Completed: August 1, 1994 Mars Global Surveyor Space Flight Facility Department of Geology, Arizona State University
One year ago we experienced the loss of NASA's Mars Observer about one hour after we had completed our second teachers workshop. The year following the loss was full of surprises. In October 1993, NASA received funds to begin Mars Pathfinder, a spacecraft which promises to complete the first U.S. landing on Mars since 1976. In February 1994, NASA announced the Mars Surveyor program as an integrated effort to recover orbiter science lost by Mars Observer and pursue new international missions over the next 10 years. The first spacecraft in the Mars Surveyor series is Mars Global Surveyor. In July 1994, NASA selected Martin Marietta of Denver, Colorado, to build the spacecraft. Mars Global Surveyor will carry some of the same instruments that were on Mars Observer.
Aboard Mars Global Surveyor will be the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES). The TES project began in 1984 when Dr. Philip Christensen and a team of scientists and engineers from around the U.S. proposed this instrument to determine the mineral composition of the martian surface. The first TES was built and launched in September 1992, aboard Mars Observer. The first steps toward construction of the new Mars Global Surveyor TES began early in 1994 and will continue until the instrument is complete in early 1996. Once it is in space, the TES will be controlled from the campus of Arizona State University (ASU).
The ASU TES research group does not have an instrument aboard the other Mars mission launching in 1996-- Mars Pathfinder. However, the Arizona Mars K-12 Education Program is committed to bringing news of this mission to the students of Arizona. Pathfinder, too, has some unique and exciting Arizona connections. The imaging system for the lander is being developed under a team headed by Dr. Peter Smith at the University of Arizona in Tucson. In addition, an experiment to monitor wind speed and direction is being devised by Dr. Ronald Greeley and Dr. Robert Sullivan of Arizona State University.
Pathfinder will land on Mars, probably at the junction of two giant flood channels, Ares and Tiu, on July 4, 1997. This will be a very exciting day indeed. No student in grades K-12 will remember the last time a spacecraft landed on Mars, as none of them had been born before September 3, 1976 (when Viking 2 landed). Mars Global Surveyor will reach the Red Planet in September 1997, and start a mapping campaign that will last well into the year 2000. At the same time, new orbiters and landers sent to Mars by Russia with the help of European and U.S. partners will be arriving to continue this new era of Mars exploration.
This volume is our second K-12 Education Supplement and Guide. Our first was printed in August 1993, and contained information about the Mars Observer mission. After the present guide (1994-1995), we expect to produce two more (1995-1996 and 1996-1997) before the new armada of spacecraft leave the U.S. and Russia for the Mars in late 1996. We hope you will find this guide useful during the 1994-1995 school year in bringing the excitement of Mars exploration into your classroom and preparing your students for the 21st Century.