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Lockheed lands Mars rocket work

NASA to pay $195 million for unit to launch lab in 2009; Jeffco to get work

Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News

Published June 3, 2006 at midnight

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Lockheed Martin won a $194.7 million contract from NASA on Friday to build an Atlas V rocket to launch the Mars Science Laboratory in 2009.

Most of the work on the rocket's main booster will be done at the company's Waterton Canyon facility southwest of Denver, said Jim Sponnick, Atlas program vice president for Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Jefferson County.

"It's a very big deal," Sponnick said. "It's a very important mission for NASA, and this selection is a demonstration of their confidence in the Atlas team."

About 1,000 people work on Atlas at Waterton Canyon, and over the course of the next few years many of them will work on this project, he said.

The Atlas V is Lockheed Martin's largest rocket. NASA used it to launch the New Horizons mission to Pluto in January and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in August 2005.

The $1.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory is scheduled for launch in September 2009 on a 204-foot-tall Atlas V with four strap-on solid rocket boosters.

The science lab, a six-wheeled rover, will be twice as long and four times heavier than each of the twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, now exploring the red planet's surface.

Basically a mobile analytical laboratory, the 2009 rover will look for evidence that the Martian surface could have supported microbial life. It will scoop soil and collect rock cores, crushing the samples and sending them to various onboard test chambers.

"The combination of mobility and a highly capable payload make it scientifically the most powerful mission we've ever put on Mars," said Michael Watkins, Mars Science Laboratory mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"The primary goal of the mission is not to detect current life. The goal is to understand the habitability of Mars," he said. "But if there is current life, we would like to believe we can detect it."

Watkins stressed that the Mars Science Laboratory mission has not been affected by recent budget cuts in NASA's science programs.

In March, Lockheed Martin Space Systems was selected to provide the heat shield that will protect the Mars Science Laboratory rover when it plunges through the thin Martian atmosphere in 2010.

And the Lockheed Martin-built Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which arrived at the planet in March, will help study potential landing sites for the laboratory, Watkins said.

Once the big rover is on the surface, it will rely on Reconnaissance Orbiter to relay its pictures and data back to Earth.

Atlas began as the first U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile but has long been used for space applications as well. In 1958, the first communication from space was broadcast from an orbiting Atlas with a recorded Christmas message from then-President Eisenhower.

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