Liftoff for a Career : UCLA Student Designs Equipment for Mars Probe

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that Dave Levitt is a little different from the other men who live on Westwood’s fraternity row.

That’s because the UCLA undergraduate is a rocket scientist.

In his upstairs room at the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity house, Levitt has designed the prototype of a robot snake that in a few years will help Russian and French space scientists in their unmanned exploration of the surface of Mars.

When fraternity jocks crowd in to watch football games on his roommate’s king-sized TV, Levitt hunkers down in the corner over his computer screen. That’s where he plotted out the workings of an automated rock chipper to help analyze Martian soil during a proposed American space probe.

As others gather down the hall for noisy beer busts, Levitt is busy with his “martini mixer.” That’s what he calls a device that may soon help NASA engineers prevent satellites from wobbling off-course in outer space.

No wonder the 22-year-old Levitt didn’t fool anybody last fall at the frat house Halloween party: He came dressed as a computer nerd, complete with a plastic pencil liner in the shirt pocket of a borrowed polyester shirt.

“We said, ‘Dave, where’s your costume?’ ” laughed roommate Brent Ofenstein.

Things such as Levitt’s martini mixer, Mars-rock masher and space snake have caused the aging corps of professionals in this country’s languishing space program to sit up and take notice. They aren’t used to attending briefings and studying scientific reports prepared by someone who ought to be writing college essays.

Levitt, of Foster City, is one of a growing handful of students across the United States whose work is space-bound--not as some sort of classroom experiment, but as a key operating part of space-probe equipment.

Some contend that fresh blood is being pumped into the space program just in the nick of time.

“Some days I think it’s hopeless,” said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, an international group with 100,000 members. “A whole generation has grown up not as much a part of the space age as you and I. They’ve not experienced the joy of space exploration.

“Dave is very unusual. I really believe he’s the kind of guy we’ll be hanging our hopes on in the future.”

NASA officials say they began soliciting student ideas about five years ago by offering grants to schools willing to add hands-on design classes to engineering course lists. The program began with eight schools; this year it has spread to 42.

“Nobody had very high expectations when it started. After all, what can an undergraduate do that NASA professionals can’t do?” said Jack Sevier, a former NASA engineer who was in the control room the day man landed on the moon in 1969. He is now a director of the Universities Space Research Assn., a Houston-based education group that coordinates the program.

“But the products that have come out have been extremely good engineering studies . . . the results have surprised everybody. Some of the ideas have been very fresh and very useful.”

In the past, most college-level engineering courses have been rooted in theory, not practicality, said Rudolf X. Meyer, a retired chief engineer for Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo who now teaches engineering at UCLA.

That meant that it was up to private industry to teach graduates how to turn computer data into useful products. And that didn’t do much for creativity, according to Meyer--who has supervised work by Levitt and others involved in space projects.

The martini mixer will help scientists figure out how to keep half-empty tanks of hydrazine fuel in satellites from sloshing around and knocking them off course, Meyer said. The fuel is used to fire thruster rockets that make tiny orbital adjustments during the life of the satellite.

The rock chipper is designed to fit on the front of a six-wheeled, microwave oven-sized rover that will roll around the surface of Mars. A stick with a tough, diamond-coated tip has been designed to jab and poke at Martian rocks to loosen sample slivers.

The space snake is a project that has been sponsored by the Planetary Society for use in the proposed 1996 Russian-French expedition to Mars.

The snake idea was proposed by veteran JPL scientist James Burke. He figured that they could be used as sophisticated guide ropes for French-made research balloons that will float over the Martian surface, rising during the daytime and sinking toward the ground at night.

Levitt helped design instruments that will be placed in the 30-foot-long, hose-like device. They will measure the roughness of the terrain and the speed of Martian winds that blow the balloons.

He also helped build a prototype snake out of long pieces of vacuum cleaner hose. Then he and fellow students tested it by dragging it around the UCLA campus and over a rocky arroyo bottom near JPL. Later, it was dragged beneath a balloon set loose over Mojave Desert lava flows.

“I was surprised. It worked!” laughed Levitt, who had painted a smiling reptile face on the aluminum “head” of the snake and decorated its sides with the admonition: “Drag Me ‘Til I Drop.”

Levitt used borrowed machine shop equipment to build a prototype of his Martian rock chipper. He finished it last week--just in time to devote his full attention to this week’s project: his fraternity’s annual “Lil’ Sister Dance” and a weekend ski trip.

“One night when Dave came back from a date he ran through here yelling, ‘I’m the King ofFun!’ ” laughed roommate Ofenstein, a 22-year-old economics major from Brea.

With that attitude, no one at Sigma Alpha Mu is likely to view Levitt as a space case.