DANTE'S TRIP IN VOLCANO `A SUCCESS'

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, January 4, 1993                   TAG: 9301040051
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: METRO   
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Short
DANTE'S TRIP IN VOLCANO `A SUCCESS'
NASA said Sunday its mission to send a robot into an Antarctic volcano opened the way for such exploration of the moon and Mars, even though the Antarctic effort was aborted by a broken cable.
"The robot works," said David Lavery, director of the Dante project. "The mission is an unqualified success in terms of the telerobotic aspects."
NASA on Saturday scrubbed the attempt to send the eight-legged robot Dante into the crater of Mount Erebus, an active volcano, after a fiber-optic cord linking it to a control station a mile away was severed.
The robot began its descent Friday, but traveled only 21 feet into the crater before the technical problem cut links with the on-site team and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
NASA said there was no replacement cable at the U.S. McMurdo Station on the Antarctic coast, and no way to complete the mission before Jan. 15, when the sea around the station begins to freeze and the weather deteriorates.
The 8-foot-high robot was to have scaled the 750-foot, near-vertical incline from the rim of the volcano to the lava lake below.
NASA and the National Science Foundation undertook the project to develop technology and telecommunications capabilities that could be used in future trips to the moon or Mars. Carnegie-Mellon University and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology also participated in the $2 million project.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB