Lead researcher discusses Cornell's new role in 2001 Mars lander mission

Astronomy Professor Steven Squyres displays camera plans for the Mars Surveyor lander mission in the Space Sciences Building July 17. Charles Harrington/University Photography

By David Brand

Cornell's astronomy department is working in a newly defined role on NASA's Mars Surveyor lander mission, scheduled for launch in April 2001. Although the Cornell-led Athena Rover vehicle program will not be included in the mission as previously planned, "we will be doing a pretty good job of recovery" by continuing to provide most of the science for the 2001 lander, said Steven Squyres, professor of astronomy and the lead researcher on the project to explore and analyze part of the Martian surface.

Squyres confirmed that because of revised budgets and time pressures, NASA has postponed the Athena Rover segment of the Surveyor Mars mission from 2001 and has tentatively rescheduled it for the 2003 Mars Surveyor launch. The highly complex package consists of a suite of experiments on board a roving vehicle. In 2005, another Mars Surveyor mission has the goal of returning to Earth with Martian rock samples collected by Athena.

"Of course, it's a little disappointing," said Squyres about the postponement of the Athena Rover program. "But having a somewhat delayed program that is realistic is better than having an on-schedule program that isn't going to work."

Following "a lengthy and painful process" by NASA to choose the payload for the 2001 mission, said Squyres, Cornell will be represented on board the lander by a sophisticated instrument called the Pancam/MiniTES (for panoramic camera and miniature thermal emission spectrometer). The equipment will be carried on the deck of the lander instead of on the Rover vehicle, as originally planned for the mission.

This reconfigured segment of the 2001 mission, renamed APEX, will be mounted on a 3-foot-long mast and will arrive on the Martian surface folded flat on the lander deck. A motor actuator will swing the mast upright. The camera will rotate on top of the mast, photographing rocks of interest. The mast's infrared spectrometer will be able to reveal much about the mineralogy of selected rocks as well as analyze soil samples scooped up by a 6-foot-long arm on the lander.

The choice of Cornell to manage the Athena Rover program was announced last November. Squyres leads the 20-member science team from the United States, Germany and Denmark, which includes James Bell, assistant professor of astronomy at Cornell. But, said Squyres, it fairly quickly became obvious that NASA's overall Mars program budget was unworkable. Then came the realization that the mission schedule for 2001 also was too tight. "By April things really started to go off the rails," he said.

As originally planned for the 2001 landing, the Rover vehicle would have traveled as far as 100 yards a day from the lander, selecting rock samples and analyzing them with its on-board instruments, among them a drill to bore into rocks and Raman and Mössbauer spectrometers to gather mineralogical data.

The 2001 investigations still will provide valuable geology and geochemistry data, said Squyres, although the research into biological aspects will be more limited than it will be for the 2003 mission.