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Geoffrey Alan Landis is an American aerospace engineer and author, working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on planetary exploration, interstellar propulsion, solar power and photovoltaics. He holds nine patents, primarily in the field of improvements to solar cells and photovoltaic devices and has given presentations and commentary on the possibilities for interstellar travel and construction of bases on the Moon, Mars, and Venus.
Mars Pathfinder is an American robotic spacecraft that landed a base station with a roving probe on Mars in 1997. It consisted of a lander, renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, and a lightweight, 10.6 kg (23 lb) wheeled robotic Mars rover named Sojourner, the first rover to operate outside the Earth–Moon system.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission was a robotic space mission involving two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, exploring the planet Mars. It began in 2003 with the launch of the two rovers to explore the Martian surface and geology; both landed on Mars at separate locations in January 2004. Both rovers far outlived their planned missions of 90 Martian solar days: MER-A Spirit was active until March 22, 2010, while MER-B Opportunity was active until June 10, 2018.
Opportunity, also known as MER-B or MER-1, is a robotic rover that was active on Mars from 2004 until 2018. Opportunity was operational on Mars for 5111 sols. Launched on July 7, 2003, as part of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover program, it landed in Meridiani Planum on January 25, 2004, three weeks after its twin, Spirit (MER-A), touched down on the other side of the planet. With a planned 90-sol duration of activity, Spirit functioned until it got stuck in 2009 and ceased communications in 2010, while Opportunity was able to stay operational for 5111 sols after landing, maintaining its power and key systems through continual recharging of its batteries using solar power, and hibernating during events such as dust storms to save power. This careful operation allowed Opportunity to operate for 57 times its designed lifespan, exceeding the initial plan by 14 years, 47 days. By June 10, 2018, when it last contacted NASA, the rover had traveled a distance of 45.16 kilometers.
A Mars rover is a remote-controlled motor vehicle designed to travel on the surface of Mars. Rovers have several advantages over stationary landers: they examine more territory, they can be directed to interesting features, they can place themselves in sunny positions to weather winter months, and they can advance the knowledge of how to perform very remote robotic vehicle control. They serve a different purpose than orbital spacecraft like Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. A more recent development is the Mars helicopter.
Steven Weldon Squyres is an American geologist and planetary scientist. He was the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His research area is in planetary sciences, with a focus on large solid bodies in the Solar System such as the terrestrial planets and the moons of the Jovian planets. Squyres was the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER).
An alpha particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS) is a spectrometer that analyses the chemical element composition of a sample from scattered alpha particles and fluorescent X-rays after a sample is irradiated with alpha particles and X-rays from radioactive sources. This method of analysing the elemental composition of a sample is most often used on space missions, which require low weight, small size, and minimal power consumption. Other methods are faster, and do not require the use of radioactive materials, but require larger equipment with greater power requirements. A variation is the alpha proton X-ray spectrometer, such as on the Pathfinder mission, which also detects protons.
Andrew Mishkin is a senior systems engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he coordinated the development of various robotic vehicles and their subsystems for more than 15 years. He was on the Sojourner rover team at its formation, eventually becoming an uplink sequence planner as Sojourner explored Mars. In 1997, he received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal and was also selected as one of "The 35 People Who Made the Year" in the December issue of Vanity Fair magazine. He then was a Mission Operations System Development Manager on Mars Exploration Rover mission.
James F. Bell III is a professor of Astronomy at Arizona State University, specializing in the study of planetary geology, geochemistry and mineralogy using data obtained from telescopes and from various spacecraft missions. Bell's active research has involved the NASA Mars Pathfinder, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR), Comet Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR), 2001 Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Mars Science Laboratory missions. His book Postcards from Mars includes many images taken by the Mars rovers. Bell is currently an editor of the space science journal Icarus and president of The Planetary Society. He has served as the lead scientist in charge of the Panoramic camera (Pancam) color imaging system on Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity.
A rover is a planetary surface exploration device designed to move over the rough surface of a planet or other planetary mass celestial bodies. Some rovers have been designed as land vehicles to transport members of a human spaceflight crew; others have been partially or fully autonomous robots. Rovers are typically created to land on another planet via a lander-style spacecraft, tasked to collect information about the terrain, and to take crust samples such as dust, soil, rocks, and even liquids. They are essential tools in space exploration.
A Mars landing is a landing of a spacecraft on the surface of Mars. Of multiple attempted Mars landings by robotic, uncrewed spacecraft, ten have had successful soft landings. There have also been studies for a possible human mission to Mars including a landing, but none have been attempted.
MESUR, the Mars Environmental SURvey was a NASA program designed to explore the planet Mars in preparation for human follow-up missions of the Space Exploration Initiative. The only mission of the program that was completed was MESUR Pathfinder.
Donna Lee Shirley is a former manager of Mars Exploration at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She is the author of the book Managing Martians: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman's Lifelong Quest to Get to Mars—and of the Team Behind the Space Robot That Has Captured the Imagination of the World.
Peter H. Smith is a professor emeritus at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona, where he holds the inaugural Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair in Integrative Science. He is also the principal investigator for the $420 million robotic explorer Phoenix which landed at the north pole of the planet Mars on May 25, 2008. Peter H. Smith's papers are held at the University of Arizona Special Collections Library.
The embedded computer systems onboard Mars rovers are designed to withstand high radiation levels and large temperature changes in space. For this reason their computational resources are limited compared to systems commonly used on Earth.
Sojourner is a robotic Mars rover that landed in the Ares Vallis channel in the Chryse Planitia region of the Oxia Palus quadrangle on July 4, 1997. Sojourner was operational on Mars for 92 sols. It was the first wheeled vehicle to rove on a planet other than Earth and formed part of the Mars Pathfinder mission.
Kobie Boykins is a senior mechanical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In 2013, he was awarded the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal. He designed the solar array systems for the Mars exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and designed the actuators on the Mars rover Curiosity. He is currently the supervisor of the mobility and remote sensing teams for Curiosity. In 2003, he was part of NASA's M-Team, which lectured nationally to students regarding careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. He lectures internationally for National Geographic regarding exploration on Mars.
Sol is a solar day on Mars; that is, a Mars-day. A sol is the apparent interval between two successive returns of the Sun to the same meridian as seen by an observer on Mars. It is one of several units for timekeeping on Mars.
References
- "'IITians don't rule the world'". Rediff.com . 13 January 2005. Retrieved 26 April 2014.
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