While NASA’s latest mission to Mars may have seemed distant to most of the population, the project hit a little closer to home for College of Arts and Sciences research associate Paul Withers.
Withers had a first-hand role in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s $820 million mission, which successfully put “Spirit,” a golf-cart sized rover, on Mars Jan. 3 and hopes to place a second rover, “Opportunity,” on the planet by Jan. 25.
Withers, who has been working with Boston University’s Center for Space Physics since July 2003, said he first started working with NASA while working toward a doctorate in planetary sciences at the University of Arizona.
Withers said he was called in by NASA to “try to understand the Martian upper atmosphere – what effects the seasons have up there and what it is composed of.”
“My involvement with the Spirit landing was related to its entry into the atmosphere and its landing on the surface as a member of an advisory group that looked at the predictions that the NASA engineers had made about what the atmosphere would be like at the time of entry,” he said.
Withers said one of his main tasks was to analyze and interpret some of the measurements Spirit made upon its entry, including those of atmospheric pressure, density and temperature.
“Looking at how temperature varies with altitude can tell us about energy and momentum in relation to different regions,” Withers said.
The data can also reveal what kinds of clouds are in the atmosphere, he added.
Withers emphasized that his role with the project is not a full-time effort.
“I don’t have a particularly long-term involvement with the Mars rover project,” he said. “It’s more an occasional series of conferences over the telephone when important events occur. I’ll be playing a similar role next week when ‘Opportunity’ reaches its destination.”
Withers said he spent some time in December developing tools to analyze measurements and computer programs to process data that the rovers are equipped to gather.
Withers is currently the only BU researcher involved with the rover project, he said.
“The supervisor at the Center for Space [Physics] has slightly different research interests,” Withers said. “Hopefully there will be an opportunity to work with some of them in the future.”
In the end, the entire BU community will benefit from the information currently being gathered, he said.
“All the experiments and their results will be placed in a public archive accessible to anyone around the world,” Withers said. “Geologists at BU, for example, would have the opportunity to look at the information gathered to understand the geological process that molded Mars into the way we see it today. Physicists and engineers could be interested in how systems on the rover were operated.”
America as a whole will also benefit from the technologies and instruments that were developed for the rover missions, as will future space missions.
Withers was also involved last year with a failed British mission to Mars, the Beagle 2.
“It landed on Mars on Christmas day and hasn’t been heard from since,” Withers said. “I was a little more involved with that mission, whereas my involvement with NASA is more involved with the engineering side to ensure the successful landing on the surface.”
As for President Bush’s promise to increase NASA funding for an eventual human trip to Mars, Withers said, “I’ll be interested to see the details when they come out.
“At the moment, I think the board’s long term goals have been laid out by the president, but the details of how NASA intends to implement them – which programs will be stopped and able to be refocused – these aims will be of great interest to scientists,” he said.
But Withers said it would be disappointing if NASA’s focus was entirely redirected to furthering exploration on Mars.
“It would be sad if all other space exploration came to a stop just so NASA could focus on a crude exploration vehicle,” Withers said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Austin Moreau, a College of Engineering student, said he is glad to have a BU researcher focus on such a momentous project.
“When I see something like this on television, it seems really removed from my life,” he said. “But to have someone involved with the mission that I could actually get in touch with here at BU is cool.”