Swathed head to toe in surgical garb and huddled over a table, George Nakatsukasa slowly places a sturdy cover over the electronic heart of his six-wheeled patient. Across a room so clean it contains almost no dust, engineers are circling another robot, peering beneath layers of plastic at the cables emerging from its torso. The quiet focus in this room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, contrasts starkly with the media glare encircling Johnson Space Center in Houston—where the loss of space shuttle Columbia has brought manned space flight to a halt. The challenge of space exploration now has fallen heavily to the engineers at JPL, who have been working for more than a year at a breakneck pace to send twin handcrafted robots to Mars. The assembly and testing of these sophisticated vehicles has been under incredible time pressure from the start. The breakup of Columbia came as engineers in Pasadena were in a last, difficult stretch: the push to finish the rovers and send them to Florida for launch this summer. When he heard the news about Columbia, Nakatsukasa stopped in his tracks. Then he headed into work. ‘‘We can’t slow down,’’ said Nakatsukasa, a lead technician with the team building the rovers. ‘‘We’ve got a launch window to meet.’’ The Mars craft will be ferried into space separately in May and June, not by a shuttle but by Boeing Delta II rockets. ‘‘Explorers don’t back off,’’ said JPL Director Charles Elachi, who called an ‘‘all-hands meeting’’ of employees the Monday after Columbia disintegrated over Texas, killing the seven astronauts aboard. ‘‘I told them the best thing you can do to honour the astronauts is go back to your offices and work on this.’’ Delaying the $800-million mission to determine whether Mars could have once sustained life is not an option, because the launch window opens only once every 26 months. By examining chemical and mineralogical clues hidden within Martian rocks, the ‘‘robot geologists’’ will seek proof that the water necessary for life once was present in large amounts on the now-cold planet’s surface. The pressure for this mission to succeed—already high because of the loss of two Mars spacecraft in 1999—has increased since the Columbia tragedy. A small rover was supposed to fly in 2001, but that trip was cancelled after an independent review of the 1999 failures criticised NASA for trying to do too much on what amounted to a shoestring budget. For those in the clean room, the disintegration of Columbia was a painful reminder of the hazards of spaceflight. Those assembling the rovers are doing everything they can to reduce risks. Everyone here knows there is a chance that the twins won’t survive their seven-month trip. Columbia’s loss makes that clear. (LATWP)
