The company co-founded by Chris Chapman '72 had to build a tool the size of a soda can that could shave off a nickel-sized section of rock using about as much power as a refrigerator light bulb. And oh yes, it had to do it reliably, since there would be no repairman on Mars...

Crunching in insulated boots across a remote icefield, the parka-clad searcher scanned the wind-sculpted, frozen white rime, then stopped and let out a yell. The other members of the National Science Foundation's ANSMET deep field meteorite team ran over and stared.

The rock looked like a deformed potato smeared with tar. They all knew the drill--sterile bag, aluminum identification tag, scissors, sealing tape, a notebook to record the precise location. Into the sack it went, then back to the search team's tent camp to await their return to the warmth and comforts of McMurdo Station.

No one knew then, in 1984, that meteorite ALH 84001, one of thousands collected in Antarctica, would one day electrify scientists around the world. It was impossible to tell just from looking at it that the rock was from Mars, let alone what was inside it.

In Aurora, Ohio, 35 million miles from Mars, Christopher Chapman '72 was working in the family business, a financial services firm run by relatives for five generations. The work wasn't directly related to his major at Pomona--art history--or another primary interest when he was an undergraduate: playing in rock and blues bands.

"I had considered majoring in music at Pomona, but it was frankly too rigorous and I wasn't ready for it then," he says. After Pomona, he went on to get a master's in music therapy at New York University. There he became friendly with a fellow music student, Steven Gorevan, who went on to engineering school.

In 1983, Chapman became a silent partner of Gorevan's in a small company they established, called Honeybee Robotics.

"We were doing mostly factory automation work in the early years," Chapman says, "and then Steve started forging links with NASA and winning R&D contracts with them. I enjoyed working with my family; I just wasn't sure that financial services was what I wanted to do in the long run. My wife and I did not have any kids at the time, and we decided to make the leap in 1988."

They moved from Ohio to New York, where Chapman became an active partner in Honeybee. As the company's president, he concentrated more on the business side of the enterprise, while Gorevan focused on the engineering.

Research and development work on automated systems for NASA, especially drilling, sampling and grinding mechanisms, became a large part of Honeybee's business. But the space agency was not at its apogee. The loss of the shuttle Challenger in 1986 was a shock to the national morale, and confidence in NASA dwindled further a few years later when the Hubble Space Telescope was found to be flawed. The agency was under continual budget pressure, and its well-publicized mantra became "faster, better, cheaper."

Then, in 1994, scientists announced the almost certain Martian origin of Antarctic meteorite ALH 84001. Among other evidence, minute traces of gases within the rock matched the Martian atmosphere. Mars' atmospheric composition was known from data transmitted by the Viking landers in the mid-1970s. The theory was that the rock had been blasted off the planet and into space by the explosive impact of a comet or asteroid.

In 1996, scientists from NASA and Stanford made the stunning announcement that the Mars rock might contain fossilized evidence of microbial life. Although a number of experts cast doubt on the claim, interest in Mars exploration surged. When the Mars Pathfinder mission the following year landed a rover called Sojourner on the surface, the mission was a resounding scientific and public success.

The good feeling was not to last.

"NASA was locked into this 'faster, better, cheaper' philosophy," says Chapman. "It was a way of dealing with their constrained budgets in the 1990s. But they found that 'faster, better, cheaper' was a strategy that introduced new risks."

Two years after Pathfinder, NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter. It delivered only painful humiliation. One set of NASA scientists had calculated a key spacecraft operation in English measurement units, while another group used metric measurements. The craft vanished after sailing too close to the planet during its insertion into orbit. On the heels of this embarrassment, NASA's Polar Lander crashed as it approached the surface of Mars in 1999. It was a total loss.

At Honeybee, which has about two dozen employees, engineers had been working on NASA's plans for a 2001 mission called Athena. "It was going to be a Mars rover, and we were providing a rock coring system that was going to be attached to the rover's belly," says Chapman.

But after the two spacecraft failures, NASA pulled the plug. "They needed to rethink their planning architecture for the Mars missions," Chapman says. "Because of the configuration of the orbits, every two years there is an opportunity to go to Mars when the planets are closest to each other. NASA had planned a series of missions that would culminate in a return to Earth of Martian soil and rock samples. That's still the plan, but when those two missions failed they concluded that their initial planning was too ambitious and needed to be scaled back."

NASA reconfigured the Athena plan and decided to launch twin Mars rovers in 2003. "The new mission was not going to be able to accommodate a rock coring system. But there was a need for a rock grinding system, and they asked if we were interested in competing for that job," Chapman says.

They called it a RAT, or rock abrasion tool. It had to be very small, the size of a soda can, and it had to be able to shave off a nickel-sized section of rock using only about as much power as a refrigerator light bulb. And it had to be ready in time.

"We had difficulties in finding the right materials for the grinding heads for the RAT and finally settled on a diamond-based coating. We went through almost a year of research on that aspect alone," says Chapman. "But there were also significant difficulties on the project level. To coordinate the mission and get everything done was just a Herculean task. There were problems with the landing air bags and parachutes that had to be worked through by the JPL team, and mass on the subsystem and system level was a constant concern. There were a series of mass audits, and they'd come back to us and say, 'We need you to drop mass.'"

As the launch dates loomed last summer, NASA still had a problem. The various components of the rovers had all been tested extensively by themselves, but there had not been time for a full-scale test in which the subsystems worked together. NASA officials, with fingers crossed, launched the rockets. When a full-scale test finally took place on Earth, the rovers were millions of miles away.

The one called Spirit bounced down first. Public interest peaked as the rover trundled to a rock named Adirondack and prepared to study it in preparation for the grinding operation. Then came a letdown when the rover's computer memory malfunctioned. But the error was overcome, and on February 6, 2004, Honeybee's abrasion tool ground a small circle off the surface of a rock on Mars, allowing instruments to analyze the subsurface.

"It looked almost easy," says Chapman. About two weeks later, on the other side of Mars, the rover Opportunity deployed its rock abrasion tool, also made by Honeybee. It, too, worked flawlessly. In March, NASA announced that the subsurface rock analyses showed that water capable of supporting life once existed in quantity on Mars.

"What I take the most satisfaction in is the team we've been able to put together, and to be able to be a part of that team," says Chapman. Honeybee's staff includes a varied group of engineers, with ethnic origins ranging from Romania to Guyana to China. "They are a very talented, dedicated group of people, and I could not be more proud to serve with them," Chapman says. "And also to work with people outside the company like Steve Squyres of Cornell, the mission's Principal Investigator, and the incredible team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory--to be part of that collective group is very motivating."

There are both psychic and material benefits to be reaped from space exploration, says Chapman.

"Honeybee has developed about a dozen different drilling and sample acquisition technologies for NASA, and we see some crossover benefits for terrestrial drilling. I think there's a demonstrable return from NASA missions, but there's more to it than that. There's the basic urge to explore. There also are the fundamental questions about who we are and where we come from. When I talk at schools, I stress that Honeybee is very fortunate to be doing this kind of work. It is tremendously exciting. What I try to emphasize most to the kids is the idea that if they're willing to devote themselves and to be dedicated to it, they too can be part of this."

Starry eyes aside, Chapman notes that the resources that a society can devote to space exploration and the search for extraterrestrial life will continue to be limited by the pressing demands of life on Earth. The twin rover mission is said to have cost $820 million.

"There's always going to be a need to relieve human suffering and improve education here," he says. "But space exploration is part of the whole package. A culture is shaped by more than just satisfying basic human needs. Art, religion and science all make a contribution to the health and strength of the culture."

Even as the twin rovers were scraping the surface of Mars, Honeybee's engineers were working on ways to dig deeper on future expeditions. "It's pushing the envelope," Chapman says, "and we're fortunate to be a part of that."

His own involvement he assesses with wry humor.

"For any disconcerted alumni who may have known me back at Pomona, the thought of me participating in the development of a piece of equipment that ended up on Mars ... let's just say that I've come a long way--and they keep me away from the hardware."

—Michael Balchunas is a freelance journalist living in Claremont.

Photos courtesy of NASA and Honeybee Robotics