Part of Merritt Square Mall in Merritt Island, Fla., will take on an
unearthly tone during two days of “Mars at the Mall” days presented by NASA
on May 9 and 10 to celebrate Florida’s role as America’s gateway to Mars.
The event, complete with a 3-D martian mural, models of NASA Mars rovers and
a gallery of Mars pictures, will share excitement about two new rover
missions to Mars scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in June.
Preparations for launch are under way at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
The new Mars Exploration Rovers will be able to explore farther and examine
rocks better than the Sojourner rover that studied one site on Mars in 1997.
Mars at the Mall will feature models both of Sojourner and a new Mars
Exploration Rover. To give an unforgettable impression of how the Mars
rovers can cope with bumps in their path, a very lightweight rover model
will roll over children who lie on the ground.
Visitors will wear three-dimensional viewing glasses to examine a mural of
the Pathfinder landing site and get a sense of the Mars landscape receding
in front of them to the horizon. Pictures taken by two orbiting NASA
spacecraft, Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey, will show visitors a
sampling of the diversity of martian surface features. Those two orbiters,
both still active, have provided evidence of erosion by liquid water on Mars
and of large amounts of ice close to the surface.
A meteorite that came from Mars will be on display. NASA personnel will be
available throughout the event to answer questions about Mars exploration.
Part of NASA’s mission is to inspire the next generation of explorers.
The launch-opportunity period for the first Mars Exploration Rover begins
June 5. The second rover could launch as soon as June 25. Both will arrive
at Mars in January 2004, but at two different sites about halfway around the
planet from each other. One site is a crater that may have once been a
lake. The other has a deposit of a mineral that usually forms only under wet
conditions. Additional information about the Mars Exploration Rovers is
available online at
Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena,
Calif., manages the missions for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington,
D.C.
