Holding Out Hope : If Mars Observer Doesn’t Call Home, Some Scientists Will Lose Theirs

As Mars Observer team members prepare to pack up and a few post for-sale signs on their homes, Edward R. Kelly still hopes for the wondrous dance of a line across his blue computer screen at the missing spacecraft’s mission control.

Kelly, a 22-year veteran at these things, would be among the first to spot the jiggling computer line, a sign that the Observer is phoning home to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. It is the same signal that a hushed room of more than 100 media members and JPL officials waited for in vain Aug. 24, the day of Observer’s scheduled rendezvous with Mars. The media crowds are long gone, but Kelly keeps waiting.

It has been more than three weeks since the spacecraft’s last contact with Earth, and JPL’s Observer team is starting to fold its tents. If Observer remains silent, the agency tentatively plans to lay off one-fourth of the 130-member team on Sept. 20. Cutbacks will continue through Oct. 31, until only a few people will remain.

Among the team members soon to be out of a job are a dozen engineers from Princeton, N.J.,-based Martin Marietta Astro Space, six of whom had bought houses in the Pasadena area in anticipation of a long stay on the Observer project.

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Team members instead will join other, probably more mundane, projects. The Observer, one of the most sophisticated planetary probes ever launched, was designed to study Mars’ geography, atmosphere and climate; its $21-million high-resolution camera was expected to take stunning pictures of the planet, 40 times clearer than the last ones from NASA’s Viking orbiters in 1976.

Some Observer team members had spent 12 years nurturing the spacecraft, from conception to liftoff aboard a Titan III rocket last September and through its 450-million-mile journey to Mars. Team members had anticipated that the Observer’s scientific instruments would gather 600 billion bits of data through November, 1995, or possibly longer. Instead, they peruse bits on the bulletin boards at Observer headquarters for job postings.

The bulletin boards are also stress-relievers, a place where jokers post mock ransom notes (“We have your spacecraft. . . . Send $20 billion in Martian money”) and David Letterman’s Top 10 list of NASA’s excuses for losing the Observer (“Forgot to use the Club”).

Flight controllers lost contact with the Observer just 68 hours before the 5,572-pound, golf cart-sized spacecraft was scheduled to begin orbiting Mars. Some independent experts speculated that the spacecraft blew up as its rockets fired to prepare for orbit; NASA countered that the likelihood of such an explosion is one-tenth of 1%. The space agency has had its scientists continue sending commands to the Observer, under the assumption that it is tumbling through space but unable to communicate.

So Kelly waits, just as he did as mission controller on the Mariner and Viking probes, NASA’s two earlier successful missions to Mars. He waits, in a lonely one-man 10-by-8-foot work station with ratty carpet and dim fluorescent lights, and, on the wall, a posted editorial cartoon lampooning the Observer. The Galileo and Magellan crafts routinely beam messages home from space, but Observer remains silent while NASA’s independent review board investigates what went wrong.

Kelly, 49, of Lancaster, speaks briskly and professionally about his job, in the manner that the world has come to expect from JPL. His reserve drops for a moment when he considers what it would be like to see a sweet sign from the Observer light his screen and admits that he would whoop so loud that the sound would carry to Observer headquarters, in another building across the JPL complex.

Kelly is one of a staff of five mission controllers who watch around the clock for that signal. One theory is that the Observer eventually will turn its solar panels toward the sun, recharge itself and, at any moment, turn itself on.

Meanwhile, flight engineers are back at the drawing board, penciling scenarios of what went wrong and how to fix possible malfunctions on the Mars Observer, dubbed “Mo Mo” for short. A team of about 15 people meets in “Mo Mo’s War Room” three to 10 times a week, sometimes from sunup to sundown. Maybe, they speculate, the spacecraft missed its orbit completely. Or maybe it made the orbit but just can’t talk to mission controllers.

Team members devise possible computer commands, which are whisked to appropriate departments for evaluation and then tested on a spacecraft clone. Each command is reviewed by the mission manager. So far, mission controllers have tapped out 1,283 commands--some of them repeats--trying to prompt a response.

Among the attempts: to switch from the spacecraft’s main computer to a backup; to quit sending commands, in order to trigger a backup program that prompts a call home if mission control is silent for five days; to shut down one of the spacecraft’s computers in case the two computers are confused about which one is in control.

The flight team will continue to propose commands until NASA sends word to stop. When the commands stop, mission controllers will begin a listen-only vigil. The spacecraft’s life expectancy is three years.

Breakup of the Observer’s close-knit team and the possible loss of the spacecraft is wearing on the psyche of the mission’s hotshot engineers, computer experts and scientists, many of whom are in their late 20s and on their first mission, said David M. Durham, the spacecraft team chief and a Tujunga resident. At 41 years old, Durham jokes that he is the “old man” of the mission. The confident team was prepared for glitches, he said, but not this.

“It was hard for people to believe at first,” he said. “Boom, where is it and what happened?”

In public, team members wear their brains, not their hearts, on their sleeves, with talk of “redundant crystal oscillators”; in private, they mourned the Observer with a poster outside mission control on the day of the ill-fated orbit: “MO, Phone Home.” Durham keeps a file folder of Observer jokes.

Morale dipped for a while after the Observer lost contact, but bounced back as people started to kick around ideas on what to do, said Scott R. Davis, a 37-year-old deputy team chief and San Gabriel resident. They took the jokes in stride, Davis said. By some small measure, the jokes even pushed them to work that much harder to prove the world wrong.

“This would be a real sensation now,” Davis said, “to bring it back . . . everyone wants to be the hero that finds the problem and that figures it out.” Davis, who once applied to be an astronaut, grew up gazing at the heavens with small telescopes when he was a kid. He believes the Observer is still up there. “Whether we recover it is a different story. . . . It’s there holding some secret of what’s wrong.”

Davis is on contract to JPL from Martin Marietta, but his work likely will end by Oct. 31. He and his family--a wife, three children and four cats--are renting a house in San Gabriel. They are preparing to move back to the Princeton, N.J., area and re-enroll their children in the school that they left when they moved to California. They are not sure where they will go because they rented their New Jersey house to tenants, whose lease does not expire until January.

Davis considers himself lucky, in a way. He had been house-hunting this summer but put off a decision because he got busy with the Observer. Six of his Martin Marietta colleagues who bought houses--some of them as recently as a few weeks ago-- are now caught between Southern California’s housing slump and the urgency of moving back home for work.

“They only owned their houses for a few weeks, and whammo, they’re hit with a $5,000, $10,000 or $30,000 loss if they can’t sell their house (for the right price),” Davis said.

Team members lift their spirits by trading news on the possibility of another Mars mission as early as October, 1994, and of a U.S. Department of Energy Earth-orbiting satellite that recently signaled home after six weeks of silence.

Team technical manager H. Mac Grant said he wants to believe that Observer, too, will break its silence.

“Maybe the human psyche says, ‘I’ve got to believe,’ ” said Grant, a 54-year-old La Crescenta resident. “That’s going to be us too.”