Monday, 8/11/97 Paige to head NASA’s next venture onto Red
Planet SCIENCE: Team faces challenge of working with cost
constraints
By Cecelia Fuentes Daily Bruin Contributor UCLA professor and
alumnus David Paige is working tirelessly on the next Mars Surveyor
Program (MSP) ’98 lander mission called "The Mars Volatile and
Climate Surveyor" (MVACS). Due to launch on January 8, 1999, there
is little time and no money to waste. In his stuffy office, amid
stacks of data covering the tables and overflowing to the floor, he
seems not at all affected by the "severe cost constraints" imposed
by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Instead, he seems excited by the challenge. "I make the analogy of
movie making," Paige said, "where you have a lot of people who do
different things and one management structure like NASA and the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)." As principal investigator of a team
of international scientists and engineers, Paige will have
responsibility for the overall success of MVACS. Mission Control
for the science team during the prime mission, where Paige will be
in command, will be managed from UCLA’s new Science and Technology
Building in Westwood. The MSP is a series of NASA missions to
explore the Red Planet. The program will launch orbiting or landing
vehicles each 26 months over the next decade. In keeping with the
"better faster, cheaper," mode set by NASA Administrator Dan Goldin
(in response to the loss of the Mars Observer in 1993), each
mission will adhere to a $150 million price cap. "It is becoming
increasingly clear that the old way of doing things – huge budgets,
packing every instrument and science experiment desired onto a
spacecraft, and placing all the risk into a large, one-time shot at
space – is over," wrote David Dubov, in the "Martian Chronicle," a
publication of the Mars Exploration Program at JPL in Pasadena.
July 4 was the program’s first success. The Mars Pathfinder Mission
placed a science payload on the surface of Mars at one-fifteenth
the Viking price tag. Viking was the Mars mission before the more
recent Pathfinder mission. What has made this possible is NASA’s
shift to a business-like mind-set. With cost the primary factor and
performance and risk being the dependent variables, one way to save
money is to adapt existing technologies, rather than create them
from scratch. For example, the Surface Stereo Imager for the MVACS
mission is a duplicate of the Imager for Mars Pathfinder (IMP)
camera. The Meteorology Package uses the same deployment mechanism
and a number of sensors derived from the Pathfinder experiment.
Even readily available software has been used. "Instead of creating
a new command structure for the computer, we bought Windows 95 and
modified it," Paige said, "taking out the office commands and
replacing them with commands to instruct the launcher, the camera,
the robotic arm and all other functions of the mission." Paige is
creating the two-meter robotic arm from scratch. There have been
some some new developments, though. A team headed by Kim Gostelow
programmed the flight computer for the Pathfinder mission, which
required the creation of an entirely new computer language. The
project entailed developing a 350-page dictionary to use in
"speaking" to the spacecraft. "Much of this work will be used in
future missions," Gostelow said. He has been at JPL since shortly
after receiving his Ph.D. in computer science from UCLA in 1971.
Gostelow worked on the Viking mission, when everything needed to be
specially designed and built for each mission. But now, Gostelow
said, "we get equipment cameras and batteries from what is
generally available, then modify whatever we need to our
specifications. The demand for advanced equipment by the every-day
consumer has really grown, so we’re really able to take advantage."
Another of NASA’s major considerations is the attractiveness of
space exploration to the general public. Costing more than $100
million annually (about $300,000 per day), the Mars mission is
still a hard sell in a time of drastic social welfare cuts and
general fiscal unease. Scientists and NASA have a new challenge: to
make these missions seem more exciting, educational and necessary
to the nation. "By studying Mars, the most likely planet for future
human expeditions, scientists hope to better understand the
formation and evolution of Earth, and of the inner solar system,"
reads a fact sheet put out by NASA and JPL . "This effort – which
is affordable, engaging to the public, and of high scientific value
– will also provide a base for infusing science, mathematics and
engineering into our nation’s educational system. International
participation and collaboration are expected to enhance the value
of the program." "There was tremendous opposition to the space
program the first time around in the 1960s," said Tom Lieser,
associate director of the Anderson School’s economic forecast. "But
landing on the moon, a stunning technical achievement, changed
minds." Lieser feels that public willingness to support large
budgets to place human beings on heavenly bodies has again
diminished, impacting the job market for engineers. "The program is
far smaller than it used to be in terms of jobs, but the jobs that
remain are higher-paying and have an important economic impact.
There’s a certain technological core which you’d like to see
remaining," Lieser said. "Even with all the favorable publicity,
JPL will continue to downsize into the next century, which makes
the new money-saving policy the only way to go." Related Links:
Mars Pathfinder Mirror Links