PUBLISHED MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
Alan
Gomez
@PensacolaNewsJournal.com
It turns out the road to Mars runs through Pensacola.
A team of scientists and researchers met at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition last week as part of a nearly yearlong effort to figure out how to reach the Red Planet.
The 20-person team consists of several high-ranking NASA officials, researchers from the institute and others from around the country.
"We tried to get people in this group who haven't necessarily been involved in the past," said Doug Cooke, manager for the Advanced Development Office at Johnson Space Center in Houston, which is responsible for planetary exploration. "We want to get brand new ideas. We're not trying to educate them on what's been done before, just trying to let the ideas flow.
"And so far, they've come up with some approaches we really haven't looked at before."
The group has met twice in Pensacola and plans to meet several more times in the next six months in several cities. The goal is to submit recommendations to NASA at the end of the meetings that may pave the way for a future Mars mission.
"We tend to work in a very closed community and talk to the same people, so it's good for us to break out of that,"said John Frassanito, a consultant for NASA who once held the patent on the personal computer and local area networks. "It's been going really well so far."
Members of the group were quick to credit the University of West Florida institute and its director, Ken Ford, for bringing together such a wide variety of talent.
"He's really able to pull people in that you otherwise couldn't get together for a meeting like this," said Dan Cooke, Doug Cooke's brother and chairman of the computer science department at Texas Tech University. "That shows in the institute because it's like a (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)-type lab already."
During the two-day session at the institute, the group concentrated on the role of humans in a trip to Mars.
Three possibilities are as old as the space program itself:
Humans remain on Earth, and shuttles send robots to the planet.
Humans fly into space but remain in a close orbit around Mars.
Humans try to land on the surface of the planet.
But the team came up with an idea that was new to manned spaceflight: keeping a space station-type post in a point somewhere in between.
That location is known as the libration point, where the gravity from Mars and the Sun cancel out. The location is close enough to Earth to maintain an active post, but far enough to ease flights to Mars. From there, astronauts can make several flights to the surface.
"We're just now beginning to reach a consensus on the role of the human in Mars exploration," said John Caulfield, a pioneer in laser optics and one of the inventors of the hologram. "It's not a simple role, but we know it's going to be important to get humans as close as we can."
William Clancey, an IHMC professor, is part of the group and also participates in another research program that studies life on Mars.
He spends about a month every year in the Canadian High Arctic studying a group of scientists who are re-enacting a mission to the surface. In April, he will head the group for the first time. This project will be done in Utah, and Clancey said the lessons learned from last week's meeting will apply to his work.
"People are going to be involved in a mission to Mars. The question is where are they going to be?" he said. "They're raising some questions in this group, and we can help answer some small parts. I've been taking my notes."
As the group spends the next six months determining the logistic possibilities of a mission to Mars and its importance to science, many said it was something else that was driving them.
"Humans are quintessentially explorers and makers of things. This defines us as a species," Ford said. "So I can't think of anything more exciting that combines the toolmaker and explorer aspects of humans than reaching for Mars."