UA students help design NASA land rover to explore Mars

Arizona Summer Wildcat NASA enlisted professor Jo Dale Carothers and her students to make a circuit board for the microrover, a remote-controlled exploration vehicle, consisting of 64 microchips, each with more than 400 pins and 850,000 transistors.

University of Arizona engineering students helped develop a data decoder board for NASA's microrover, a remote-controlled exploration vehicle, which is aboard the Pathfinder spacecraft.

Pathfinder will land on Mars Friday.

The Jet Propulsion Lab, which is managing the Mars Pathfinder mission for NASA, had trouble designing the circuit board with the commercial software packages they were using, so the lab sought help from Jo Dale Carothers, UA assistant professor in the Ele ctrical and Computer Engineering Department.

A team of UA students worked with Carothers to design a decoder with 64 microchips, each with more than 400 pins and 850,000 transistors. More than 8,000 connections must be made between the microchips.

The UA team routed a board that contained multiple layers, connected together in a manner that required fewer layers than was possible using commercial tools.

The new technique solved JPL's problem and made the board manufacturable.

"The students felt they were making a difference," Carothers said. "They didn't have to wait five to 10 years for the work to be useful."

Carothers said people from the outside community were interested in the project and kept in touch with the students to see what they were doing. She added this provided students with extra motivation to work harder, faster and a little better.

"This makes for better research because you're advancing the state of the art while taking into account reality," Carothers said. "The techniques that are being used are being developed in this research are being applied now."

Women's Health Project

UA health researchers are helping the Arizona Department of Health Services find additional participants for a study on middle-aged Hispanic women's health.

The Well Woman Health Check Program, ADHS's breast and cervical screening program, is offering free screenings for diabetes and heart disease. The program is funded by a grant from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The services offered by the program in Maricopa and Pinal counties are open to uninsured and underinsured women with an annual income at or below $15,780. Five hundred women are now enrolled.

"Our goal is to have an additional 1,300 women enrolled in our screening program by December," said Bobbie O'Neill, chief of the Office of Chronic Disease Prevention.

James Marshall, professor of Family and Community Medicine, said researchers are not sure why a large number of Hispanic women suffer diabetes and heart disease.

A recent topic among the medical community has been that physical activity is good for health, Marshall said.

"We encourage them to walk half an hour a day, five days a week," he said.

Compiled from news releases.