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		Touchdown: Mission control celebrates the successful landing of the rover Spirit on January 3. Left to right: NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, Steve Squyres, and Ed Weiler, associate administrator for space science.
	On the ground: Hours after landing on Meridiani Planum on January 24, the rover Opportunity stunned scientists with this first color “postcard” (left). The red circles are bounce marks from the lander’s airbags. “It’s a world unlike any we’ve seen before,” says Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres. “A beautiful, alien place.”

Steve Squyres is feeling better. He’s had his nap, for one thing, which is no mean feat these days. “Ah! The circus is back in town!” he says, marching into a crowded media room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The lanky Cornell astronomer, fortyeight, is wearing his usual uniform of ostrich-hide cowboy boots and leather bomber jacket; the chain of a silver pocket watch dangles from his tattered jeans. It’s late afternoon in Pasadena but the middle of the night on the Martian schedule Squyres and the other scientists and engineers have been living and sleeping on for the past three weeks. Recently, though, no one’s been sleeping much. “The last three sols,” he says, “have been hell.”

Both Squyres ’78, PhD ’81, and the golf-cart-sized robotic rover named Spirit that he helped design are recovering from what NASA likes to call an anomaly. Spirit had successfully operated on Mars for seventeen sols, or Martian days, wowing the world with startlingly vivid images of a rock-strewn landing site. And then it disappeared, missing its preset communication window again and again. Time passed, the silence deepened, the engineers puzzled and tinkered. At the darkest moment, on the morning of the twentieth sol (January 23), the crippled rover failed to muster a beep, the simplest trick in its book, and Squyres allowed himself a moment to contemplate the worst.

“It wasn’t despair,” he says, in a tone of voice that seems to indicate that maybe it sort of was. “But the thought began to creep into my mind that, jeez, we might have lost the thing. This could all be over.”

Squyres is the principal investigator (PI) for the Athena payload, a suite of geological instruments that serves as the scientific heart and soul of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. He spent sixteen years developing Athena and shepherding it to the surface of Mars. In a few hours, Spirit’s identical twin,Opportunity, will hit the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour and, if roughly a million things go exactly right, bounce to a safe landing on the other side of the distant planet. The satellite trucks of the international media are gathering in the parking lot, waiting to see if NASA’s $820 million twin rover project can beat the odds. Squyres steals a quick glance at his pocket watch—which runs on the twenty-four-hour, thirty-nine-minute, thirty-fivesecond clock of the Martian solar day—and does the math for local time.He’s got one sick rover on the surface, another screaming down in about five hours, and a very long night on Earth ahead of him.

“Oh, I’ve seen worse,” he says breezily, recounting the misadventures of Magellan, which mapped Venus in 1990.“My God. One-and-a-half orbits worth of data and we flat lost the thing. I mean, just lost it. Then we got it back during the press conference to announce that we had lost the spacecraft!” He shrugs. “You know, stuff happens.”

Among the men and women who play the long odds of interplanetary exploration, a certain healthy fatalism is part of the game. Only a third of the probes and landers aimed at Mars since the 1960s reached their destination. In 1993, NASA’s billiondollar probe and a polar lander. Since then, a Japanese orbiter has hurtled off course and a European lander is presumed crashed. “Never take it for granted,” Squyres warns. “Treat every day as if this could be the day you lose the spacecraft.”

Cornell researcher Robert Sullivan, a member of the science team, remembers another vivid admonition from Squyres: “Do geology as if a sniper were aiming at us from behind a rock, waiting to pick us off at any moment.”

This time they’ve dodged the bullet. Like a missing person staggering out of the woods, Spirit re-emerged, delirious but alive, on sol 20. The rover surprised its handlers with a burst of garbled data, enough to help engineers diagnose a corrupted flashmemory system and regain a modicum of control over the vehicle. Squyres can breathe a little easier today, after several sleepless sols under a headset in mission control listening for his wayward spacecraft. “I’m so emotionally attached to this vehicle that I just have to be there when the doctors are operating,” he says. “You use a word like ‘love’ advisedly when you’re talking about a hunk of metal, but to the extent that you can love a machine, we love these vehicles. The analogy that everyone on the team uses is not ‘our toy is broken.’ It’s ‘our child is deathly ill.’ That’s how it is.”

Steve Squyres came a long way to get to Mars. One hundred million miles or so, as the crow flies, and more like 300 million via the looping seven-month route that Spirit traveled. But for the scientists and engineers behind what may be the most complex planetary exploration ever undertaken, this is a trip that began decades ago.

One night in 1980, Squyres was drinking beer with Jim Garvin, now NASA’s lead scientist for Mars exploration, at a Stanford burger joint called the Oasis in Menlo Park, California. They were attending a conference on Venus at NASA’s Ames Research Center, and Squyres, still a grad student, had just come off a stint working with Cornell astronomers Carl Sagan and Joe Veverka on the Voyager probe. But that’s not what he wanted to talk about. “You know, Jim,” he said. “Mars is the place.”

“Twenty-four years later, and he’s exactly the same,” Garvin says.

The Athena scientific payload that Squyres masterminded was selected by NASA in November 1997, a decade after he formally began to shape his desire to lead a rover mission to Mars. But the planet had long been high on his horizon: Squyres was a junior geology major in 1977 when he opened the door to a room in Clark Hall full of Viking photographs and emerged four hours later “knowing exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.”

If Squyres’s personal trajectory has long been clear, the object of his planetary affections has lately followed a more elliptical path. Victorian visions of Martian canals and alien civilizations were dashed when Mariner 4 revealed a cratered and moonlike surface in 1965; the color pictures and biological experiments of the 1976 Viking landers left scientists pondering a new image of Mars—an arid red plain of rusted rocks, punishingly cold and utterly lifeless. But more recent discoveries have pointed in tantalizing new directions: there’s abundant water ice at the Martian poles, and elaborate gully systems and riverbeds that have led many scientists to imagine a warmer, wetter era in the past. Liquid water may still flow, at least occasionally, fueling speculation about a third Mars—one that may yet harbor life.

The MER mission, unlike the Vikings or the unlucky Beagle 2 lander that disappeared on arrival in December, isn’t explicitly looking for life. The rovers are looking for rocks, and for the clues about the planet’s past that they carry. The mission mantra is “Follow the Water”—Gusev Crater, the Spirit landing site, is thought to have once been a large lakebed, while orbital analysis of Opportunity’s Meridiani Planum target has revealed dark deposits of gray hematite, a mineral that on Earth is often associated with hot springs. Spirit and Opportunity are essentially robot geologists, armed with a brace of instruments that can analyze the soils, rocks, and atmosphere. NASA hopes that somewhere within roving range lie the keys to unlocking exactly how—and if—water might once have flowed.

The rovers’ road to Mars was rocky, even by NASA standards. An earlier iteration of the Athena suite of instruments was originally set to fly on the ambitious 2001 Mars Surveyor mission, cancelled after twin Mars failures in 1999.With a particularly juicy launch window looming in 2003—a June orbital opposition would put the planet closer than it had been in 60,000 years— NASA scrambled to rebuild its program. MER “came from the back of the pack,” says NASA associate administrator for space science Ed Weiler. “It wasn’t even on the short list.”

The proposal called for a six-wheeled solar-powered vehicle that dwarfed the tiny Sojourner rover that Pathfinder had successfully deposited on Mars in 1997. The engineers at JPL,NASA’s Caltech-affiliated unmanned spacecraft facility in the San Gabriel foothills above Pasadena, were game to build the thing, but needed the right science payload, fast. Meanwhile, Squyres’s Athena suite for the defunct Surveyor was already halfbuilt. In May 2000, Garvin told Weiler, “We’ve already got the instruments, we’ve got the PI, and he’ll deliver.” Then-NASA administrator Dan Goldin liked the idea but was leery of the risk: getting a big rover down was a high-stakes gamble. So they doubled the odds—Goldin told JPL to build two.

The race to the launchpad was, by most accounts, nothing less than a three-year all-nighter. “Orbital mechanics waits for no one,” says Robert Sullivan. “The schedule cannot move to the right.”

“That first year was tough,” Garvin remembers. “We had negative mass margin, which meant we couldn’t even get off the ground.”While engineers struggled to cut weight, Squyres logged about 300,000 airline miles annually, commuting back and forth to Pasadena and Cape Canaveral from Ithaca. “I calculated that, over the final year before we launched,my long-term average altitude was 1,300 feet,” he says, “and my average velocity was twenty-seven knots.” The launches in summer 2003 came with their own heart-stopping mini-dramas, with faulty valves, weather delays, and a wayward fishing boat that almost kept Opportunity grounded for good. But both vehicles got off before the window closed, and the seven-month cruise to the red planet was oncourse and reassuringly quiet. In thirty-four months, NASA had rebuilt a program in tatters and delivered a pair of fiendishly complicated spacecraft to the edge of Mars. Now for the hard part.   On a cold December afternoon in Ithaca, a few weeks before the Spirit landing, associate professor Jim Bell sits with a dozen astronomy graduate students and post-docs in a computer-laden room on the fourth floor of the Space Sciences building. “This might be our last meeting,” he says. “What do we need to know?” Bell is a veteran of the imaging team on the Mars Pathfinder mission from 1997, and he’s spent eight years developing MER’s double-lensed panoramic camera system. Conceived to function as the rover’s high-resolution eyes, Pancam can produce IMAXquality stereoscopic images—it should be able to pick out grapefruit-sized rocks hundreds of yards away from atop its five-foot mast. “The idea was that we could take a picture today that would map out all possible driving contingencies for tomorrow,” Bell says. “That turns out to be the equivalent of human twentytwenty vision. If the camera performs like we think it will, this will be spectacular. It will be like you’re there.”

Cosmic connections As a teenager, Nagin Cox ’86 watched Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” series on PBS and vowed to follow the legendary astronomer to Cornell, and beyond. Now she’s flying a spacecraft 280 million miles to Mars, leading the cruise phase of MER B at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.“It’s been a remarkable ride,” she says. Cornell scientists may be at the helm of MER’s charge to Mars, but getting the rovers there has taken the efforts of hundreds of engineers and telecommunication experts—not a few of whom also happen to be Cornellians.Walk down the halls of JPL and you’ll see a lot of red. Deputy engineering team chief Cox hung a Cornell pennant outside her cubicle on the fourth floor of Building 264; there’s another Big Red banner just down the hall.“We’re everywhere,”Cox says. Over in the Surface Mission Support Area next door, telecom systems engineer Monika Danos ’95 has been pulling fourteen-hour shifts trying to maintain the delicate lines of communication with Spirit. Meanwhile, mobility/egress engineer Kevin Burke ’90 has been busy with an equally perilous chore—rolling Opportunity off its lander. Like the science team members, many of the JPL engineers are living and working on Martian time for the duration of the mission. Unlike most of the visiting scientists, they get to go home and sleep in their own beds, at least occasionally. “I’m excited,” says Danos on a rare day off.“I can see my husband. And daylight.”

Most of Bell’s Pancam team will go to Pasadena; a skeleton crew will stay behind to help process the raw image data here. The topics on hand today range from nightmarish “What if?” contingencies (What if the rover’s mast doesn’t deploy? What if the rover can’t get off the lander?) to workaday logistics (research support specialist Heather Arneson ’02 asks if she should bring towels).

Bell, thirty-eight, is a wry, low-key Rhode Islander who gently deflects his team’s youthful enthusiasms. He knows what’s ahead—he remembers the media interest that Pathfinder generated back in 1997, and he’s got a feeling that this could be bigger. He also understands the challenges of life on Mars time, with the whole world watching along on CNN. “Start sleeping on a night schedule,” he advises. “Hang out. Enjoy the buzz. It’s gonna be crazy. And if it works, we’re all going to be very, very busy.”

The Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) system that JPL devised to get the rovers on the ground relies on a singularly unlikely series of events. As seen on the splashy computer animation Dan Maas ’02 created for NASA (his eight-minute digital MER movie looks like a cut from Attack of the Clones), the spacecraft comes apart in stages as it makes its fiery descent through the thin Martian air, shedding its nesting Russian-doll pieces along the way. The parachute deploys, the heat shield separates, the folded-up lander drops bungee-jumper style from a sixty-five-foot cord attached to its back shell, and a protective cocoon of airbags inflates around the lander like a bundle of giant beach balls. Finally, at what seems the last imaginable moment before the entire thing accordions into the ground at 150 miles per hour, deceleration rockets fire, the cord snaps, and the beach balls free-fall the rest of the way, bouncing along for several minutes and hundreds of yards before coming to a safe rest, somewhere. “It’s a controlled crash,” as EDL manager Rob Morrow says.

The craziest thing about it is that it works. This airbag scheme safely delivered both the Pathfinder lander in 1997 and the bigger Spirit on January 3. The Spirit touchdown was all but perfect—the telecom people never even lost contact. So as Opportunity’s January 24 landing looms, NASA seems intent on keeping expectations in check. “Every time we do this,”Morrow says, “it’s another experiment.”

The 9 p.m. landing itself is more movie premiere than science experiment. Buses and limousines full of VIPs (including Al Gore and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger) mingle with the NASA brass while the media watches on TV monitors in an auditorium JPL has converted into a newsroom. The EDL sequence itself is all pre-programmed, so there’s little for mission control to do during the “six minutes of terror” besides fret. Nevertheless, it’s a strangely dramatic tableau of anxiety. Squyres stalks around nervously, arms tightly crossed, as the final minutes count down. One by one, incoming signals confirm what the spacecraft did eleven minutes earlier: the heat-shield separates, the parachute deploys, the retros fire. Then, finally,Opportunity is bouncing on the surface.

“We’re on Mars, everybody,”Manning announces. And he bursts into tears.

The celebration is a full-blown Game Seven home-plate pileup, with much hugging and high-fiving. Gore and Schwarzenegger start pumping hands. An hour later, a giddy victory-lap of a press briefing fills the auditorium; NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe and JPL director Charles Elachi sip champagne and make their Oscar speeches. The scientists look on from the sidelines, waiting anxiously for their first data to come down from the next Mars Odyssey flyby, which is due at a little after 1 a.m. They won’t pop any corks until they see where they ended up.

From orbit, the thirty-seven-mile-long “landing ellipse” that Opportunity aimed for is a flat and featureless plain—so featureless that the science team mulled a late trajectory change that would have planted the rover closer to a nearby cratered region that might have offered more varied terrain. But the course change never happened, and as everyone waits for Opportunity to unfurl its panels and open its eyes, fingers are crossed. At 1:10 a.m., the data starts flowing—a sudden flurry of small black-and-white “postcards” from the rover’s low-resolution Hazard Identification Cameras, or Hazcam.Within seconds, the scientists realize something remarkable. The horizon is dark and hummocky, not the flat plain they expected, and there’s a bright irregular arc of white poking out of the sands in the middle distance, like the bleached bones of a great whale. Opportunity is sitting in a small crater, and at the rim, blasted free of the Martian sand, there’s an outcropping of bedrock.

“Bedrock!” Squyres marvels as he strides into a 2 a.m. briefing. “We’ve got bedrock!”

This is a big deal, to a geologist. Previous landing sites, from Viking to Gusev,were all variations on a boulder-strewn theme, littered with loose rocks of various shapes, sizes, and provenance. But here, at last, was native rock, the mineral foundation of the planet. “These rocks grew up right in this neighborhood,” Squyres says.

Halfway into the early-morning briefing, the first color image from Pancam comes in. It’s a rush job, color-calibrated in Ithaca and relayed to Pasadena to be stitched together into the picture that now flashes before an auditorium of sleepy reporters and scientists. Squyres, on stage, cranes his head back and gapes. A dark plain rises, topped by rippling wind-driven dunelets. Four perfect circles—bounce marks, so distinct that airbag seams are visible—are imprinted on the sand, lurid red. The crowd gasps, then breaks into applause.

“This is exactly what it looked like in my wildest dreams,” says Squyres, goggling at the strange world behind him. “And they were pretty wild.”

The Martian day begins with an electric guitar fanfare—Rush’s “Spirit of the Radio,” an FM nugget from 1980—blaring tinnily from a speaker. This is Opportunity’s morning wake-up call, a little mission-control tradition from the Apollo days. It isn’t morning, of course—it’s early evening—and there’s no one to wake up on the robot spacecraft. But the sun is up on Meridiani Planum, and controllers hope to fire up Opportunity’s high-gain antenna today, so “Spirit of the Radio” is broadcast across the flight operations network. The tune finally caterwauls to a finish, and in the Pancam lab on the fourth floor of JPL’s Building 264, the methodical business of painting a portrait of Mars goes on.

On the two floors devoted to the MER mission, thick black rubberized shades cover every window. The floors have nearly identical layouts but different color schemes, to help sleep-deprived scientists remember what rover they’re working on. Spirit’s fourth floor is red; the Opportunity (or MER B) floor above it is blue.“B for blue,” Jim Bell recites. Slumping at the keyboard in a Cornell sweatshirt, he seems half-awake and more rumpled than usual—unlike most of these casual-day scientists, Bell often dons jacket and-tie for press briefings—and the strain of the unearthly hours is evident all around, from the bulletin-board tips on avoiding fatigue to the nearby stockpile of vitamins, cereal, and nacho chips. Outside, evening deepens into night. Bell just ate breakfast. At his rental apartment off the freeway, he taped the comforter over the window in an attempt to duplicate the sunless limbo of Building 264. “You get into your own little world here,” he says. “They close the door and you have no idea what’s going on outside.”

Bell scrolls through the black-andwhite thumbnail images of the Meridiani outcropping that came down from the most recent pass of the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft that orbits the planet, relaying data from the rovers back to Earth. Grad student Jason Soderblom taps at another machine in the corner. Each tiny digitized picture must be calibrated using various combinations of filters, then assembled into another octant of the 360-degree “mission success panorama” that is Pancam’s first job at its new home. It’s repetitive, labor-intensive work, and, with millions of bits of data coming in, there’s plenty to go around.

With Opportunity waking up, the Spirit floor is emptying out after another sol’s work. There are no photographers or reporters here, just muffled hallways, blacked-out windows, and the steady hum of computer monitors. Small cells of scientists from the other instrument teams huddle in side rooms. The air of cloistered intensity is leavened only by the abundance of ice-cream bars that most scientists seem to be nibbling. (There’s a freezer of Häagen-Dazs down the hall.)

Up on the blue fifth floor, Washington University astrogeologist Ray Arvidson, MER deputy PI and senior statesman, sits alone in front of a monitor in the big science assessment room. It’s early in his shift—a good time to mull the newest Pancam close-up of the finely layered rocks of Meridiani. Bell stops by and peers over his shoulder.

“Cool or what?”

Arvidson, a soft-voiced veteran of the ’76 Viking program, doesn’t even look up. He’s lost in the tumble of alien rocks.

“It’s totally cool,” he says. “See this coarse stuff? I’m thinking this is ash. You see that in Kilauea in Hawaii, where there’s an eruption of granules close to the vent.” But, he adds, it’s just a theory. “There will be debates about this for weeks, if not years.”

The MER science team is a sprawling, multinational convocation of 170 planetary geologists, atmospheric scientists, and Mars experts from various fields. They assemble to bat around hypotheses and plot the rovers’ next moves in a large daily meeting, with smaller gatherings for five theme groups and the teams that run MER’s six main instruments.With two rovers now on the ground, all this brainpower has split into two shifts working a half-sol apart. Keeping the whole machine running smoothly takes creative scheduling, huge spreadsheets, and some delicate diplomacy. “These are not people you can order around, and you’d be a fool to try,” Squyres says. “I know these people very, very well. I know who the poker-playing buddies from grad school are, and I know who doesn’t really like being around who. I like nothing better than to just put the pieces in play and then sit back and watch it go.”

“Steve isn’t just a brilliant scientist,” says Orlando Figueroa, NASA’s Mars program director.“He’s an unconditional team player.”

He’s also an unabashed cheerleader: Squyres can talk up hematite and crater rims with all the goony fervor of Quentin Tarantino riffing on kung fu movies. Before press briefings, he fidgets behind the table with his face locked into a huge grin, like he’s just busting to tell the world’s greatest secret. “Wait ’til you see the rest of this thing,” he promises. “Just wait.”

For reasons he doesn’t quite understand, Sqyures is now a famous man. He has a personal assistant scheduling his day and an entourage of reporters trailing his every move. In the week after the Spirit landing, ABC News made him their “Person of the Week,” a distinction he now shares with the late Carl Sagan. “Does anyone even know what that is?” he asks. “You gotta realize, I don’t own a television. I have no idea how this is seen by the outside world. Is it a big deal?”

It is indeed—by the end of January,NASA’s MER website had logged over 5 billion hits—more than all the other federal government sites in the last year, combined.What’s more remarkable, the real mission—scientifically speaking—has only begun. The rovers have a ninety-sol design life, but, as Squyres puts it, “that’s just when the warranty expires.”Dust will eventually cover the rovers’ solar panels, and the harsh Martian environment will take its toll on the delicate instruments. And, of course, the sniper behind the rock could strike at any second. But Spirit and Opportunity may operate longer than anticipated—a prospect that fills some team members with a mixture of excitement and dread. Bell, who recently flew home for a few days when his young son had an appendicitis scare, admits that the mission’s end will be “a relief, frankly.” Squyres misses not only his wife and teenage daughters, but the Ithaca winter (he’s an avid ice climber). “This has absolutely taken over my life,” he says. “I even dream about it at night. I think about the mission and my family. That’s my universe.”

But, he hastens to add, he’s not complaining. “I’ve been waiting for this for sixteen years. Six months of this? Hell, yeah. This is the payoff.”He shakes his head. “You pour your heart and soul into this hardware. And then when it gets up there and does what you designed it to do, that is an incredible feeling.”

He tells a story, a moment in a month of very public highs and lows. Spirit had just landed, and Squyres was talking to the press in the JPL auditorium when he heard that the first color image from Pancam had arrived. He sprinted across the courtyard to Building 264 and dashed up to the Pancam room on the fourth floor, expecting to find a crowd of people gathered around the big plasma-screen monitors. But the room was dark and empty.

“Jim Bell is sitting there all alone in front of a computer with tears running down his cheeks,” Squyres says. “I walk in. There’s the picture. And he says, ‘It works, man. It works.’”

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For more exciting news and pictures of Mars and the Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, there is a fabulous website at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov.  This site is from the JPL in California, and has something for every age-solar systems, stars and galaxies, as well as all the latest news on Mars!  Half way down the page there is a link for MarsQuest Online which takes you to a cool site that invites the user to manipulate the panoramic camera views from the Mars Rover Spirit and Opportunity.

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