Wednesday, 17 November 1999 UA student rooting for probes he named Chris Richards, The Arizona Daily Star Withers won a contest involving a Mars mission By Rhonda Bodfield Sander The Arizona Daily Star When two basketball-sized probes crash onto Mars next month they will carry names suggested by a University of Arizona graduate student. On a whim, Paul Withers, a planetary sciences graduate student, entered a NASA contest to name the Deep Space 2 probes. His nomination: Antarctic explorers Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. Withers figured he had a good shot at runner-up, but he was shocked to learn that he beat out 17,000 other applicants. ``I don't really think it's sunk in yet that there are two little probes that will smash onto the martian surface with my names on them,'' said Withers, 24, who moved to Tucson from England 18 months ago and plans to finish his doctorate in about three years. Withers' fellow Englishman, Scott, was beaten to the South Pole by Amundsen, a Norwegian, who completed the first expedition in December 1911. At the time, Antarctica was the Earth's only unexplored continent. After arriving at the South Pole a month after Amundsen, Scott and his English team froze to death or starved as they headed home. ``His memorial's inscription reads: `To strive, to seek, to find, not to yield.' These are the aims of Deep Space 2,'' Withers wrote in his nomination. In addition to the fact the probes will hit the south polar region of Mars, the other obvious parallel is the space mission's tremendous challenges. Unlike any other spacecraft, the 5-pound probes must endure up to 60,000 times the force of Earth's gravity when they hit the surface on Dec. 3., going about 450 mph. The hope is that the ceramic outer shells will shatter, but the instruments inside will survive the crash and search for water up to 3 feet beneath the frozen surface. A UA team built the miniature ovens that will melt the soil. If the project works, said NASA spokesman Douglas Isbell, it may allow installation of whole networks around the planet, or even on Jupiter's moon Europa. ``The main goal is just to prove we can do it,'' he said. Withers studies the upper atmosphere of Mars to try to determine climate and weather changes. He said the data from the exploration won't be particularly useful in his research. But now that he has a stake in the mission, he said, he's that much more interested. ``I think I'll be paying really close attention to what happens in the next month.'' Aside from just the honor of the award, he'll also receive a $4,000 gift certificate from CompUSA, a computer store, and a copy of a Deep Space 2 poster signed by project leaders.