Radio Mars

Little did Gordon E. Wood dream, while cobbling together ham radios on cold, starry nights in his parents’ Glendale garage, that those childhood skills would help make him NASA’s top radio man when the Pathfinder spacecraft lands on Mars today.

“Now I’m talking to planets rather than to South Americans,” said Wood, 53, Pathfinder’s chief engineer for mission communications at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Amused at how far he has come since his ham-radio contacts 40 years ago with Antarctica, Australia and even Hilo, Hawaii, following a tsunami, Wood added, “I had really studied [electronics] because of my interest in ham radio . . . not for job training.”

After Pathfinder lands on an ancient martian flood plain, Wood and his communications team will roll up their sleeves and go to work.

Among other things, their job is to assure that data collected from Sojourner, the 23-pound rover to be rolled off a ramp from Pathfinder, safely gets radioed back to the spacecraft and then is relayed to the scientists at JPL.

Although separated by about 120 million miles--a distance that takes light 10 minutes and 39 seconds to cross--Wood and his microwave radio gadgetry on the red planet will be on familiar terms.

“They’re really not that different,” the La Canada Flintridge resident said of radio transmitters, be they on a ham operator’s workbench or sealed within a foam cocoon aboard a $280-million spacecraft. “With ham radios, you have to improvise. You have to make do with the technology that you have, and that really is a crucial element to space communications and planetary projects.”

Using half the power of a bathroom night-light, the 793-pound Pathfinder will relay data across the cold desert of interplanetary space to give geologists a glimpse of the terrain of Ares Vallis, a broad valley a few hundred miles north of the martian equator. The six-wheel rover will extend a mechanical “nose” that will sniff out the age and the composition of rocks, soil and dust, perhaps shedding further light on whether water once flowed on the martian surface.

As Wood spoke Thursday, a huge pink dust storm swirled about 600 miles away from the landing site--just one of the obstacles that he and his trouble-shooting crew had to address before, and may have to make adjustments during, the 30-day primary mission, he said.

“You’ve got to have very, very special radios [on the mission] because they have to work in a very tough environment,” Wood said.

In addition to temperatures ranging from 200 degrees below zero at night to 63 degrees during the day, the radios must withstand an impact--unique among planetary missions--that could cause Pathfinder to bounce about four stories high and tumble within its air-bag cushion for a minute or more, Wood said.

Likening it to a huge ball bounding across a red beach, he added, “It sounds screwball at first, but it really is cool when you think about it.”

For Wood, the wonder of electronics began more than 40 years ago, when his father bought him an old shortwave radio--already about 20 years old at the time--from a Salvation Army thrift store when Wood was about 12.

In the garage of his parents’ ranch-style home in north Glendale, Wood turned the radio on and was startled, he said, “when I started to hear people from far away, from different countries. . . . It really was quite a revelation to me. . . . Here’s this stupid little dusty box doing this, and so I told myself I had to find out how this works.”

Bit by bit, tapping library sources and eventually other ham radio enthusiasts, Wood built radio after radio until he mastered the craft in a makeshift workroom in the garage, often bundled against the cold. His father, 92-year-old Everett Wood, still lives in the hillside house where the younger Wood grew up--and where his plywood laboratory remains.

“It’s a kind of technical community,” Wood said of fellow ham operators. “You talk to people halfway around the world . . . people you’ll never meet, but you get to know them very well. It’s a very different social relationship.”

After graduating with honors from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and UC Berkeley with a master’s degree in electrical engineering, Wood drove to JPL in 1967 and, remarkably, he said, landed a job.

Subsequent years found him working on several interplanetary missions--Mariner, Viking, Voyager--each continuing a 400-year odyssey, he said, that began with Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler and Sir Isaac Newton.

“Mankind after all these years is reaching out from his own planet . . . with little toys to snoop around and understand whatever else is out there in the universe,” Wood said.

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