Plan Doesn’t Clear Air
Gerald A. Soffen, the project scientist for the Viking missions that performed the first successful experiments on the surface of Mars, has died.
Most recently the director of university programs at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, Soffen died of a heart ailment on Wednesday at George Washington University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He was 74.
A leading scientist for most of his 30 years with NASA, Soffen began his career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where he managed biological instrument development and was the principal investigator for the proposed Mars Microscope.
He left JPL in the early 1970s to join NASA’s Langley Research Center as the project scientist for the Viking missions.
Launched in 1975, the twin robot landers arrived at the Red Planet a year later and became the first successful missions to perform unmanned experiments on the planet’s surface.
As project scientist, Soffen directed the work of more than 70 colleagues across the country in planning the Viking mission. And while the Viking probes found no evidence of life on Mars, Soffen was optimistic about the possibilities for human life thriving there.
“It’s not preposterous or wild. It’s in our genes to explore and to occupy,” he told a Washington Times reporter some years ago. “It will happen; it’s just a question of timing.”
In 1978, he was named director of life sciences at NASA. He directed programs to ensure the well-being of astronauts, as well as overseeing the agency’s biomedical and space biology programs.
Soffen joined the Goddard Center in 1983, where he helped to establish the Mission to Planet Earth program, an unprecedented effort to understand the effects of natural and human-induced changes on the environment.
“With all the planets I have looked at, I have never seen anything as complicated as the Earth,” Soffen told a Times reporter. “The thing that complicates the Earth, of course, is the water and the biology, especially humans. It is just mind-boggling.”
Soffen formed the university programs office at Goddard in 1990 and directed activities to maintain and broaden the center’s interaction with the academic community.
In 1994, Soffen created the NASA academy, a summer institute of higher learning whose goal is to guide future leaders of the space program.
Born in Cleveland, Soffen earned his bachelor’s degree at UCLA, a master’s of science at USC and a doctorate in biology at Princeton. He served in the army in Europe during World War II.
He is survived by his wife, Kazuko, and a sister, Nancy Guy of California.
