NASA could soon send humans to Mars, UA researcher says

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Peter Smith, associate research scientist at the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, shows a photo spread depicting images of Mars sent back from the camera he helped build.

"We have the ability to send spacecraft to Mars with humans aboard even now," said Smith, associate research scientist at the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

He said sending astronauts to Mars depends on getting NASA to change its goals for space exploration.

"We're going to have to wait for NASA to stop building the space station and start thinking about going over the next mountain, getting us to Mars," Smith said to an audience of about 90 last night in the Arizona Health Sciences Center DuVal Auditorium as part of the Faculty Community Lecture Series.

Smith said that after the Apollo missions of the late '60s and early '70s, NASA stopped working on the Saturn 5 launch vehicle necessary for a future Mars mission.

"We let our capability decay to the point where you cannot even send people to the moon at this point," he said. "We would have to rebuild some-thing like a Saturn 5 rocket."

Despite NASA's emphasis on the space station and small unmanned missions, Smith is optimistic about someday sending humans to Mars.

"It could happen within 10 years, and we've even formed a Mars Society to form a political base to get things started," he said. "I think within 100 years we will be colonizing Mars." The Mars Society comprises a group of people who work toward sending a manned mission to the red planet.

Smith served as principal investigator for the group that designed and built the Imager camera for the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997. His group will have two more cameras on board a 1999 mission to the red planet. The Polar Lander, which launches Jan. 3, will land near the ice cap on Mars' south pole.

In addition to the Imager camera like the one on the Pathfinder mission, Smith's team of UA scientists have built a camera mounted on a robotic arm that will scoop up Martian soil, which another team of UA scientists will analyze.

"The robotic arm will put the soil in little ovens that will heat it up," Smith said. "The gases released by the heating will then be measured."

Smith's team will continue building cameras for the 2001 mission, set to land near the Martian equator.

"The 2001 mission will be a combination of Pathfinder and the Polar Lander missions," he said. "It will have a camera (the Imager), a robotic arm and a rover."

Thomas Stauffer can be reached via e-mail at Thomas.Stauffer@wildcat.arizona.edu.