Scientist Unfazed, Even if Work Is Lost in Space
It’s a scene that plays over and over in his mind: On the final leg of a mission to Mars, the spacecraft disappears with his experiments on board.
It’s no fantasy. In fact, three times UCLA planetary scientist David Paige has lost years of work and millions of dollars in equipment on three separate missions to Mars over the last decade.
Throughout the weekend, the question lingered: Is he about to relive his worst nightmare?
Paige is in charge of a $22-million package of experiments aboard the Mars Polar Lander that has yet to phone home or answer queries from Earth since it hurtled into the Martian atmosphere midday Friday toward its planned touchdown near the south pole.
NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory tried again Sunday--without success--to reach the $165-million spacecraft designed to unearth clues about how the once warmer and wetter planet grew so cold and dry, and whether it ever could have supported life.
Relaxed Under Pressure
Despite his stake in the mission, Paige--whose father joined with Adm. Richard Byrd 66 years ago to explore the South Pole of Earth--has been one of those least inclined to show signs of strain.
When the spacecraft’s unnerving silence first bore down on JPL in Pasadena, most scientists began to sweat under the pressure. Not Dave Paige. Taking advantage of the lull, he curled up beneath his desk for a two-hour nap.
Even after Sunday morning’s failed attempt to contact the Polar Lander, he said, “I’m still in a hopeful mode.” He then left to rally the crowd at Planetfest, an event at the Pasadena Convention Center sponsored by the Planetary Society. An attempt late Sunday night also failed.
“We have another good chance at contact around midnight [tonight],” Paige said. “Hopefully, we’ll get something positive.
“I’m not one of those people who wrings their hands,” Paige said. “I go with the flow.”
Indeed, he’s noted among his colleagues for going with the flow. They call him laid-back, even childlike in his sense of wonder and playfulness. Not too long ago, this boyish professor used to skateboard to class. Now that he has reached the mature age of 42, he prefers in-line skates.
His students regularly pile into his VW van to accompany him on weekend trips skiing, kayaking or mountain biking. They go on field trips to Santa Catalina and the Grand Canyon and giggle together over his physics jokes.
“He challenges you and you learn a lot, but he says things that are really funny,” said Jean-Pierre Williams, a grad student.
His offbeat humor is hard-wired throughout the UCLA Mars Science Operation Center, which he assembled from scratch in a cavernous building on the Westwood campus. A pair of lava lamps--one shaped like a ‘50s-style spaceship--stand like sentries by the front door. When colleagues bicker, he hands them foam rubber bats to work it out, or he bonks them on the head himself.
“He is quirky,” said Pamela Marton, his sister. She recalls how he spent the first term as a Caltech grad student camping in a tent in Millard Canyon, doing his homework by the light of a Coleman lantern.
“He find things to laugh about and find the humorous side of the situation,” said Candice Hansen, a longtime colleague and No. 2 on the Polar Lander science project.
His peers also point out that he’s an uncommonly creative scientist with “a telescopic mind,” one that can visualize the big picture, but then focus narrowly on the smallest detail.
His single-minded devotion to his work has never allowed time for marriage.
“This is my family,” he said, waving to a crew of scientists working around a model of the Polar Lander. “I have a lot of people to take care of.”
Paige, an expert in planetary ice caps, dazzled NASA in 1995 with a proposal to devote this Mars mission to the study of its south polar region.
Ever since then he has worked tirelessly--17-hour days for the past few months--to pull together the work of 132 scientists and engineers from around the world.
As principal investigator for the scientific mission, Paige is in charge of the Mars Volatiles and Climate Surveyor. The elaborate package of instruments includes cameras, weather sensors, a robot arm to dig 1 meter beneath the Mars surface, and a gas analyzer to determine if the soil contains water.
But as he knows all too well, science experiments bound for the Red Planet do not always survive.
No Stranger to Martian Heartbreak
Paige was part of a team of scientists who designed instruments launched in 1992 aboard the Mars Observer, which was supposed to measure atmospheric temperature, dust and water vapor. Those instruments vanished a year later along with the Mars Observer en route to the fourth rock from the sun.
Another of Paige’s planned experiments was lost in 1996, when a Russian mission to Mars blew up in Earth’s atmosphere and rained debris somewhere over Chile.
More recently, Paige was counting on the Mars Climate Orbiter to be his satellite link for the Mars Polar Lander and give the current mission an added dimension, as its eyes in the sky.
But the Climate Orbiter was lost Sept. 23 due to a navigational error--an experience Paige described as “just plain horrifying.”
“When you don’t hear from the spacecraft, it slowly dawns on you,” Paige said. Then he recites a line from a “Star Trek” movie: “He’s dead, Jim.” And laughs.
He isn’t ready to jump to any conclusions yet about the Polar Lander. “It will take a long time before I lose hope,” he said. “I won’t believe it’s dead for a couple of weeks.”
If space flight engineers can establish a communications link with a healthy Polar Lander, Paige plans to spend the next three months running a remote lab on Mars. Given that the Polar Lander is powered by the sun, Paige would work a Martian day shift, which runs from about 4 p.m. to 2 a.m.
In some ways, though, he has been on Martian time for most of his adult life.
He was first smitten by the Red Planet as a UCLA undergraduate. One of his first assignments was in 1976 to help former professor Hugh Kieffer with an experiment mapping atmospheric temperatures on the Viking missions, the first U.S. Mars landings.
Adam Hall, a longtime pal, recalls getting a phone call in college from Paige, asking him to go up to Mt. Pinos in the northernmost corner of Ventura County. Bring a telescope, Paige said, he wanted to see Mars.
“Don’t you get enough of Mars at work?” Hall asked.
“No,” Paige replied, “I want those photons to hit my eye directly.”
It was during high school that Paige discovered his calling.
Frank Memmer, former astronomy teacher at Beverly Hills High, remembers arriving at school early, around 6:30 a.m., only to find Paige waiting excitedly to get into the school’s planetarium.
“He was always taking apart laboratory equipment, some of which he could never get back together,” Memmer said.
As a senior, he won a National Science Foundation competition to include his experiment--using polarized light to examine clouds and snow--aboard a NASA plane. As his reward, he was the only high school student in the nation to join 20 scientists aboard the 990 Convair that flew over Alaska, Greenland and the North Pole.
It was a pivotal moment for a teenager trying to figure out where to fit in. “I remember thinking, ‘This is it,’ ” he said. “This is really good stuff.”
His sense of exploration was inspired by his late father, David Paige Sr., who as an artist accompanied Byrd on his second expedition to Antarctica in 1933.
As David Paige Jr. sees it, the south pole of another planet, Mars, is now the new frontier.
Even if the worst scenario is replayed and the Polar Lander is lost, he said, the hazards of robotic space exploration pale in comparison to those his father faced as he struggled through an Antarctic winter.
“The great part of this business is that even if this [crashes], we don’t all die,” he said. “You are not putting your life on the line, just years and a lot of money.”
Then there’s always the chance of another shot at Mars. “I just heard,” he said, with excitement growing in his voice, “there’s an opportunity to be involved in the 2003 Mars mission.”
