NASA engineer details rover exploits

NASA's Alicia Dwyer Cianciolo, an aerospace engineer with the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., spoke to a small group of students and faculty members at Northwest Missouri State University on Thursday about her involvement over the past decade in several unmanned space flights to Mars.

Cianciolo, a Nebraska native and mother of four who telecommutes from her home near St. Joseph, spoke for nearly an hour about the challenges she and her colleagues have faced in sending a series of rovers on the eight-day journey to Earth's solar system neighbor, successfully landing the crafts, then working to retrieve their data.

"I get paid to send vehicles to other planets," she said.

One of Cianciolo's main themes was the need for more students willing to study science, physics and mathematics in preparation for careers with the U.S. space agency, which she said is getting long in the tooth.

Of NASA's 18,000 employees, she said, two-thirds are scientists and engineers. She added that 58 percent of that workforce is over age 50, while only 15 percent is under the age of 35.

She said that unless more young people decide to join the United States' 50-year quest to push back the boundaries of space, NASA will loose the legendary base of experience and knowledge developed during its Apollo- and shuttle-era glory days of the 1970s and '80s.

Cianciolo also talked about her role as a member of the entry, descent and landing team that successfully placed the Curiosity rover on Mars last August.

The car-sized robotic rover reached the surface after a wild "seven minutes of terror," which included deployment of the world's largest supersonic parachute, a canopy capable of surviving 65,000 pounds of force and slowing the rover module down to a mere 200 mph while descending through the Red Planet's thin atmosphere.

Small rockets were used to reduce the craft's speed even more so that the barrel-tired rover could be gently lowered to the surface via a "sky crane."

Cianciolo said challenges in designing and building such rovers include being unable to test them on Earth in anything resembling a Mars-like environment, where gravity is slight and the atmosphere all but non-existent. Everything has to work perfectly the first time out of the box,
she said, or years of work are wasted.

Curiosity's primary mission goals include collecting data about Martian climate and geology and assessing whether the planet has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.

As for manned flight, Cianciolo said that putting people on Mars in "30 or 40 years" remains NASA's overriding goal. However, she admitted that space is a very hostile environment of humans, and that myriad technological hurdles will have to be overcome.

But exploring outer space, she believes, is just something that's coded into humanity's DNA.
"It's just human nature," she said. "We need to explore. We need to find out what's out there."