WASHINGTON -- A former astronaut who flew on two of the most dramatic shuttle missions of the 1990s is among 17 members of a newly-named independent team of engineers, scientists and executives that will scrutinize NASA's program to explore Mars.
Veteran spacewalker Kathryn "K.T." Thornton heads an all-star panel formed by retired Lockheed Martin executive Thomas Young to look into NASA's strategies to explore the planet in the wake of back-to-back losses of the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander probes.
NASA announced the members at the panel's first meeting at the space agency's headquarters on Friday. After a day-long meeting, the group decided to meet next at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 11-13. The group will later visit the Denver facilities of Lockheed-Martin where the lost Mars probes were built.
Young told the group to be prepared to make recommendations to NASA Administrator Dan Goldin by March 15 on how the agency should conduct its research at the Red Planet.
Last month Goldin named Young, former mission manager of the 1970s Viking missions to Mars, to chair the panel. NASA will do whatever Young's group suggests in order to make future missions succeed, Goldin has said.
Young's group is to analyze the budgets, content, schedule, management structures and scientific goals of the two lost probes, as well as look at successful missions such as the Mars Pathfinder, which landed in 1997, and the Mars Global Surveyor, now orbiting the planet. The group will also review proposed revisions to the existing exploration program that are to come from a separate team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
Thornton, a four-time shuttle astronaut, flew on shuttle Endeavour in May 1992 on a rescue mission to retrieve the stranded Intelsat satellite. That mission featured NASA's only three-man spacewalk -- performed by astronauts Pierre Thuot, Rick Hieb and Tom Akers -- to grab the wayward satellite.
Thornton also flew on the first mission to restore the eyesight of the then-nearsighted Hubble Space Telescope in December 1993. On that flight, she made two spacewalks with Akers that totaled about 13.5 hours. Thornton left the astronaut corps in 1996 to join the faculty of the University of Virginia, where she is assistant dean for graduate programs.
Joining her on Young's panel are two nationally recognized experts on the martian terrain, Michael Carr and Larry Soderblom of the U.S. Geological Survey.
Other members are Herb Kottler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts; retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Ralph Jacobsen; retired Air Force Gen. Ronald Fogelman; Peter Staudhammer and Joanne McGuire of TRW; Thomas Brackey, executive director for technical operations at Hughes; Peter Wilhelm of the Naval Research Laboratory; Peter Lyman, a consultant in Pasadena, California; James Arnold of Ames Research Center; Doug Dwoyer of Langley Research Center; Brian Williams and Maria Zuber of MIT and Robert Pattishall of the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Virginia.
Serving as consultants to Young's committee are former JPL director Bruce Murray of California Institute of Technology, Brantley Hanks of Langley Research Center, Bob Sackheim of Marshall Space Flight Center and Peter Norvig and Steve Zornetzer of Ames Research Center.
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