Stephen Gorevan, a co-founder of Honeybee Robotics, has thick snow-white hair that seems to float above his head like a cloud, and he wears glasses with pronounced black frames. He greeted a recent visitor to Honeybee’s offices, on Thirty-fourth Street, by producing a magnifying glass from his pocket and pointing toward a framed photograph of Mars on the wall. “Want to look at something neat?” he said.

The photo showed what some scientists believe is an ancient salt-sea bed near the Martian equator, and was taken by the NASA rover Opportunity, in 2004. To the visitor, it looked like a generic spacescape: rocks and dust and not much in the way of color. Gorevan handed over the magnifying glass. “Do you see anything near my pinkie?” he asked. It was hard to say. “Something segmented?” Gorevan suggested. After some hesitation, the visitor wondered, “Is it supposed to be an animal?”

“We’re forbidden to utter those words,” Gorevan said, and then bounded down the hall to his office overlooking the Hudson River, sidestepping the large reddish hunks of basalt that were scattered about on the carpet: simulated interplanetary surfaces collected from the Mojave Desert, southwestern Spain, and the Canadian Arctic, for drilling practice. He retrieved a copy of the latest Aviation Week from his desk. The cover showed the Phoenix spacecraft, which had recently managed, after several failed attempts, to shake some dirt collected on the northern plains of Mars into an onboard oven, for chemical analysis. (Scientists at the University of Arizona, which is leading the Phoenix mission, celebrated by dancing to K.C. and the Sunshine Band’s “Shake Your Booty.”) “When you have something land on Mars, we start wearing our T-shirts, and sleeping and thinking and almost eating Mars,” Gorevan said. His shirt read “M.E.R. Development Team,” referring to the Mars Exploration Rover project.

Honeybee is a rare breed—a NASA spacecraft contractor in Manhattan. “People in our community are used to Southern California and Texas,” Gorevan said, and conceded that recruiting employees was “problematic.” (First-generation Americans from City College are the company’s prime resource.) But now that the Phoenix has struck a hard white material beneath the Martian dirt, it is Honeybee’s own custom-made scoop that is responsible for digging and collecting. The hard white material, Gorevan explained, is presumed to be a kind of “super ice, up to four or five times stronger than sidewalk concrete.” His scoop features a rasp which resembles a tile-cutting bit that you might buy at Home Depot. It spins at five thousand revolutions per minute and is unaffected by extreme low pressures and temperatures.

Ice equals water equals . . . life? “They never say they’re looking for life directly, because that would be setting themselves up for huge failure,” Gorevan said, of NASA. “They’re looking for ‘the conditions for life to have evolved.’ The mantra is ‘Follow the water, and we’ll get there.’ ” He added, “To me, this is ultimately all reconnaissance for sending people. I mean, we have to check the place out.”

Gorevan led his visitor on a brief tour of the engineers’ workspace, which resembled both a metal shop and a HAZMAT treatment facility, with “Nitrogen Warning” signs, a thermal vacuum chamber, and a “clean room,” where a test was being conducted for a five-hundred-piece mechanism that will be sent to the Red Planet in 2009, to aid in collecting rock samples. “I did have a dream once that there was this great ‘Eureka!’ press conference about how we’ve discovered life on Mars, and it was actually the dead skin of one of our employees,” Gorevan said.

Back in his office, the television was tuned to Channel 367, NASA-TV, which showed astronauts floating around inside the space shuttle Discovery. Gorevan mentioned the photograph in the hallway again and, using a red globe on his desk, indicated the spot where the Opportunity rover had landed: the Meridiani Planum. Honeybee also built the rock-abrasion tool (or RAT), that the Opportunity uses for its own shallow digging. “I have this fantasy that that bug out there is actually a fossil of a segmented worm,” Gorevan said. He recalled his feeling of intense relief when a photograph came back from the rover following its landing and its initial successful employment of the RAT, in 2004. “I have kids,” he said. “I’m supposed to say I was happy when my kids were born. I was much happier when this image came through.” ♦