After Years of Waiting, JPL Is Jubilant

“The space game is a waiting game,” mused Torrence Johnson as the clock ticked down toward his final moments of waiting.

For the 51-year-old Galileo project scientist--”I’m basically chairman of the board of a group of scientists doing experiments”--the wait began 19 years ago. Johnson was there before the beginning. “I helped sell the project to NASA. . . ,” he said with a bemused smile.

Here’s what that comes down to: 19 years of stops and starts and detours and broken antennae on a star-crossed spaceship. Nineteen years of energy invested in another Jet Propulsion Laboratory mission, Voyager, which explored other planets. “Neptune in ‘79, Saturn in ‘81, Uranus in ’86. . . ,” he listed.

And here on Earth: His kids grew up and started college; the family cockatiel came and went; a Mercury Capri gave way to an Audi and a Saturn.

But all the time, waiting for Jupiter.

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So when 2:59 p.m. rolled around Thursday at JPL and it was only minutes before the first possible sign that this epic undertaking had just maybe worked, Torrence Johnson proved himself the master of the waiting game.

As he stood in front of a television set watching a gaggle of mission support scientists, he looked as confident as a politician with great polls, as serene as a poker player with a great hand--even if his opponents were the elements of a tempestuous planet.

Sporting a blue blazer and a shirt with a bolo tie and a silver clasp, he folded his arms across his chest, fixed a steady grin on his face and took in the patter of the televised mission commentary. He chuckled softly, occasionally looking down at his wristwatch, ignoring the half-dozen cameras trained on his face to catch his tears of joy or sorrow.

Soon a voice barked the result that Johnson was waiting to hear--the probe was in position. “Whoa!” he cried and dissolved into triumphant laughter, clapping his hands. Cameras flashed, reporters smiled as they took notes and crowded around him.

“I was nervous,” he assured them, beaming and taking a celebratory swig of Evian water. He flashed a thumbs-up sign to a passing NASA administrator.

“This is a fantastic achievement,” he exulted. “With the probe flying on its own, slamming into the atmosphere, being protected by its heat shield . . . and then phoning home!” He sounded like a proud father. Ecstatic and still concerned. They would have to wait another three hours to learn if the main spacecraft successfully fired its engines and made it into the orbit of Jupiter.

All around JPL, the scientists who had devoted years of their lives to the Galileo mission seemed to have made an uneasy peace with the fact that the end of the wait might mean the end of hope for the mission.

They were nervous but philosophical.

“I’m a great believer in not wasting a lot of time on things I can’t do anything about,” chuckled Margaret Kivelson, professor of space physics at UCLA, soon after arriving at JPL to join in the historic vigil. She wrote her proposal to put a magnetometer on the orbiter--to measure magnetic fields--in 1976. “It was supposed to arrive on Jupiter in 1983 or ‘84,” said Kivelson, the principal magnetometer investigator on the project. “That seemed a long time away then.” She smiled ruefully.

As the Galileo project unfolded, she and her husband, a chemistry professor at UCLA, remodeled their house twice and become grandparents five times over. “And one on the way,” said Kivelson, 67.

Her son, Steve, has followed in his mother’s footsteps: He is a professor of physics at UCLA. Her daughter is a professor of Russian history at the University of Michigan.

Fortunately for Kivelson, the journey to Jupiter has been as interesting as the destination.

“We got information from Venus; we flew by Earth,” she said. “We flew by two asteroids, and that gave us some information on what their properties are. So there’s been a lot of good science along the way that wasn’t planned.” She grinned. “I call it serendipitous science.”

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Even those scientists for whom the ride was simply a means to an end tried to stay brutally realistic until they knew for sure that the probe had made it into Jupiter’s atmosphere.

“You look at Apollo 13 coming back in,” said Dave Atkinson of that troubled craft’s difficult re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. “That was a piece of cake. If this was an easy mission, someone would have done it already.”

Atkinson, a 40-year-old professor of electrical engineering at the University of Idaho, has been on the project for only 15 years. (“I’m one of the newcomers,” he quipped.) His is the Doppler wind experiment. The man he inherited the project from died in 1994 of a rare cancer. “That’s hard to accept on a project this long,” said Atkinson.

In the hours after the probe signaled its successful entry, Atkinson took in the good cheer around him. He called his wife back home in Moscow, Idaho, and found out that all his relatives and friends had been calling to share the happy news.

He was a bit sheepish. “I hate to admit that I thought there was a good possibility it wouldn’t work,” said Atkinson. “I halfway expected to be explaining to people: ‘It didn’t work because so many things had to happen. . . .’ ”

He marveled at the extraordinary amount of effort that it took to get precious information from such a small time frame. Galileo has been en route to Jupiter for six years. “We’ll get 75 minutes of data if we’re lucky,” said Atkinson.

Shortly after 6 p.m., scientists heard the words that told them the orbiter was successfully on course around Jupiter.

“We can report burn complete,” came a voice over the speakers from Mission Support. “Thank you very much,” came the disembodied reply.

But in the auditorium at JPL, the applause burned on into the night.

* GALILEO WATCHERS: Three El Monte students get an up close and personal view of the Galileo mission at JPL. B1