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Posted at: 05/23/2008 01:00:59 PM

Updated at: 05/23/2008 01:57:28 PM

By: Pat McGonigle

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RIT scientist making Mapquest for Mars

On Sunday NASA plans to land a rover on Mars for a fact finding mission. Like previous Mars rover expeditions, nothing is assured and mission control operators know many things can go wrong during landing. NASA still knows very little about the surface of the Red Planet---but that's about to change.

"It was science fiction for a while - now it's not," said Dr. Don Figer at RIT. "So now we're doing it, so it's becoming science fact."

Figer was recruited to RIT to work at the school's Rochester Imaging Detector Laboratory. The lab recently won a contract with NASA to develop a series of detectors that could one day develop a type of Mapquest for Mars. The detectors use something called LIDAR technology to create a 3-D topographical readout of a planet's surface. LIDAR stands for "light detection and ranging".

"The imaging LIDAR detector could become a workhorse for a wide range of NASA missions," says Figer. "It could support NASA's planetary missions like Europa Geophysical Orbiter or a Mars High-resolution Spatial Mapper."

Figer was heavily recruited by many top notch universities, including several Ivy League schools.

He says he chose RIT because of Rochester's reputation as the imaging capital of the world, dating back to George Eastman and the creation of Kodak.