Mars Hot Rods

By Jeffrey Kluger

Mars has not been kind to NASA lately. It was only three years ago that the Pathfinder rover toddled across the planet, beaming home the best cosmic photo album ever assembled. Last year, however, the space agency's Mars program fell flat, when two other spacecraft failed en route to the planet without collecting a scrap of data. Now NASA is trying again. Last week the space agency announced plans to send a pair of souped-up rovers to Mars in 2003 and this time--via the Internet--to take Earthlings along.

The Pathfinder rover was a modest machine: 1 ft. tall and so slow it covered only 100 yds. of terrain in its 90-day life-span. By comparison, the new Mars cars are hot rods. Each will weigh 330 lbs., stand 4 ft. high and cover 100 yds. in a day. The rovers will bristle with 10 cameras as well as a robotic arm, able to conduct microscopic studies of rocks.

Hardware this snazzy does not come cheap: total cost of the missions is estimated at about $600 million. NASA insists it is money well spent. Mission analysts have concluded that one reason for last year's failures may have been that NASA chief Dan Goldin's "better, faster, cheaper" policy may have got too cheap and cut too many corners.

In order to keep the public involved, every minute of the missions will be beamed to a NASA website, where a rover's-eye view of Mars will be available. NASA doesn't know yet just what part of the planet's surface viewers will see when they log on, but plans call for sending the rovers to spots where water may once have flowed--and life might once have appeared. No matter what the robots discover, for now, NASA is relieved that the Mars program is once again showing its own signs of life.

--By Jeffrey Kluger