David Abbey Paige

BY MONA GABLE / UCLA Today Staff

Calling on his cellular phone, David Paige sounds like a man from another planet. But it’s not because there’s static on the line or a bad connection.

Ever since the associate professor of planetary science at UCLA was named by NASA to operate the 1999 Mars Polar Lander, the first-ever mission exploring the Martian climate, the affable scientist has hardly had a minute to come back to Earth.

“Oh, God,” he said, laughing, when asked how many miles Earth is from the red planet. “I have no idea off the top of my head. But it takes about a year to get to Mars from here.”

If Paige is a bit giddy these days, it’s no wonder. After three years of preparation and behind-the-scenes meetings with an international team of engineers and scientists and high-level NASA officials, he’s about to embark on the greatest adventure of his professional life.

When the Lander sets down on the unknown south polar region of Mars in December 1999, the UCLA scientist will take charge of the spacecraft’s spectacular $20-million payload. He will operate the Lander’s robotic arm, which will dig below Mars’ surface for the first time and collect soil samples. He will gather and analyze data on water in Mars’ atmosphere and underground. He will oversee every experiment during the mission’s dramatic 86 days. Then he will share the scientists’ findings with the entire world.

“This represents the main focus of my effort for the last five years,” said Paige, when asked what being one of the key players in the Lander mission means to him professionally. “It’s a big honor to be selected to do something like this.”

That’s true on several fronts. While NASA has had university partners before, this is the first time the federal space agency has given an academic institution so much control over a scientific payload. With their proposal, Paige and his UCLA team beat out a number of government and academic competitors, among them Cornell and Washington University.

“For providing the payload for a mission going to Mars, this is a first,” said Paige of UCLA’s involvement. “The idea is to get the best possible science for the least amount of money. We can make a lot of trade-offs. Having it under the direction of one person, it’s faster.”

The Mars Lander project involves not only UCLA and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), but several other partners including the University of Arizona and Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver. In preparation for June, when Paige and his team will move into a specially equipped building in Westwood that will serve as UCLA’s mission control, he’s been shuttling between institutions to be sure the payload’s instrumentation is ready.

Known as the “Mars Volatiles and Climate Surveyor,” the payload Paige will be in command of has four major instruments: a mast-mounted camera that will photograph the landscape; the robotic arm; a gas analyzer that will determine the content of ice and frozen carbon dioxide in samples of Martian soil; and sensors to record atmospheric pressure, temperature and winds.

There’ll also be a Russian-built device called a lidar, which will measure dust and clouds in the atmosphere and includes a microphone that will broadcast the first sound from Mars.

“Whereas Pathfinder was mostly interested in studying rocks, we’re more interested in studying Mars volatiles, looking for water in the atmosphere and underground, making measurements on the surface that help us interpret things like the meteorites we’ve gotten from Mars already,” said Paige. “We’ll be trying to determine whether Mars once had a warmer weather environment. We hope the data will help us answer those questions.”

Paige and his UCLA colleagues, however, won’t be busy for some time. Lander’s scheduled launch from Kennedy Space Center is Jan. 3, 1999. But the $160-million spacecraft won’t reach the surface of Mars for nine months. “We don’t turn the thing on and do much with it until it actually lands,” he joked of the payload.Even so, the UCLA professor foresees a few tense moments before then.

“The launch will be nerve-wracking,” he said. “The landing will be nerve-wracking. We’ll be waiting for the signal from the surface to hear if it lands successfully. I get nervous when I don’t have any control.”

In the meantime, Paige looks forward to June, when he and his team will move into their new scientific home, the Science and Technology Research building, located just off of Gayley Avenue.

Paige views the mission as a rich opportunity to excite public interest in space exploration, as well as this second phase of NASA’s 10-year Mars Surveyor program.

There’ll be a Web site and a K-12 education program for students throughout the United States. At the Science and Technology Research facility where Paige and his team of graduate and undergraduate students will be based, along with some three dozen other scientists connected with the mission, there’ll beclassrooms for presentations, a Lander mock-up and “sandbox” and versions of the payload’s instruments for visitors to see.

“I think there are great opportunities to get the UCLA name associated with the mission if we play our cards right,” said Paige. “We’ll have a different look and feel to the whole mission.

“We’re not NASA,” he adds. “We’re not bound by the same regulations and bureaucracies. It’s up to us to create what the mission is.”

Copyright 1998 UCLA Today

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