For Young JPL Engineer, the Sky’s No Limit

On Dec. 3, two 8-pound NASA probes, each the size of a large grapefruit, are scheduled to slam into the surface of Mars with a force as much as 60,000 times that of the Earth’s gravity.

Kari A. Lewis, 26, is the chief mission engineer for the project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

She knew the Deep Space 2 probes when they were just squiggles on a lab computer screen and cared for them when they were baby bits of cables and sensors. She sweated it out when JPL scientists hurled them from airplanes and shot them out of a cannon-like air gun for impact testing. Now the probes are on a cold, 11-month cruise to Mars, snuggled in a basketball-size protective shell, wrapped in a thermal blanket. If all goes well, the probes will dive-bomb into Mars’ surface to study the planet’s soil and atmosphere and to look for water.

But if the probes hit a big rock at 400 mph, they’re history.

Talk about your separation anxiety.

Lewis is working on another project until the landing, but that doesn’t mean she’s not counting the days.

“It’s getting closer and closer,” she said, with a team leader’s tact and cheer. “It’ll be a good time.”

The press attention she has been getting is curious to her. She’s a systems engineer, thank you, with lithium thyonal chloride cells on her mind. She hasn’t even had time to order business cards, and reporters are poking through the CDs in her tiny office (Alanis Morissette, Sarah McLachlan, Cher) and asking nosy questions (She’s single, likes mountain biking and lives in Pasadena).

“I don’t want to sound cocky,” protested Lewis, who doesn’t sound cocky. “I don’t want people to think that I think I’m something great because I have this job and I’m younger than most people.”

She’s among a new breed of 20-something team leaders at JPL, Gen-Xers who are moving into leadership positions opened up by the new era of smaller, faster, cheaper missions pushed by NASA chief Dan Goldin. (Still, at NASA’s 10 centers, only 3% of the scientists and engineers are younger than 30 years old).

In June 1998, Deep Space 2’s chief mission engineer quit unexpectedly to start his own business. The manager of the $29.2-million project, Sarah Gavit, thought Lewis was the obvious replacement.

“There wasn’t a whole lot to think about, to be honest with you,” Gavit said. “I was absolutely confident she could do the job.” Lewis was an excellent engineer, Gavit thought, with two years experience on Deep Space 2. And she knew how to talk to people.

“You’re trying to coordinate a very complex design with lots of engineers,” Gavit said. “You have to have people skills.”

Lewis knew the drill, coordinating budgets, schedules and designs with scientists and other staff members. Still, one minute, you’re 25, with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and it’s only been three years since you wrapped up a senior project on conceptual spacecraft design. The next minute, you’re overseeing 30 Mars project engineers, some of whom are old enough to be your parent.

“Oh, God, that was intimidating,” Lewis said. “I felt a lot of pressure not to make any mistakes, not to screw up.”

Saverio D’Agostino, a senior engineer on the project, said he didn’t mind working for a younger team leader. At 52, he didn’t even mind when someone mistook Lewis for his daughter.

“If the skill is demonstrated, there’s no problem with younger people or older people getting a position,” he said. “She was excellent.”

Co-workers never gave her attitude, Lewis said, and that helped. Days were long, with 60- to 80-hour weeks before the launch in January, and the work called for quick decisions. Like the time when a scientist pushed for an advanced water-sampling instrument a month before the scheduled launch. The parts were late; the software had not been written. The software engineer didn’t have the time to write a program or test it. She had to say no and not look back.

She didn’t grow up a space buff, moving around the country for her father’s job as an Air Force pilot (her mother was a homemaker). The younger of two kids, she liked to draw and build and put together puzzles. She had a serious Lego collection. Maybe she would be an architect.

But Lewis didn’t think much about a career until her high school days in Liberty, Mo. She was good at science and math but couldn’t see herself as an engineer, building circuit boards.

“I didn’t want to become an engineer that did everyday, basic things,” she said. “I wanted to do things no one else was doing.”

In college, she heard the stories of professors who had worked on space shuttle launches, including the Challenger disaster in 1986. One story stuck with her.

The professor, who was Air Force secretary for President Reagan, thought he was bungling a meeting about the proposed space station.

“Then Reagan looked up and winked at him, and he knew he had the space station,” Lewis recalled. “That’s exciting! That’s history! That’s, like, wow, to be part of American culture and life and history, and to leave a mark.”

On campus, she headed for JPL’s recruiting booth and landed a nine-month internship, which she spent mostly doing research on proposed NASA projects. She had never been to California, had no car and knew no one in the state. But JPL felt like home.

“My job here is more than something I go to from 9 to 5,” Lewis said. “It’s my life. . . I love it. To me, it’s just really a great thing to be here. I love the people I work with, and they’re all brilliant.”

These days, she’s the systems engineer on the MUSES-CN Nanorover, the smallest rover ever to fly on a space mission. The project’s 2.2-pound rover--small enough to fit into a briefcase--will explore the surface of an asteroid in April 2003.

Meanwhile, the Deep Space 2 probes are cruising to Mars waiting to break away into the planet’s summer solstice. Lewis thinks about those probes every day. What if the probes land weirdly and the antennas are messed up? (The probes will send information on soil composition via radio signals to a spacecraft, which will relay the data to Earth.) What if the drills don’t work? (The drills will grab bits of soil for water testing within the probes.)

And how about that landing?

Imagine dropping a PC from an airplane, 10,000 feet high, hoping it burrows 3 feet into unknown terrain. You hope all its electrical and mechanical parts will survive the crash landing, and you hope it can work despite the cold (as low as minus-184 degrees Fahrenheit).

With Deep Space 2, JPL wants to show that tiny, packed probes can whiz through the solar system, that mega-space projects are old news. Someday, scientists want a mother ship to be able to shoot dozens of soil probes all over a planet or moon.

Every once in a while, Lewis thinks beyond the engineering. What if the probes hit pay dirt--say, water turned into ice by Mars’ cold climate. Water would be huge--a clue to the big question of whether life exists, or ever existed, on Mars. The question goes back to her days on family camping trips in Missouri, gazing into the night sky, wondering what’s out there.

“It’s fascinating to think about,” she said. “Who knows what Mars was like millions of years ago when it had water on its surface? What could have been there? What made it change?”

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Renee Tawa can be reached at renee.tawa@latimes.com