SATELLITE CAMPUS ON MARS

IT'S ARID AND COLD there now, and quite inhospitable. But researchers think that Mars was once home to ancient bodies of water-rivers and lakes, and possibly oceans. And where there once was water, there may have been life. The effort to crack that mystery was the scientific objective of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, which in January successfully landed a pair of small robotic scouts on the Red Planet. If answers arc found, much of the credit can go to a cadre of academics from 13 American universities, with support from French, German, and Japanese colleagues. The principal investigator is Cornell University's Steven W. Squyers, a professor of astronomy. Other scholars on the science team come from such institutions as Harvard, the University of Chicago, Washington University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Arizona, and Ohio State University. Cornell and Texas A&M were among schools that engineered the robots' panoramic cameras, while Ari/ona State University and the University of Nevada were among those that worked on the varions instruments aboard the rovers. And mission control for the $820 million Mars exploration is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which is managed by the California Institute of Technology.

Opportunity, the second rover to land, early on sent back photos of bedrock that suggested they might have been formed by prehistoric waters. No matter the mission's conclusions, Squyres told reporters, it is "arguably going to be the coolest geologic field trip in human history." Spirit was the first of the two rovers to reach Mars. It made a textbook landing and had begun to explore the Martian surface, delivering incredible pictures, too. Nasa engineers worked out some glitches that initially sidelined Spirit. Mars is a notoriously hard place to reach; two thirds of previous missions there failed. So despite Spirit's difficulties, this one was already deemed at least a partial success.