Rover's sendoff party allows CU alumni to go behind the scenes

Cornell researcher Robert Sullivan, a member of the Mars rover Athena science team, describes aspects of the latest mission for Cornell alumni and friends at a Cape Canaveral restaurant, June 23. Listening to Sullivan at the front table are Cornell astronomy professor Yervant Terzian, left, the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences, and alumnus Fred Young '64. Robert Barker/University Photography

By Kate Becker

Esther Bondareff is excited to be meeting Bill Nye -- again. "I knew him when he was this tall," she said, gesturing in the air near her waist to indicate the height of the boy -- now the famously bow-tied television "science guy"-- who used to frequent her family's grocery store in Washington, D.C.

Bondareff '37 and Nye '77, who is a Cornell Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 Professor, were among the hundreds of alumni and friends in Cape Canaveral, Fla., the week of June 22 for a bon voyage celebration to send the rover Opportunity on its way to Mars. Spirit, Opportunity's twin, was launched June 10.

The launch brought together people from across disciplines as well as across generations, melding current students who are working with the rover science team with those who graduated decades ago. Bondareff noted that she graduated 66 years ago, a decade before pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier and 22 years before NASA was created. And, if all goes according to plan, next January she will be hearing about rover "robotic geologists" landing on Mars.

Cornell's intimate connection with this historic event, even though it faced several delays, was celebrated with typical enthusiasm during the week by the alumni, who converged on hotels in Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral. They were there to get a behind-the-scenes look at NASA's latest Mars mission and, in particular, at the two rovers and their twin suites of Athena science instruments and tools from the people who designed and built them.

It has been "an exhilarating, exhausting sprint to try to get Opportunity onto the launch pad," Steven Squyres, professor of astronomy and the leader of the Athena science team, told 200 alumni at a banquet Tuesday, June 24, at the Kennedy Space Center's commanding Saturn V Center.

Standing in the shadow of a Saturn V rocket (the 6 million-pound behemoth hangs from the ceiling of the Saturn V Center), he called the twin-rover mission "humanity's first great voyage of the 21st century."

Said Squyres, "This has been the adventure of a lifetime, and our ships haven't even left harbor yet." He added that this is a time when "literally, our dreams take flight." And saluting the many Cornell undergraduates and graduates associated with his team, he said, "There are students, 21, 22 years old, who have built with their own hands hardware that will spend the rest of eternity on another planet."

About 50 alumni also had the opportunity to pepper Squyres with questions about the rovers' hardware and software in a two-hour update from the mission's principal investigator on Wednesday morning, June 25, at the Best Western hotel in Cape Canaveral. A relaxed Squyres also shared "war stories" of failed tests of the rovers' bounce-down landing maneuver, including a parachute that "shredded to ribbons" and a rover that became tangled and trapped in the airbags designed to cushion its landing.

On Monday evening (June 23), 60 alumni and friends had gathered at a Cape Canaveral restaurant to hear from Cornell researcher Robert Sullivan, who is a member of the Athena team. "Cornell has a huge part in this mission," said Sullivan. "The organization, the thrust, the vision" came from Cornell researchers, he emphasized.

"I don't want to leave to future generations exploration that we could do now," said Sullivan.

Genevieve Wolpert, left, from Durham, N.C., will be entering Cornell in the fall. Here she attends a June 24 alumni banquet at the Saturn V Center at Kennedy Space Center with her father, Robert '72. Robert Barker/University Photography

Teenager Genevieve Wolpert might be part of that next generation of space exploration. In Florida with her parents -- her father, Robert Wolpert, is Class of '72 -- she will be entering the Cornell Class of '07 in the fall. She and a team of students from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics were regional finalists in last fall's Siemens Westinghouse Competition for their research on remnants of exploding stars, called supernovas, and she is considering studying astronomy or biology at Cornell.

Two members of an intrepid and enthusiastic group of alumni called Friends of Astronomy, Charles Burger and his wife, Manhattan artist Barbara Burger, described the launch as a "down to Earth" expression of the cosmology and mathematics that inspire Barbara Burger's art. She has completed a series of sculptures exploring science as the art of the 21st century.

The Athena team will assemble at the headquarters of mission manager, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, Calif., next January for the Mars landing. Karen Jewett '79, associate director of the Cornell Alumni Affairs and Development Western Regional Office in San Francisco, is working to ensure a strong alumni presence. She hopes the landing, which coincides with the Planetary Society's annual Planetfest celebration, will be "great recognition" for the close to 150 Cornell engineering alumni who work behind the scenes at JPL.

In Florida, the alumni meetings with science team members were the silver lining to launch delays that prevented the visiting alumni from seeing the launch itself. "People who chose to come [to Cape Canaveral] were committed to salvaging something from the experience," said Karen Weinreich '89, director of Alumni Affairs and Development's Southeast Regional Office in Miami. But, she said, the alumni "were more than pleased" with their experience. Referring to the Best Western session, she observed, "To have two hours with the principal investigator -- how cool is that?"

The delays were particularly bittersweet for two alumni, Bruce Marcus '58, Ph.D. '63, and his wife, Carol '60, M.S. '61, Ph.D. '63. The two were fulfilling a long-held ambition to see their first rocket launch. But they couldn't stay. Bruce Marcus related that before retiring in 1999 he had spent 35 years working on rocket thermal control systems for TRW. "I'm still a rocket scientist who has never seen a rocket launch," he said regretfully.