"To infinity and beyond!" —Buzz Lightyear, space ranger.
Thomas P. Meloy will settle for Mars.
Meloy, who at 80 is one of WVU's oldest active professors,
has been named a principal investigator of the NASA Mars lander
scheduled to travel to the red planet in April 2001.
This first in a series of small probes designed specifically to look for Martian life will consist of a lander and an orbiter that will perform detailed mapping of the planet. The lander will include a rover, an instrument package, and a radiation experiment.
Dr. Meloy, of WVU's College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, will lead a 20-member team of scientists that will research minerals in Martian soil. Meloy's home base will be at WVU, although most of the work will be done at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California.
It is important for NASA to know whether quartz is present in Martian soil. When astronauts finally venture to the planet about the year 2020, quartz dust could harm their lungs.
If no quartz is found, that's good. Not only for the astronauts' health, but because it would help prove that Mars was not born a hot metallic mass, as some scientists think Earth was. "If it's present, though, it'll be a major scientific event in planetology," Meloy said.
There is a theory that life may have developed
on Mars and been transported to Earth in meteorites created by
an explosion on the neighboring planet.
Meloy said he hopes fossilized life forms will be found in the soil samples his team will examine. "I would never have thought they'd have given someone in his eighth decade such responsibility," he said.
The last time the Harvard and MIT graduate studied extraterrestrial dust, it came from the Moon. He's been on the WVU faculty for 21 years.