UCLA Charts New Course: Supervising a Space Probe
UCLA is about to go where no university has gone before, provided that a spindly three-legged spacecraft called the Mars Polar Lander touches down today near the Martian south pole. Upright. And in one piece.
After NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena signal thumbs up on the landing, control of a probe on another planet will shift for the first time to a non-NASA site--a cavernous building on UCLA’s campus in Westwood.
The spotlight will then shine for three months on a UCLA-led team of 132 scientists. They will beam instructions to the lander’s robotic arm and other instruments to dig several feet into Martian soil and take pictures and measurements that they hope will shed light on how a once wetter and more inviting planet turned so inhospitable.
From the mission’s conception, the Polar Lander has been UCLA’s baby. University planetary scientist David Paige was in charge of the $22-million scientific instrument package carried on the vehicle, which was built by Lockheed Martin in Denver.
“We have been able to fly more missions and do it faster, cheaper, better, in part by bringing in universities,” said NASA chief Daniel S. Goldin. “We get more bang for the buck in space exploration and meet the second part of our mission: training the next generation.”
Goldin is largely responsible for UCLA’s enhanced role in space exploration by pushing the agency to alter the way it builds spacecraft. No longer does NASA build billion-dollar behemoths laden with instruments and elaborate fail-safe systems that get launched once a decade. Instead, it is planning and launching dozens of cheaper, high-tech craft that can be built and shot into space on a quick timetable.
Today, space agency engineers and university scientists are holding their breath as the Polar Lander enters the final stretch of its 470-million-mile voyage to land on Mars at noon. Early this morning, JPL flight engineers had their last chance for any course corrections, before turning over the entire landing operation to an on-board computer and 15,000 lines of software program code.
“We are right in the sweet spot,” JPL flight operations manager Sam Thurman said of the lander’s flight path Thursday as it neared Mars. “We have this nailed.”
After the lander safely touches down and its systems become operational, Paige and his crew of scientists at UCLA will have the run of the spacecraft.
Paige caught NASA’s fancy in 1995 with his proposal to organize the scientific instruments aboard the Mars Polar Lander. But the fact that his team will be the first non-NASA scientists to shepherd a major mission to fruition was more a matter of fate.
That honor was supposed to go to scientists at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab earlier this year when their spacecraft was scheduled to rendezvous with a huge potato-shaped asteroid.
But a misfired thruster set that mission back by more than a year. So the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft has a new date--Valentine’s Day--to connect with the asteroid Eros, named after the Greek god of love.
To be sure, university scientists have long been involved in designing scientific instruments aboard NASA spacecraft. Yet only recently have professors been designated as missions’ principal investigators, the people responsible for all experiments.
Take Don Brownlee, a University of Washington astronomer who is the principal investigator for the Stardust spacecraft, which is hurtling toward the Wild 2 comet to gather dust in 2004.
The principal investigator “is stuck at the top,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, I’m the one who gets blamed.”
Other university-led scientific missions are stacked up like airplanes at Los Angeles International Airport.
Caltech geochemist Don Burnett is leading the Genesis mission to collect solar wind particles. Cornell scientists are preparing for a three-comet fly-by and the launch of another Mars lander in 2001 with a rover aboard to prowl the Red Planet in 2002. And the University of Maryland in 2004 will launch the Deep Impact mission to penetrate the nucleus of a comet.
All of these universities won contracts in competition with private contractors and science teams based at NASA space centers.
“It’s one way of NASA downsizing,” said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. He noted that NASA’s payroll has dropped from about 22,000 to about 18,000 employees.
Internal NASA resistance to handing over the controls to outsiders has been diminishing, Goldin said. “When I first announced this [to NASA employees] in 1993, you could freeze ice on their face,” he said, whereas now it’s limited to minor grumbling.
Goldin said he won’t tolerate any retreat from the healthy competition for space missions.
“If universities have a better idea, God bless them, let them do it,” said Goldin, who toured the UCLA Mars Science Operation Center on Thursday. “We are going to see more of these control centers at universities.”
UCLA’s Mars center buzzed with activity Thursday as Paige trotted around in running shoes, making final preparations for today’s anticipated landing.
The center bears some resemblance--although it is much newer and less careworn--to a typical NASA mission control center, with its banks of computers, big-screen monitors and a full-sized model of the $165-million spacecraft planted in a big sandbox.
But it has the casual, more freewheeling atmosphere of a university laboratory rather than the constrained, high-security feel of a government science center.
“When you go over to work at JPL, you lose your identity as a university person,” said Peter Smith, a University of Arizona researcher who is in charge of the cameras in the UCLA instrument package aboard the Polar Lander. “We are happy to be working out of a university for once. We are masters of our own way of doing things.”
UCLA boosters, meanwhile, are eager to bask in the reflected glory that comes with hosting an interplanetary mission. The UCLA name is about to be broadcast around the world as hundreds of print, television and Internet journalists descend on the campus.
“You cannot buy this kind of publicity,” said Assistant Vice Chancellor Max Benavidez, noting that UCLA has a marketing budget of about $20 million.
“This kind of thing boosts the university’s prestige, which translates into everything from increased alumni donations to increased student applications,” said Peter Taylor, former UCLA alumni president. “People like to be associated with universities doing great things.”
Dana Kovaric, a UCLA graduate student in geophysics, spends all her free time around the control center. “I applied to UCLA because I know they had a Mars project,” she said. “I’m so happy I got in.”
The UCLA control center teems with undergraduate and graduate student volunteers such as Jean-Pierre Williams. Taking advantage of a space mission completed in a relatively short four years, he decided to continue his studies as a UCLA graduate student so he could help Paige select a landing site in Mars’ southern hemisphere.
“It’s great to apply what I’m learning in the classroom,” Williams said. “This is the chance of a lifetime, but I hope it’s the beginning of a career in planetary exploration.”
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Live video coverage of the Mars probe landing begins on The Times’ Web site at 11 a.m. today:
https://www .latimes.com/mars
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Countdown to Mars Landing
Key events today in the Mars Polar Lander mission, in Pacific Standard Time:
3 a.m. Final decision on whether to adjust spacecraft trajectory.
5:01 a.m. Thrusters perform final trajectory correction maneuver if controllers decide it is necessary.
11:07 a.m. Entry, descent and landing sequence begins.
11:49 a.m. Spacecraft turns antenna away from Earth, cutting off radio communications until after landing.
11:51 a.m. Lander and Deep Space 2 microprobes separate from cruise stage.
11:56 a.m. Atmospheric entry.
11:57 a.m. Descent radar deploys.
11:59 a.m. Parachute deploys, descent camera begins taking pictures, lander jettisons heat shield.
Noon Lander legs deploy, descent radar activates, lander separates from parachute and retrorockets fire to begin powered descent.
12:01 p.m. Touchdown.
12:06 p.m. After waiting for dust to settle, lander unfolds solar panels.
12:09 p.m. Medium-gain antenna deploys and seeks Earth.
12:25 p.m. First signals sent to Earth.
12:39 p.m. Transmission reaches Deep Space Network’s 200-foot antenna in Goldstone, Calif.
1:24 p.m. First transmission of data on spacecraft condition and meteorology, and possibly the first black-and-white images.
1:46 p.m. Lander batteries recharge.
6:26 p.m. Lander receives instructions.
7:27 p.m. First opportunity to communicate with the Deep Space 2 probes, which were to have slammed into the planet at 400 mph shortly before the lander’s arrival.
8:09 p.m. Transmission of more data begins.
11:24 p.m. Lander shuts down for night.
Source: Associated Press
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Mars Landing on the Web
Web sites offering information on Mars and the Polar Lander mission:
* JPL’s main Mars site will post the latest pictures and updates throughout the 90-day mission: https://marslander.jpl.nasa.gov or https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov /msp98
* JPL’s home page has links to the latest Mars projects as well as probes sent to other planets over the last 20 years. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov
* JPL’s Mars Educational site includes activities for children and teachers. In one section, pages can be printed, folded and glued to create a model of the Mars Polar Lander: https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov /education/
* UCLA, where the primary science team is based, offers a site focusing on experiments aboard the Mars Volatiles and Climate Surveyor payload: https://www.marspolarlander.com
* The Planetary Society will mirror JPL’s site and offer its own content in conjunction with its PlanetFest ’99 gathering at the Pasadena Convention Center: https://planetary.org
* The Mars Society, which advocates human exploration of the Red Planet, will mirror JPL and offer its own content: https://www.marssociety.org
Source: Associated Press
