"I am very happy that Doc Horowitz and Richard Heidmann have agreed to join our board," said Zubrin. "With the help of these two talented and accomplished individuals, we will be able to make major breakthroughs towards advancing the cause of human Mars exploration."

Dr. Scott Horowitz is a four-time Space Shuttle astronaut and recently stepped down as Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems at NASA. Prior to his NASA career, Horowitz had an impressive career with the United States Air Force, where he logged more than 5,000 hours in over 50 different aircraft and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. Dr. Horowitz has a bachelor of science degree in engineering from California State University at Northridge in 1978; a master of science degree in aerospace engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1979; and a doctorate in aerospace engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1982. In addition, Scott was a founding member of The Mars Society. See Dr. Horowitz's full NASA biography.

Richard Heidmann, a space propulsion engineer, spent most of his career in the development and production of European Ariane rocket liquid propulsion systems and more recently as director of R&T strategy orientation for the Snecma group. A founding member of The Mars Society, he is founder and head of its French chapter, Association Planète Mars. Retired since 2002, he has continued to participate in various working groups managed by the Centre Nationale d'Etudies Spatiales (the official French space agency), the European Space Agency, and other international space organizations. He participated in one mission to the Mars Desert Research Station. Sixty-four years old, he is married and the father of two children.

In the last several months, The Mars Society has taken multiple steps to enable us take on more ambitious projects and run a more seamless organization. "We are extremely lucky to be able to add two men of such high personal and professional caliber to our Board," said Mars Society Executive Director Chris Carberry. "In addition, they represent diversity in backgrounds that I think is essential to an effective Board and their talents will be invaluable as we move The Mars Society to a new phase of operation."

Space Simulation Test Successful For Archimedes Project

Perhaps one of the biggest and most important single milestones towards MIRIAM's planned June 14 launch was achieved on Saturday with the successful completion of the space simulation test of the service module and instrument pod at IABGs space test centre.

The test was carried out with the actual flight model of the servcie module and instrument pod this time, fully rigged and in flight configuration, albeit slightly modified to adapt to Earth's 1g surface environment. The test also included the flight model balloon.

For the test, the tank system held 160 bars of Helium. This gas was injected into the balloon using a precalculated inflation control command sequence. The sequence was executed correctly and the Helium injected into the balloon, which was already partly inflated due to trapped air.

Albeit eventually successful, this test didn't run as smooth and flawless as all previous tests. A software error prevented real telemetry from being transmitted, so only a test protocol could be sent. This gave us the transmitter's performance under simulated mission conditions, but the actual tank pressure values had to be probed before and after the test using a meter connected to the manual fill valve. The inflation system's pressure values could not be determined, but have to be calculated using known boundary conditions.

Another potential problem was the air trapped inside the balloon as it hung suspended from the space simulation chamber's ceiling. Since the balloon will be packed very tightly for the flight, this problem doesn't concern us too much for the actual flight, so we decided to proceed.

During the test we could verify that the tank system is tight, and so is the balloon. The specified amount of gas was injected into the balloon, and all avionics modules stayed within their specified temperature ranges.

Next in line is a shake down of the entire MIRIAM flight system stack, again at IABG's space test center, as well as spin balancing, spin tests and a test to determine the moments of inertia. These latter tests will be done here at the UBW. In parallel, the performance of MIRIAM's instrument pod during a complete mission cycle will be tested, including a simulated magnetic field for the MiriMag experiment, camera and accelerometer readouts and telemetry down links. A long range life telemetry test out in the open will round off the series of tests before the flight system will be installed underneath the rocket's nose cone.

MIRIAM is a flight test within the ARCHIMEDES atmospheric sounding probe for Mars project, and tests the full inflation and subsequent entry of an atmospheric entry balloon ("ballute") here on Earth. It is jointly developed by The Mars Society Germany and several institutes of the University of the Federal Armed Forces of Germany in Munich. MIRIAM combines all research programs within the ARCHIMEDES development program, and is currently planned for launch to a 200km peak altitude from the SSC ESRANGE rocket test site near Kiruna, North Sweden on top of the REXUS4 sounding rocket managed and built by the DLR Moraba group of Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany.

To obtain more information please feel free to direct inquiries to either hg@marssociety.de or hannes.griebel@unibw.de, or meet us at the Special Session on Space Technology of the 5th European Conference on Intelligent Systems and Technologies ECIT 2008.

Hannes Griebel