Early mornings with the Red Planet
 |
Jeremiah Glascock (pictured above) wakes up at 5 a.m. every morning. He feeds his infant daughter and puts her back to bed with his wife; his other daughter, who’s 4, is often still asleep. By 5:30 or 6, Glascock is working behind a "Restricted Access" sign on the door of an Ohio State lab, downloading images and data from NASA’s two Mars rovers.
Welcome to the life of an Ohio State undergrad.
Last spring, Glascock took a class with Dr. Ron Li, an Ohio State mapping scientist who serves on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover team. When Dr. Li asked for a volunteer to do some "early morning data collection," Glascock raised his hand.
"I thought that undergraduate involvement would be critical," Dr. Li says. "All the research was done by graduate students, and we wanted to have an exposure of our project to undergraduate students. To me as an educator, if people pay the tuition fees, I would like to have them learn the best thing."
Glascock, who's still a few months shy of getting his bachelor’s degree in geomatics engineering, is one of the first people in the world to see new images from the rovers. "It's not the most complicated job," he says, "but it's the first step."
After that first step, Master's student Evgenia Brodyagina stitches the images together, using rocks that the rovers have photographed from more than one angle as "tie points." The result: a mosaic of photos that show scientists the rover’s path amid Mars' rust-colored rocks and pock-marked craters.
Brodyagina recently used her mapping skills to help one of the golf cart-sized rovers venture down Husband Hill, a Martian mountain about as tall as the Statue of Liberty—a crucial job.
"If the rover slips and falls down, that’s it," Brodyagina says. "It would be impossible to start again."
Says Dr. Li: "I think overall our contribution is systematically telling the mission where both rovers are, with an accuracy that has never been achieved before. We make all these maps that are fully accurate, that support the mission so much."
Related links
Ohio State's Mapping and GIS Lab
Read more about Dr. Li's Mars work
NASA's Mars Exploration web site (off-site)
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geodetic Science
(text/images: University Marketing Communications)
Mars Timeline
- 400 B.C.: Babylonians study Mars, which they call "Negral"
- 1609: Galileo looks at Mars through the first telescope
- 1877: The Martian moons--Phobos (fear) and Demios (fright)--are discovered
- 1964: NASA's Mariner 4 takes the first close-up photo of Mars
- 2003: The Mars Exploration Rovers are launched.
