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ZL2VAL > ROVERS 05.01.05 11:05l 92 Lines 3849 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 960624ZL2VAL
Read: GUEST
Subj: Rovers story to air on PBS TV
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Sent: 050105/0819Z @:ZL2AB.#46.NZL.OC #:54721 [New Plymouth] FBB7.00g
From: ZL2VAL@ZL2AB.#46.NZL.OC
To : ROVERS@WW
*TV Review: NOVA - Welcome to Mars *
*By Tariq Malik
Staff Writer
posted: 4 January 2005
7:00 a.m. ET
NASA's twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have yielded volumes of
new data about the red planet in the last year - the least of which
involves the planet's history of water. But the rovers have also amazed
their human handlers with their longevity, lasting nearly four
times their initial 90-day mission despite some early glitches that
popped up after landing.
A new one-hour documentary `NOVA: Welcome to Mars' (Public Broadcasting
System, Jan. 4 at 8:00 p.m. EST) chronicles the rover mission from the
early days after Spirit's landing through the arrival of Opportunity and
some following months.
The program is NOVA's sequel to its first rover feature `Mars: Dead or
Alive', which aired a day after Spirit's Jan. 3, 2004 landing at Gusev
Crater (Opportunity landed at Meridiani Planum on Jan. 25). Since then,
mission scientists and engineers have helped the rovers overcome a
potentially crippling *software* glitch aboard Spirit, a *stuck heater*
on Opportunity and found *evidence* that liquid water was once plentiful
in the distant Martian past.
For viewers with an interest in Mars - but perhaps not the time to track
Spirit and Opportunity's progress day after Martian day - `Welcome to
Mars' provides a pretty clear overview of the mission's science
accomplishments to date
But the highlight of the show is its inside glimpse at the effect the
rover effort has on the people behind the mission, such as one
married couple's effort to both live on "Mars time," a shifting
eight-hour work cycle, for their mission duties while raising two
children who live firmly on Earth's day-night schedule.
"I wanted people to come away with a sense of what an adventure it was
for the people involved in this mission," the show's producer Mark Davis
told SPACE.com. "It's not just some sort of cold-blooded science
experiment."
The anxiety of Cornell University astronomer Steven Squyres, principal
science investigator for the rover mission, during Spirit's software
problems seems to sum up his whole team's fears: "Was it something we
did? Was it a design flaw or an act of God?" he says in the documentary.
Meanwhile, other mission team members describe their feelings while
covering light-filled windows to blot out the Earth's Sun so as not to
distract from their Mars time schedule.
"We landed two rovers on Mars in three weeks," one rover team members
says. "What can match this?"
Davis's crew shot 30 hours of video with the Mars rover teams at NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California - where the
entire mission was initially managed - then sifted though hundreds of
hours of footage captured by a JPL cameraman to make up the 60-minute
documentary.
"It was really impossible for people not to anthropomorphize these
rovers," Davis said. "They're pretty cute."
`NOVA: Welcome to Mars' will appear on PBS at 8:00 p.m. EST (Check local
listings). You can watch NOVA: Mars Dead or Alive here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mars/program.html
-=###=-
73, Alan
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