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I started down this road a long time ago, and I've had the good fortune to be guided by many people along the way. Joe Veverka was my advisor in grad school, and he taught me both how to do science and, by his example, how to be a generous mentor and colleague. Joe was last year's recipient of the Whipple Award, and in a lovely twist, Joe's advisor when he was in grad school was none other than Fred Whipple himself. So I dedicate this to my academic father and my academic grandfather.

During the Mars Sample Return mission the Athena Rover will acquire remote sensing andin-situ measurements of surface materials, drill into rocks and collect cores, acquire soil samples, and place the rock and soil samples in an ascent vehicle on the lander. After the ascent vehicle and its sample cache are launched, the rover will conduct an extended mission focused on exploration and discovery. The Field Integrated Design and Operations (FIDO) Rover simulates these sampling and exploration activities with a science payload similar to the Athena Rovers. In its initial field trials, FIDO was deployed and controlled remotely for 2 weeks in the Silver Lake area of the Mojave Desert in California. FIDO successfully completed traverses of over 500 m in diverse terrains while acquiring imaging and spectral reflectance data. FIDO also successfully identified, maneuvered to, and cored into rocks. The trials validate the mission operations approach andprovide many lessons that will maximize the science return associated with rover-based observations and sampling activities.

The Field Integrated Design and Operations (FIDO) Rover, a prototype vehicle designed to rehearse operations for the Mars Sample Return missions and associated Athena Rover, was put through a suite of field trials in the Silver Lake area of the Mojave Desert in April and October 1999. The trials also provided an opportunity to foster active involvement of students in rover missions using inquiry-based study An integrated team of more than two dozen high school students and their teachers from Los Angeles, Phoenix, Ithaca, and St. Louis (LAPIS) developed and implemented their own FIDO-based rover mission that employed long-distance traverses to explore terrains and make discoveries. LAPIS team members from each city were paired with local science mentors who are part of the Athena Science Team to ensure that the LAPIS activities furthered the overall mission objectives at Silver Lake and to provide expert advice.The students learned to work as a geographically distributed team, developed hypotheses to test, commanded the rover via the Internet to test their hypotheses, analyzed data, and generated their own Web site and archives. Post-LAPIS assessments demonstrated that the participants gained new communication and information technology skills, an enhanced ability to cut across traditional disciplines to solve problems, and a greater understanding of planetary exploration and discovery Further, for some of the students, LAPIS provided the right set of experiences needed to help them define specific career goals in science, mathematics, and engineering.

It is clear that conditions on Mars during the Noachian period, which extended from the beginning of Mars' geologic record to something like 3.9 b.y.a., were significantly different than they are today. As on the other planets, the meteoritic bombardment rate was far higher than it is at present, as evidenced by the densely cratered nature of Noachian terrains. But there were other differences as well, some inferred, some more obvious. The nature of these differences and what they imply about broader topics of planetary evolution were the primary subjects of the workshop, “Early Mars: How Warm and How Wet?,” held July 26–28, in Breckenridge, Colo. The workshop was sponsored by NASA's Mars' Surface and Atmosphere Through Time (MSATT) program.