Students Receive Grant for Mars Study

Cal State Northridge students have received a $105,000 grant to design a lightweight unmanned aircraft to scout Mars for potential landing sites for a manned mission to the planet.

The grant was awarded by the Universities Space Research Assn., a foundation sponsoring NASA-endorsed research at 43 universities across the country. When the designs are complete, NASA will review them to determine if they are worthy of further development, said Tim Fox, a Cal State Northridge professor.

“We will come up with a design for an aircraft to fly in the Martian atmosphere and explore the planet surface,” Fox said. “It will be totally up to NASA as to what they want to do with it.”

NASA scientists hope to send human explorers to Mars in the second decade of the 21st Century. But they still have insufficient knowledge of the planet’s geography.

An “autonomous flying rover”--which scientists expect will be a winged craft similar to a light airplane, but with larger wings to cope with the thin Martian atmosphere--could take close-up pictures of the planet’s surface.