MILES O'BRIEN: The traffic, once again, is heavy on Mars. Rover's Spirit and Opportunity still at it, working well into their third year on the red planet, helping unlock some secrets of Mars. They are controlled by engineers, you know about this, at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. But you may not know also by some folks in a seventh floor office just a few blocks away from where I stand.
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MILES O'BRIEN, (voice over): What do Mars and Manhattan have in common? Feel free to insert a joke here, but it is no laughing matter on the seventh floor of this old office building on 34th Street. Here in a city known for finance, fashion, and the media, you will find a little company more concerned with the flow of traffic on Mars than the West Side Highway.
MILES O'BRIEN: So what you have here is kind of a modern day miracle on 34th Street?
STEVE GOREVAN, CO-FOUNDER, HONEYBEE ROBOTICS: Well, you now, I never thought about it in those terms, but I have to sometimes pinch myself.
MILES O'BRIEN: Steve Gorevan is co-founder of Honeybee Robotics. The drill on this operation is the drill. The busy bees here designed and built the so-called rock abrasion tool, or RAT, used by Martian rovers Spirit and Opportunity, to literally uncover some secrets of the red planet.
GOREVAN: I was so worried about the tool just functioning, surviving the cruise and the landing.
MILES O'BRIEN: Gorevan is a die hard New Yorker, so you'd expect him to be a little neurotic. But in this case, he had some solid reasons for angst. Mars is the Bermuda Triangle of the solar system. Only half the spacecraft launched there arrive alive.
GOREVAN: Well, I'm supposed to say that I was happiest when my children were born. But when those images came down and it scrolled on the screen and I saw the circle that indicated we had not only a grind, but a beautiful grind, it was the happiest single moment of my life.
MILES O'BRIEN: That was just the beginning of the cheering for some amazing plucky rovers. So far they have traveled 9 1/4 miles, captured more than 156,000 images, and most important here on 34th Street, successfully drilled on Mars rocks 43 times, 41 more than guarantees. All the data led to a big scientific splash. Proof this cold, dry place was once warm and wet and thus a cushy birth for microscopic living things. It was a long, wild ride from the day chief scientist Steve Skwiers (ph) faxed Gorevan his back of the napkin idea for a drill on Mars.
STEVE SQUIRES: This is the robotic arm. Here's the APSX.
MILES O'BRIEN: Honeybee is not resting on its drill tailings. Matter of fact, they are hard at work on some sophisticated tools stated for Mars missions in 2007 and 2009. And they're working on ways to drill deeper and deeper in the future.
GOREVAN: The holy grail is to find and develop a drill that could go 100 meters or so that where water in a liquid phase on Mars might exist.
MILES O'BRIEN: They say life in New York can be a grind, but here that's a compliment.
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