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Reprinted from: The Green Bay News-Chronicle
http://www.greenbaynewschron.com/

January 26, 2005

From UWGB to Mars

A professor will be part of the team controlling a 2009 Mars rover

By Adam Hardy
For The News-Chronicle

The next time NASA sends a rover to Mars, it will be carrying a little bit of Titletown with it. A University of Wisconsin-Green Bay planetary scientist has joined a NASA-funded team that will design and control a Mars megarover, launching toward the red planet in 2009.

Dr. R. Aileen Yingst, assistant professor of Natural and Applied Sciences at UWGB, will join one of three specialist squads dedicated to the technical testing of the rover's sensory equipment.

Yingst said the goal of the planned mission to Mars, under the purview of the Mars Science Laboratory, is to deliver a mobile laboratory to the Martian surface in search of nutrients that could potentially sustain a future manned mission to Earth's closest planetary neighbor.

"One of the things Mars Science Laboratory is assigned to do is understand what resources are available on Mars," said Yingst. "If you are sending people to Mars, you are going to want to know what resources you are going to take with you and what resources you might be able to use on the surface. One of the things that MSL is going to do is find out what resources we can use in the soil. The other mission is to look for past environments that supported life."

Bigger, heavier and more powerful than the machinery currently exploring Mars, the roving laboratory is expected to remain active by harnessing the power of the sun for two years after landing in 2010.

While the mission headquarters will reside in San Diego, Calif., Yingst said she will be doing the bulk of her work in Green Bay.

"The beauty of technology is that (the team) can do most our communications by e-mail and cell phone," said Yingst. "The closer we get to launch and landing, the more we are going to have to communicate by going out to San Diego and being there at the scene."

While communication can be accomplished from afar, there are a few things that the geography in Northeast Wisconsin cannot offer. Yingst's specialty is camera work, and she plans to put the new rover through its paces in locations like Death Valley and Iceland, which Yingst said are geologically similar to Martian terrain, though not exactly so.

"The best example of an environment like Mars on Earth is about 100,000 feet up," said Yingst. "Mars has an atmosphere that is extremely thin and it's very cold on Mars. But the next best place on the surface of the Earth would probably be Antarctica, a cold desert."

Though Yingst has her Ph.D. in geology, she has hands-on experience working in the field of optics and that is what landed her the spot working on the mobile laboratory.

"My expertise is in field testing of Mars cameras," said Yingst. "I worked as a post doc (post-doctoral student) at the University of Arizona at the lunar and planetary lab with Peter Smith, the person who built the camera for the Mars Pathfinder. When I was working with (Smith) I worked with the Mars Pathfinder cameras, and I also worked with the Mars Polar Lander cameras. My expertise is taking those Mars-ready cameras out into different geological situations and testing the abilities of the cameras to take good pictures of what we should be seeing. You want to make sure that the images you are getting are a true representation of what is on Mars' surface."

While the basis of the mission is to discover what resources are available on the surface or Mars, with the apparent purpose of laying groundwork for a future human mission, Yingst said that she is not certain if a human boot will touch Martian soil in the near future.

"It depends on what our priorities end up being. My opinion, having had experience working with robotic mission, is that there is a limit to what they can do. As an example, when we where doing Pathfinder there wasn't a single geologist in the room that didn't, at least at one point, stand on his or her tippy-toes trying to get the lander to look just a little further over horizon.

"For Pathfinder, if I had been on the surface of Mars for just 10 minutes, I could answer all of the questions that we still have about that particular landing site. The beauty of robots is that they go places that are very dangerous for humans to go. But my sense is that at some point, if we are going to advance scientifically, we are going to have to send humans to Mars."