of the shuttle to prevent disasters such as the 2003 Columbia shuttle crash.

NASA officials have said the Crew Exploration Vehicle will be smaller and sleeker, like a giant space airline service that can transport a large human crew to the moon and beyond. Mastering the moon is the first step in the ambitious sequence of events NASA officials imagine will end with humans on Mars.

Meyer said his agency's goal is to enable astronauts to assemble vehicles and space housing while orbiting the moon, then send it all down to the surface to support human life.

"When they get it going on the moon . . . that's when we'll look at Mars," he said.

The orbiter, scheduled for launch either tomorrow or Thursday or later this month, depending on the weather, will greatly expand human understanding of that planet. One of the orbiter's first goals will be "hunting for landing sites of the future, both robotic and human," said Doug McCuiston, NASA's Mars exploration program director.

The orbiter, or Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, is scheduled for launch at 7:54 a.m. tomorrow. The weather is predicted to be favorable, NASA officials said.

The orbiter weighs more than 2 tons and is 44 feet from the tip of one of its solar panel wings to the other. It resembles a giant bird; the solar panels are its wings, and its body is the orbiter's analytical core, a constellation of high-powered cameras swathed in gold material.

"We have taken a major step forward in the capability of this spacecraft to return data," said Jim Graf, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's project manager in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, adding that the orbiter will send back a staggering 34 terabytes of data every two years. "We are going to be awash in data that will allow us to better understand the planet as a whole."

The orbiter is scheduled to reach MARS by about March 2006, maintaining orbit for at least four years. At the heart of its mission is the hope to expand on recent findings that Mars once had water and that it still contains ice. Without water, life could not be sustained on Mars. "We want to know if that layer of ice . . . represents the tip of the iceberg," said Rich Zurek, a orbiter project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The orbiter will also carry a 1,200-megapixel digital camera that will send back the most detailed pictures of Mars ever.

In 2007, NASA plans to send an unmanned craft to study Mars's polar regions. Three years later, it will send the Mars Science Lab rover, the size of a compact car, to analyze the planet's organic chemistry. This will be followed by another rover mission to explicitly search for signs of life and another mission to explore beneath the planet's rocky and dusty surface.

But Meyer said these unmanned missions will never be fully satisfactory.

"The problem with rovers is that their response time is slow. An astronaut can analyze the planet much more efficiently," he said, refusing to guess when such a mission might take place. "The potential for discovery is much greater."

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