"We're just arguing over what it looks like," said Kaija Bonde of South Dakota, viewing the rover model with son Elijah. "He says it's a shelf. I say it's a table." 

Photograph by: Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post
More about Post photographer Susan Biddle 

Mimicking Mars on the Mall
Air and Space Exhibit Plays Off Real Missions

By John F. Kelly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page B01

They found life on Mars yesterday. But the fact that the "life" was some ultraviolet paint daubed on a styrofoam rock at the National Air and Space Museum explains why this story isn't on the front page.The Smithsonian museum is capitalizing on the interest spurred by the spacecraft exploring Mars with a new exhibit that mimics the two NASA rovers that will cruise the surface of the Red Planet for the next three months.

Dubbed the Personal Exploration Rover, it is just about the cutest semiautonomous, six-wheeled robotic vehicle you ever did see. About a foot long and a little less than that wide, the 10-pound rover looked like an eager puppy yesterday as it snuffled about, swiveling its periscope-like camera from side to side inside a walled playpen called the "Mars yard."

The rover is a lot smaller and a lot simpler than NASA's Spirit, the Mars Exploration Rover that landed Saturday night, or its twin, Opportunity, due to land later this month. But its creators at Carnegie Mellon University nevertheless wanted to emulate the way the real crafts work.

Museum visitors don't use a joystick to drive the rover around the faux Mars-scape. Instead, they wait while the rover's digital camera spins around, snapping a 360-degree panoramic image of its surroundings. Then, on a computer screen, they pull up a map of the Martian surface and click on the rover's current location and which of three rocks they want to examine for signs of organo-fluorescence, an indicator of certain types of bacteria. Sophisticated software aboard the rover allows it to complete its mission without constant human attention.

"It goes from where you tell it it is to where you want it to go," said Steven H. Williams, chairman of Air and Space's education division, as he readied the exhibit.

Eugene Pearson and his girlfriend, Morgan Olszewski, University of Colorado students visiting Washington, were the first tourists to send the rover on a mission. The buggy's camera whirred, its wheels spun, its suspension soaked up bumps and crevices as the rover crept across the rocky terrain. It stopped a few inches from its bulbous target rock, then let loose a brief blast of purple UV light.

"We both found life," Pearson said. "Maybe I'll win the Nobel prize or something."

Since each of the three target rocks has ultraviolet paint on it, the odds of finding life are pretty good. But that didn't dim Pearson's enthusiasm.

"I think it's really great that there's something that the public can do to show them what their money is being spent on," he said.

The Mars yard was built by about 60 students at Loudoun County's Heritage High School. An earth sciences class consulted Martian topographic maps, then built up layers of foam to create the rippling surface. An art class covered it in a stuccolike material and painted it shades of brown. And a shop class built the platform that holds it all together. (A second Mars yard, built by students at Ashburn's Stonebridge High, will open soon at the new Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly.)

In a separate gallery upstairs, a few visitors gazed at a full-size replica of the Mars Exploration Rover.

"We're just arguing over what it looks like," said Kaija Bonde of Sioux Falls, S.D., who was examining the mock-up with her son, Elijah, 10. "He says it's a shelf. I say it's a table."

The replica, its flat solar panels unfolded, looked like a golf cart-size ladybug. At the front was the mosquito-like proboscis that contains a drill for grinding into the Martian surface.

Jane Apperson, a college student from England visiting the museum with her American husband and in-laws, lamented the apparent loss of Beagle 2, the tiny probe her country sent to Mars. British scientists expected to hear that it had landed by now. Her cousin worked on Beagle's software.

"He thinks it's a lost cause now," Apperson sighed.

There was a glitch with the earthbound rover yesterday, too. The Glaze brothers of Ohio -- Nathaniel, 7, and Eric, 5 -- were in the middle of a mission when the contraption stopped working.

Williams scooped it up and pried open its top as if it were the shell of a steamed crab. Then he yanked out the battery pack and popped it into a second rover Carnegie Mellon had sent along as a backup.

"I think it's a wireless network information problem," Williams said. "Hit control-alt-delete."

The rover rolled again.