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'Roving Mars' adventure as well as documentary

“Roving Mars,” which opened at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center on October 6, is a documentary about the two Mars Exploration Rover vehicles on the Red Planet. It’s quite educational. And since the rovers had to get to Mars in the first place, it’s also a great adventure story.

“It’s the story of a team of people that did something that seemed to be undoable,” said Jeffrey Kirsch, the Executive Director of the Fleet Science Center.

Narration is provided by Mars Exploration Rover principal investigator Steve Squyres. Squyres noted that the question of whether life once existed on Mars could possibly be answered by investigating the composition of the rocks. The rovers provided the communication, inspection, and mobility capabilities to inform NASA about the composition of Martian rock.

“It was delightful. It was very well done. Steve Squyres is full of enthusiasm,” said Dan Goldin, who was the NASA Administrator when initial work on the project began and who now has a company in La Jolla called The Intellisis Corporation. “Not only is he a good scientist, but he’s a good communicator.”

There are no mechanics on Mars, so all of the parts had to work perfectly and survive the trip. That seven-month trip covers both Earth and Mars rotating around the sun (a Martian day is 24.6 Earth hours; a Martian year is 687 days), and making sure the spacecraft landed on Mars was the equivalent of shooting a basketball from Los Angeles to New York and landing it into the net. Such a basketball shot, accuracy notwithstanding, would be possible with enough rocket fuel, but since the exploration vehicle itself was larger than originally planned the parachute had to be redesigned to avoid tearing as it did during tests. And since Earth and Mars are only properly aligned for such a flight every 26 months, missing the deadline carried consequences.

It should also be noted that radio signals took ten minutes to reach Earth, and with a six-minute timeframe between penetrating Mars’ atmosphere and landing on the planet NASA wouldn’t be able to make any corrections.

In order to increase the chances of a vehicle landing on Mars and working once it got there, NASA built two vehicles. Actually they built three, leaving one at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for testing purposes, although that was not mentioned in the movie. Spirit, the first rover built, had most of the testing problems, and that meant that NASA encountered fewer problems while testing Opportunity, which was launched three weeks after Spirit in 2004.

Spirit and Opportunity both landed successfully, and all functions worked while the vehicles were exploring Mars. Spirit’s initial investigation, however, revealed that the rocks it first examined were volcanic lava, so Spirit was relocated to a hill a mile and a half away. That seems simple enough for a vehicle designed to travel over rough terrain, but Spirit was only designed to travel about 600 yards during its lifetime.

The rocks Opportunity examined indicated traces of water, making the mission successful. Spirit struggled up the hill as dust obscured solar panels and reduced power, but it reached high enough for wind to clear the dust and restore the solar panels’ capability and eventually reached the top of the hill for observation. Each of the vehicles now has a problem with one wheel, but the rovers which had life expectancies of three months are both still sending data to NASA nearly three years after landing.

The documentary couldn’t provide every piece of information. One major shortcoming is that the rovers actually have three spectrometers, one of which is not on the vehicle’s four-fingered arm, so the narration that the arm includes a camera, two spectrometers, and a rock abrasion tool is somewhat misleading. But the film provided valuable information about Mars and about JPL as well as about the rovers.

And not only did it provide information, but in the process of describing how that information was made possible it also entertained through the adventure of building, landing, and successfully deploying a spacecraft.

There may or may not have been life on Mars. But there’s life in the “Roving Mars” film.

 

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