The spirit of exploration.

Abstract

This article discusses the two NASA rovers on Mars. At 8:15 P.M. Pacific time on January 3, the Spirit rover tucked inside its protective capsule, separated from its interplanetary mother ship and prepared to enter the atmosphere of Mars. And just a week before Spirit reached Mars, the British Beagle 2 lander bounded into the Martian atmosphere never to be heard from again. Between 1960 and 2002 the U.S., Russia and Japan sent 33 missions to the Red Planet. Nine made it. Steve Squyres, principal investigator of the rover's scientific instruments, has been trying to get to Mars for 17 years. The Cornell University professor has something of a wunderkind reputation. He did his Ph.D. from start to finish in three years and, during the 1980s, became an expert on half the solid bodies of the solar system, from the icy satellites of Jupiter to the volcanic plains of Venus to the water-cut highlands of Mars. Over the past six and a half years, the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey orbiters--bearing duplicates of the instruments that the ill-fated Mars Observer carried--have looked for and detected essentially none of those minerals.