BLOOMSBURG — By dinner time
tonight, NASA will have landed a rover and a helicopter drone inside a Martian
crater, ready to explore new ground for manned landings and possible human
habitation in the future.
Bloomsburg University professor
Michael Shepherd will be watching closely.
“Mars has been a huge focus of
NASA in recent years as it is one of the closest and most Earth-like planets
and the only one that can be settled in a reasonable amount of time,” Shepard
said. He has studied asteroids and is contributing to an asteroid visit by a
space probe next year. Some of his academic colleagues and friends helped work
on the space project.
The NASA Perseverance rover and
Ingenuity drone were launched last July 30 and should touch down on Mars at
3:55 p.m. today. Its two-year mission, and possibly longer, is to collect rock
and soil samples and look for signs of any ancient microbial life, while also
testing methods of extracting oxygen in the Martian atmosphere needed for
manned explorations.
Prior visits to the Martian surface
have turned up evidence of water in ice deposits. The Perseverance drone has a
drill to collect core samples in a search for possible early signs of microbial
life embedded in subsurface rock.
“This crater in which it is
landing is thought to have been a giant lake about the size of Columbia
County,” Shepherd said. “It has instrument packets to look at minerals there
and for any organic material that may show signs of past life.”
Shaping up an asteroid
Shepard developed a 3-D model to
envision the shape of a large asteroid between Mars and Jupiter that is
believed to be largely composed of metal, unlike most asteroids, which
primarily are made of rock.
That is significant because if
Psyche, as the asteroid is named, is found to be largely metal, it could be the
core of a former planet that once existed in the solar system. It would be kind
of like Superman’s Krypton home that fictionally exploded in the cosmos.
“There are not many metal cores
floating around,” Shepard said. “They’re never seen before because they are
buried deep inside planets.”
His shape-determining model,
which appears like a squashed football, will help a probe land on the
asteroid’s surface in 2025 or 2026.
“It’s a pretty good sized rock,”
he said. “And it is rocky, but there appears to be a lot of metal sticking out
of it.”
Shepard is working on a research
paper about his work and will speak at an upcoming NASA Lunar and Planetary
Conference in Houston about it.
‘Weird space guy’
As a professor and “weird space
guy” in BU’s Environmental, Geographical and Geological Sciences department,
Shepard has students in his classes who see and discuss space exploration as “a
normal thing,” with hopes of visiting those places one day.
Business magnate Elon Musk’s
SpaceX rocket development project to reduce space exploration costs and offer
commercial space flights one day “will be a big business for a lot of people,”
Shepard said.
When asked if he might want to
journey to Mars someday, Shepard declined.
“I get motion sick,” he said.
But he has his fingers crossed on
the success of today’s Martian landing.
~Retrieved from the Press Enterprise article by Leon Bogdan, 2-18-2021
