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Cecilia Beaman is a 57-year-old grandmother, a principal at Pacific Middle School in Des Moines, and as of Sunday is also a suspected terrorist.

“This is not right,” she told us. It’s not right!”

This past weekend she and several other chaperones took 37 middle school students to a Heritage Festival band competition in California. The trip included two days at Disneyland.

During the stay she made sandwiches for the kids and was careful to pack the knives she used to prepare those sandwiches in her checked luggage. She says she even alerted security screeners that the knives were in her checked bags and they told her that was OK.

But Beaman says she couldn’t find a third knife. It was a 5 1/2 inch bread knife with a rounded tip and a serrated edge. She thought she might have lost or misplaced it during the trip.

On the trip home, screeners with the Transportation Security Administration at Los Angeles International Airport found it deep in the outside pocket of a carry-on cooler. Beaman apologized and told them it was a mistake.

“You’ve committed a felony,” Beaman says a security screener announced. “And you’re considered a terrorist.”

Beaman says she was told her name would go on a terrorist watch-list and that she would have to pay a $500 fine.

“I’m a 57-year-old woman who is taking care of 37 kids,” she told them. “I’m not gonna commit a terrorist act.” Beaman says they took information from her Washington drivers license and confiscated and photographed the knife according to standard operating procedure.

She says screeners refused to give her paperwork or documentation of her violation, documentation of the pending fine, or a copy of the photograph of the knife.

“They said ‘no’ and they said it’s a national security issue. And I said what about my constitutional rights? And they said ‘not at this point … you don’t have any‘.”

Dutch marines stationed in the Caribbean island of Aruba conduct a search for Natalee Holloway, 18, an Alabama high school graduate who disappeared while she was on a five-day graduation trip in Oranjestad, Aruba, Thursday, June 2, 2005. The Holloway family offered a reward for her safe return as more than 100 tourists and locals volunteered to post fliers and help in the search. (AP Photo/Pedro Famous Diaz)

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More than a month after a Mars rover on autopilot got stuck in a foot-high dune, space engineers are laboring to guide the six-wheeled vehicle out.

Progress so far: just over one foot. But they’re not treating Opportunity like a stuck Chevy.

“We’re trying to be so careful,” Jim Erickson, manager of the $900-million Mars rover project, said in an interview.

Never before has any space vehicle been trapped for so long.

Erickson called the miring “a headache,” but added: “If we didn’t find anything on Mars except what we’d already seen, we wouldn’t be learning very much.”

Before you start kibitzing, consider the situation:

•Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., can’t just deflate the tires — they’re solid aluminum.

•No gun and go: The solar-powered 380-pound rover has one very low forward gear and a top speed of one-third of a mile per hour.

•Rocking the rover out of the dune by shifting gears forward and back repeatedly isn’t an option. It takes 10 minutes to transmit a command from Earth to Mars and another 10 to get back video images of the command’s effects.

“We could preprogram it to rock back and forth, but we wouldn’t know when to stop,” said Patrick Whelley, a graduate student in geology at Arizona State University in Tempe. He’s one of about 220 NASA personnel, contractors and students who have been working to free the rover since it got stuck April 26.

Instead, project engineers did what mired earthly motorists never do: two weeks of intense reconnaissance without once hitting the accelerator.

Their focus was on the vehicle’s wheel treads. They’re stubby blades that run at right angles to the tires’ edges and across their 6-inch surfaces, making the tires look like paddle wheels.

Opportunity’s cameras showed a dust-like substance compacted so tightly between the blades that the rover’s wheels were, in effect, left bald and spinning.

So NASA workers decided to simulate the martian surface where Opportunity is stuck to see if they could find a solution.

“Guys in pickup trucks hit every Home Depot in the L.A. basin,” recounted Steve Squyres, a Cornell University astronomer who is the principal scientific investigator on the project. The quest: sand, clay and a fine substance used in swimming pool filters called diatomaceous earth.

To simulate martian gravity, which is a third of Earth’s, experimenters stripped one of the test rovers of two-thirds of its weight

Soon, the Opportunity team was ready for action. On May 11, Pasadena commanded the rover to straighten its wheels. Two days later, Pasadena ordered those wheels to rotate 2.5 times, or about 80 inches.

Since then, Opportunity has moved forward an average of 0.5% of the total distance that its wheels have rotated. That comes to 1.1 feet ahead out of 213 feet spun.