Dante Lauretta

We’re going to get better and better at characterizing planets around other stars. That’s going to be a big thing. We’re going to start to find smaller planets, Earth-like planets. I think—I’ll make a prediction here—we’re going to start to realize that Earth-like planets are relatively common and this will feed into the whole idea of, is there life on other planets out there? We’re going to learn to detect remotely any signs of life—if it’s an oxygen-rich atmosphere, or if it’s some other atmospheric signature, or maybe it’s something you can see, changes on the surfaces or something like that. I think we’re going to really start to get better and better at characterizing and detecting extra-solar planets. That expands our number of targets from nine, keeping Pluto as a planet, to hundreds and thousands of objects in nearby space to us. Planetary science is going to blossom enormously because there’s simply that many more planets out there that need to be studied.

William Bottke

I think the fact that the field has grown so much is because there’s so much excitement in it right now. It’s not just our solar system, either; it’s the discovery of planets in other solar systems. The big growth areas I see are extra-solar planets, which are now a really hot topic; and I also see astrobiology. It’s growing in fits and starts, but ultimately there are really interesting constraints that planetary science provides for life and vice versa. I think that will be another big growth area as we become more sophisticated. 

Alfred McEwen

Scientifically, the lab is getting more and more interested in extra-solar planets. Exobiology, astrobiology, things like habitability—you can have a discipline in astrobiology even if you don’t find any extraterrestrial life. Stephen Gould called it “that great discipline in search of its first data point.”

Jay Melosh

I think since the discovery of extra-solar planets, planetary system formation has gotten to be more respectable astronomy. We now have a lot more bridges with the Steward Observatory. There’s a group there that works on planet formation and collaborates very closely with LPL. That old separation is being healed over.

Nicholas Schneider

It’s a joy to see each of these worlds turn into a place that you can get really familiar with, intimate with. But the nature of science is changing for each of those worlds; the obligation of how much you have to explain is correspondingly higher. I do see us turning more and more worlds from complete unknowns into well-categorized places, but the fact that we’ve found planets around other stars means that we’ve got a good set of fuzzy points of light that we have yet to explain. I find extra-solar planets a true growth field for planetary science.

Peter Smith

The more you learn about life on the Earth and the incredible things it’s done to adapt to strange environments—for instance, even here in Tucson, look at the Palo Verde trees. If you take a seed off a Palo Verde tree and put it in some nutrients and add water, it will not grow. Why not? Because its seed coating is so tough that water can’t penetrate. The only way a Palo Verde tree can sprout is if the seed, which has landed on the ground, runs along a stream and wears off the outer part of the seed coating. Then it will sprout. So it only sprouts when it’s wet. How does a tree know how to do that? That is really clever. And that’s just one out of a billion example of how life adapts.

Life came almost instantly on the Earth after it cooled. Mars would have cooled first, and water would’ve been stable on the surface. There’s probably lots of water on Mars. Certainly we see remnants of it today. Why wouldn’t have life formed immediately there? And if it did, why can’t it adapt as ferociously as life has on the Earth to every little niche and cranny, including, as the water dried up, underground? It would’ve gone right underground with the water, wouldn’t it?

I don’t know if the ice in the northern plains of Mars is where life took hold or not, but it’s a good chance. That’s where water comes up to the surface. There’s ice all under the surface, probably all around Mars. This is the one place you can get to it. So we’re hopeful. What are the chances? I try to keep myself from getting too excited. Basically we’re throwing a dart at a map, and what are the chances that that’s the place? I am feeling lucky though.

Dante Lauretta

There’s no evidence for it, so scientifically we have to say that the jury is out. Based on my studies of the origin of life and the chemistry involved with basic processes I’d say it is very likely that biology is going on somewhere else in this universe. We haven’t figured out exactly how the origin of life started, but we’ve got a pretty good framework for how it could get going. Nothing seems like a show-stopper right now. There are some critical steps we need to work out, like how you make up a polyimide molecule, but all the basic building blocks are there and they’re very common. So I would say yes, there’s a high probability. There’s just no evidence for it, or against it.

Renu Malhotra

I’ve wavered with this, being pessimistic and optimistic. At this point I’m pessimistic, and the reason is that there are so many things that have to go just right, for an Earth-like planet as we find it today. A lot of things have to come together just right, just so: Quite narrow ranges of physical parameters and initial conditions for Earth to be comfortable for life, particularly advanced life.

But then, you know, it’s a pretty ill-defined question. How close do conditions have to be for us to say that some alien planet is an Earth-like planet? Conditions may be equally exciting and interesting on other planets, other worlds, but totally different than on ours. 

Alexander Pavlov

Astrobiology is a new direction in science, which is really on the border of biology, astronomy, planetary science, and atmospheric science. People are interested in the origin of life and specifically how life evolved together with the environment, and whether life can be present on other terrestrial planets like Mars or elsewhere in the universe.

You really have to go to the boundaries of these disciplines to answer those questions. That’s why NASA has this new initiative to essentially sponsor that new direction which we call astrobiology. My interest in the astrobiology is from the climate standpoint. I want to know what kind of environment and what kind of climate was there at the moment of the origin of life, at the early evolution of life in particular.

The main interest is to study Mars, because Mars—I won’t say it’s the only place we expect to find extraterrestrial life in the solar system, but it’s the most reachable place. There are other potential places like Titan and Europa, but they’re much further away, although they’re extremely interesting as well.

But Mars is relatively accessible and there’s a whole kind of express of missions that’s being developed. It is important to know where exactly you’d expect some kind of life, if life was there. There are all sorts of questions we can get from the atmosphere. The discovery of methane on Mars is a very strong indication of life. But is that true? Is it confirmed that this is a direct sign of biology, since methane is a biogenic gas? So there are a lot of things that atmospheric science can give you. That’s why I see myself entering into this field.

The beauty of astrobiology is that you can have an idea and you’re working with scientists in different disciplines, biologists in particular. Biologists don’t know anything about planets or the Martian atmosphere, really. But if you know how the climate works and what to expect on the Martian surface, you can give a biologist a clue on how to set up a particular experiment in order to test what particular bugs are going to live there or not.

I think there’s a very strong indication [that there could be life on Mars]. There are so many suggestions that, well, the UV radiation is a problem, lack of water is a problem, ionizing radiation, superoxidants is a problem. It is a harsh place, there’s no question of that. It’s cold there. But the more we start learning about extremes of life, we’ll be smarter where to look. Don’t go to directly the surface, go a little bit underneath. You have ice there. The water is maybe not stable at the Mars surface because of the very low pressures. But if the ice is underneath, all of a sudden we have a layer that has water in it, liquid films. Yes, it’s not as stable as an ocean, but how much do you really need for the microorganisms to survive? Not much.

When you start doing all this, then the objections that people have about life on Mars kind of fall. You find out that, yes, there are bugs here which live in the Siberian permafrost, with conditions very similar to what’s there. There are microorganisms that can take extremely high dosages of radiation. The fact that Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field, and a very thin atmosphere bombarded by cosmic rays, is really nothing strange either. So really there’s no reason why not. I think we’ll be witnesses to this kind of discovery being made.

Guy Consolmagno

Oddly enough, I think it will be a three-day wonder and then people will be worried about Britney Spears again. The fact is I don’t think it will be a radical shift in anybody’s thinking, because I think everybody expects it to happen sooner or later anyway. By the time it does happen, the reaction will be, “Well, it’s about time,” or “Didn’t they already know that?” Even if it was intelligent life. I think, also, if we do find intelligent life we’ll find out that their way of communicating, their kind of language, is so utterly alien from ours that we won’t be able to communicate. But, who knows? I still read that science fiction, and anything’s possible.

John Lewis

You look at our little eight or nine, or eight-and-a-half, planets and think that that’s a fair representation of all that planets can be—uh-uh. It’s just a small taste. There are many other possibilities. The purpose of my book Worlds Without Endwas to spell out some of those other possibilities, and to open people’s eyes as to why a few government dollars properly spent on discovering planets of other stars might tell us an enormous amount about our own Solar System, our own Earth, its relationship to the other planets, and the big questions: Are we alone in the universe? Are habitable planets possible?

There’s sort of a popular misconception that the reason the Earth is inhabited is become we have oceans and a wonderful oxygen atmosphere, but in fact the reason the oceans aren’t frozen is because we have life on Earth regulating the composition and thermal properties of the atmosphere, and the reason we have oxygen in the atmosphere is because plants grow. Earth has adapted to life.

Jay Melosh

I think astronomy continues to play a major role in planetary science. I think that will always play a role in planetary discoveries. It’s true the way you learn about the surface of Titan is not to look at it from the ground. That view is very limited, even though we have people like Caitlin Griffith who did a lot from the ground. But really the way to do exploration is to go there.

There are people in laboratory who started out as traditional astronomers. That was the origin of the lab. Kuiper was a traditional astronomer. Before there was any space program that was the only way you could study the planets. In spite of that, Kuiper started the lab knowing that there would be exploration of the Moon, and wanted to position himself to take advantage of that, which worked out very well.

But we still do a lot of ground-based observing. Right now there are extra-solar planets, although there’s a lot of desire to move that into space and do that better. Another thing that’s been an important part of the lab has been the study of near-Earth asteroids. Tom Gehrels, who’s been here since Kuiper, started years ago his SPACEWATCH® program, looking for threatening near-Earth asteroids. Right now there’s his SPACEWATCH® program and the Catalina Sky Survey, both within this lab, doing that job, as well as other agencies.

There’s still a fair amount of asteroid study that’s ground-based. I think the lab’s got a pretty good mix. If you decide you really need to study things through a telescope, telescopes are available, facilities are available. Bob Brown, before he got completely consumed by the Cassini mission, did a lot of ground-based observing in the outer solar system. So I think we have a pretty well-balanced program.

Humberto Campins

It is clear that there is much science that cannot be done from the ground. There is very important science that can only be done from the ground. It’s very complimentary. The spacecraft bring the resources that you cannot get otherwise. The budgets of spacecraft missions are considerably larger, and you can get expertise, and you can develop a laboratory facility that you wouldn’t be able to develop otherwise. That was a logical shift for the Lunar Lab, which has been very good for its reputation. I think it plays very nicely with the astronomy and telescope expertise. I’d say that this is one of the great successes of the Lunar Lab.

Robert Strom

When I first started this [research], global warming was well established. The thing that was very controversial was what’s causing it. Is it human caused, or is it a natural phenomenon that is occurring? That was debatable when I was teaching. When I retired, that was no longer debatable. It’s actually human caused, from emitting greenhouse gases, CO 2. This all started during the Industrial Revolution. We started getting out of equilibrium in about 1850 or so.

At that point I decided I was going to write a book on it. It took me five years to do it and I just finished it now. It became very clear to me that we had an enormous problem that was being ignored by politicians. It’s a problem not for me because I’m not going to live long enough, but it’s a problem for our grandchildren. They’re going to have an awful problem unless we do something about it now. It could lead to catastrophe. In fact at the extreme warming it could easily lead to the end of civilization as we know it, unless something is done now. We have to do it now. We can’t wait 30 years, until everything starts falling apart. If you wait that long it’s too late, there’s nothing we can do about it because of the inertia of the system. That’s why we have to start now. So that book [Hot House: Global Climate Change and the Human Condition] is dedicated to the grandchildren of the world. I hope that the parents and grandparents will do something about it.

When the grandchildren grow up and get to be the leaders, if we haven’t done anything about it it’s going to be too late. There’s nothing we can do about it, except some very expensive things which I call geo-engineering which scare me almost as much as global warming.

The optimistic thing is, we can do it. We have the technology. Technology got us into this mess and it can get us out. So I’m optimistic in the sense that yes, if we go ahead and start now—and they’re some encouraging signs that we may be doing this—we can conquer it. We’re still going to experience global warming, but the thing is, it’s possible to keep it below the critical level, so it isn’t the disaster. Attitudes are beginning to change, which is good.

I’m really concerned about it, because I love humanity. Gosh, you know, if you look at some of the kids, they’re brilliant. Some of the students that I deal with are great, wonderful people and extremely smart. To lose that to me would just be awful, a tragedy that I don’t even want to think about. So that’s why I wrote the book. That’s my sayonara.

Martin Tomasko

Cassini is really the last, big, flagship-class mission—there’s infrared spectrometers, there’s infrared cameras, there’s visible cameras, there’s ultraviolet spectrometers, ultraviolet cameras. Whatever part of the spectrum, there’s some physical phenomenon going on inside of the system. Even if you haven’t thought of it in advance, you’ve got everything there you could ask for to measure that phenomenon analytically and to understand it.

The trend now is no more big flagship missions; they’re too expensive. We can’t afford that. So we’re going to have now more focused missions. But if they’re all short and sweet and different, the effect is, you’re going to drive more and more of the groups that do this kind of work out of business.

There’s 300 scientists working on Cassini, and that’s wonderful. But when Cassini comes to an end that’s the last of those missions, and you’d better be interested in Mars, which cheaper to get to, and closer, and we’ve got sort of a continuing program. If you’re interested in the outer solar system, you’re in trouble.

The fact that it was an international mission meant that it could do things that no single country can do by itself. It was really the best of both worlds. It was scientifically robust, and it was financially robust. It had good reasons for continuing, and it was very sophisticated and could do good science.

The best future for space science would be if the Japanese, the Chinese, the Americans, the Europeans all threw in together and flew joint missions. The joint missions would be really good ones, and everybody would want to keep it going because they’ve got all these international collaborations going.

Dale Cruikshank

The Europeans are doing more and more. There are collaborations with the Europeans in progress and some that are of course planned for the future. There are a lot of people coming into this field. A lot of young women are coming into space science, which is changing the demographics in a favorable way. There is no shortage of really exciting programs and projects and problems to work on. I think it’s an extremely exciting future. We’ve accomplished an immense amount, but we can certainly see the directions to further deepen exploration; more exciting science without end.

Mark Sykes

Whenever we go some place new, it’s always interesting. But we’re kind of getting out of that phase of solar system exploration, where we can just go some place and see something we haven’t seen before. Now we’re getting down to, “What are we learning from this? How does this fit with the other information that we’ve got?”

It’s a really transitional period. To go to new places, it’s further away. In order to do new things like a sample return, it’s more expensive. These missions are more and more expensive to the point that they’ll eat your lunch. They’ll eat everybody’s lunch. So now we’re pushing into an era where we’re going to have to get smarter about our investigations. But there’s just so much more knowledge we have yet to gain and learn by doing that.

I see us playing a role in the future in human exploration. Can we live out there? Are there resources we can make use of that would minimize the cost or even make human activity in space self-sustaining? It’s not guaranteed to be yes, because the question hasn’t been seriously asked or investigated. But it’s a neat problem. The goal would be, if it is possible, to be the first people to establish a self-sustaining presence in space.

Where do we get water? What about near-Earth objects that come by at low velocities in the Earth-Moon system? A friend of mine calculated that at any one time there should be about a dozen of these things within the radius of the Moon. We just don’t see them. Is there a sufficient frequency of objects that would be potentially water-bearing, that could sustain our transportation needs once we’re in lower orbit?

You see what the options are, and you figure out what’s the most cost-effective way of following them. It would be an adventure, because we don’t know what the outcome is. There’s a lot of testing, a lot of experimentation, a lot of science that needs to be done. Planetary scientists would be the native guides. We’re the ones that know what’s out there and what needs to be done to read the grass and the footprints, and find the buffalo. Assuming that there’s vision at the national level, there could be a very interesting future for people in my profession.

John Lewis

My interest for several years now has been the economic pay-off of space exploration, making the resources and energy and materials of space available on Earth to solve our problems here. I’ve been spending a lot of time working on sources of energy for Earth to relieve our dependence on imported oil and fossil fuels in general. The energy resources of the solar system are effective to use, but getting to them is a real challenge. Getting that pipeline installed and opened is a real challenge. It makes the Alaska pipeline look like nothing.

Space science has to be done first, but if you draw up a list of the things that space science needs to know, and a list of, say, the things a mining engineer would need to know, the list has a huge overlap. There are many things that are on both lists. A science program that is well done, that has a few engineering tasks added on, will meet everybody’s needs, and will permit rational, informed planning of exploiting those resources.

Dante Lauretta

We’re going to continue our active exploration of the solar system, and it’s hard to predict but I have a feeling it’s going to be a much more international adventure. We’re going to see the Chinese, the Japanese, the Indians, the Europeans, and probably other nations that are just now gearing up—maybe Korea, Brazil—expanding into outer space. I think that’s a good thing, because it’s going to drive our competitive spirit, and there will be more resources put into space.

Space will become much more commercialized. You’re going to start to see real estate business setting up shop, either through tourism or advertising or bringing souvenir material back and selling it, that kind of thing. I think we’re going to see a huge explosion in the commercial development in space, and science will go along for the ride. It’ll be easier to get to space, we’ll be able get to these targets, and science will benefit enormously from that.

Charles Wood

We have to dream, and we have to be looking for something new to explore, to encourage us to invent new technologies, to encourage us to try to do new things. I don’t know that civilizations become great just by staying at home and growing corn and taking care of their families. Those are things that you have to do, but it seems to me we ought to do a lot more.

Adam Showman

Planetary science is very small field. There’s maybe about two thousand planetary scientists worldwide or so. Every school in the country has a physics department, compared to like ten planetary departments. But to me, there’s an intangible aspect of science. It’s like art. How can you say what price tag it is worth for an artist to paint the Mona Lisa? Sure, you can auction it and claim that’s what the value is, but up front you don’t know what you’re going to get. So there’s some value in just: Let’s discover what’s out there, what the universe is, what it’s like, and what our place in the universe is. I think the role that plays in society is very similar to the role that art plays, in the sense that it’s that “Gotcha!” It gives you something extra when you look at the night sky.

People often think of science as producing things, or how we make the world better: How we get better seatbelts or better whatever, better frying pans. That’s actually a misconception of what science is. Spin-offs are useful, but if they really want those things they should put it directly into research on seatbelts or frying pans or whatever. The research, the knowledge in and of itself is beautiful, and I think that’s why we do it.

Charles Wood

When I was young and when I was at the Lunar Lab in the sixties, I thought I’d probably go to the Moon. I think most of us, the younger students, thought we’d probably be doing planetary geology on the Moon or on Mars. It was a big disappointment when that didn’t happen. My dream all along has been that we would have people doing work and living on these other places. I think we know now it’s a lot harder than we used to think it might be. But I think we should still do it.

I used to teach, and I would tell people to have a longer perspective. The perspective I used was the orbital period of Halley’s comet. Halley’s comet was last visible in 1986. Mark Twain was born in 1835, and halfway through his life he said he came in with the comet and he’d probably go out with the comet, and he died when Halley’s comet came the next time. That’s 76 years. If you think in terms of 76 years as one cycle, if you think back to the 1500s, 1400s, and every time Halley’s comet came close to the Earth before that, the people on Earth were pretty much living in an agricultural environment. There were flare-ups of culture in Greece and China and places like that, but pretty much life was fairly agricultural.

When Halley’s comet appeared in the 1500s and 1600s, the scientific revolution had started, the Renaissance had started. The first scientific society was 1669 in England. As Halley’s comet came every 76 years, the next time it came for the last three or four hundred years, we’ve had lots of technological advances. For example, in 1835, we had the steam engine that was invented; we were doing trains. By the next time it came, 1910, airplanes had been invented. By the next time it came, in 1986, computers had been invented, spaceships had been invented. So if you look at how much change there was between one time Halley’s comet was near the Earth and the next time, it’s just phenomenal. It’s almost unbelievable, the technological changes that have occurred.

So I assume that the same sort of unbelievable changes are going to occur between 1986 when it last here and the next time, 2050 or whenever it is. I think the next time it appears that there will be people on Mars studying it as it goes past Mars, and they’ll be people on the Moon studying it as it goes past the Moon, and they’ll be other people flying in spaceships alongside of it as it comes into our solar system so we can study it better.

The time after that, that Halley’s comet comes, about 150 years from now, we’ll be living throughout the galaxy. The rate of technological expansion is just extraordinary. So if we don’t kill ourselves because of environmental degradation or nuclear war or something like that, humans will be throughout the galaxy. It doesn’t seem to me it’s so much of an extrapolation. You should be planning what your life is going to be in the solar system, not just what your life is going to be on Earth.

Joe Giacalone

We’re literally in the golden age of planetary science, there’s no doubt about it. I mean, going to Mars, going to Saturn, going to Jupiter, going to the Moon—the textbooks literally have to be written constantly to keep up with the new information. Planetary science is just growing like crazy.

Solar physics is an area that is expanding, and there’s a lot of emphasis on understanding how the Sun works. It’s been recognized fairly recently that the Sun itself undergoes changes. It’s got the 11-year sunspot cycle, and it becomes active and can have these huge solar storms that can affect communications and things. This is kind of a new area of research that’s come up, that’s been given the blanket term “space weather” or “living with a star”—buzz words that have come about. That’s been the big emphasis for the last five to ten years. When I came here in ’93 I don’t think “space weather,” that term, had been invented yet.

Renu Malhotra

The major exciting thing for me now in the last two or three years is inner solar system and the bombardment history of the planets. Now that we have strengthened the idea that there was indeed a cataclysmic bombardment, there are still many unanswered questions about it. What exactly was the mechanism that made the asteroids turn into projectiles at that time? It’s very exciting to be able to probe the early history of the Earth and inner planets, and one of the things that is especially interesting to me about it is that any mechanism that explains the late heavy bombardment is going to have something to do with what was going on in the outer solar system too.

As it turns out, to launch the asteroids out of the asteroid belt and into the inner solar system, you likely have to use the gravity of the big planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. That means that what was going on in the outer solar system had a profound effect on what happened in the inner solar system, including the Earth.

Just being able to connect such diverse areas—to be able to connect what is essentially planetary geology with orbital dynamics, and the terrestrial planets with the outer giant planets’ history—I think this lab is probably one of the very few places in the world where something like that could happen, because of our diverse range of researchers.

Dante Lauretta

There are a lot of meteorite dealers that show up at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. I started going to that, and I met Marvin Killgore, who was at the time a meteorite dealer. He’s one of the rare meteorite dealers that was very interested in meteorite science and was preserving these at his expense—basically not selling all his best stuff, so he could keep it and do research on it and provide it to scientists for research.

We realized that the commercial meteorite world was in a crazy state right now, with millions of dollars being traded in meteorites, and meteorites being harvested at very rapid time-scales compared to the rate at which they fall on Earth. This was kind of a bonanza, similar to a Gold Rush period in the 1800s, and it was going to die out like the Gold Rush did too. All the good meteorites were going to be recovered, and if we didn’t do something to preserve them, there’d be nothing left for future generations to work on.

We decided to try to create this Southwest Meteorite Center, and we hired Marvin at the University of Arizona. He still works for us. We’ve been going for about a year now, with pretty good success. We have some potentially very large donors interested in contributing, which is really what we need in order make this thing a long-lasting success. It’s kind of a save the world crusade that we’re on: Save the meteorites.

Jonathan Lunine

I am involved in two missions that are under development. One is the James Webb Space Telescope, which is the successor to Hubble. I also recently got selected as part of a team to build a mission to make measurements of Jupiter, called Juno, which will really focus on the structure and composition of Jupiter. That should launch in 2011. I’m involved in studies of future missions to Titan, particularly balloon missions.

The field is exciting; the questions have become sharper and deeper. There are a lot of mysteries in the solar system and beyond to understand. I hope I live long enough and the program prospers enough both to find planets like the Earth around other stars and to get this darn balloon to Titan, so we can get a camera all over the surface at close range and really see what’s going on. If those two things can happen, I’ll be tickled pink. If they don’t, it still has been a great ride.

Alfred McEwen

I’d really like to get back to Io. Io was my first love. It’s a tough sell because there are very dim prospects for finding life as we know it on Io. It’s dry, it’s sulfurous—hell, basically. It’s not a nice, warm, cozy place for life as we know it. But it’s spectacular with all the active volcanism. The time hasn’t been right to send a dedicated mission to Io, but maybe that time will come.

Don McCarthy

You would’ve thought that we’d learn everything about the planets by now. But it keeps getting more and more surprising. I am amazed by the activity on Saturn’s moons, the geysers from Enceladus. To be honest, I’m convinced it has to happen on Pluto now. Pluto’s atmosphere has waves in it. Something has to cause the waves. There has to be activity of some kind on the surface of Pluto. It’s too small a place to see it directly, so you’ve got to probably wait until 2015 when the spacecraft goes by. But they should see geysers or some sort of activity on Pluto.

The solar system just keeps surprising, whether it’s individual objects or how they interact with each other. To me that’s one of the most beautiful parts of it, to see the orbital relationships. The solar system has a lot to tell us yet, about individual objects and their general patterns. Then to relate that to other solar systems that are being discovered is pretty amazing.

I think NASA’s about to have another press release that says there’s another planetary system somewhat like ours that’s being discovered. Those are rare. There are very few systems that are like our own. It’s kind of funny because people argue that planets formed from a common process that occurs naturally by the formation of stars. That does seem to be true, but we can’t reproduce the exact details of our own solar system. All these planets are different; where they are, how they’re situated. The Earth may actually still yet be fairly unique.

That could be wrong, because we don’t have the technology to see Earth-like planets yet. But where we are in our orbit, how long we’ve survived, and with the Moon that we have, it seems at the moment to still be very special and unusual.

Martin Tomasko

We proposed for DISR, the Descent Imager Spectral Radiometer, for this Titan entry probe mission. The deal was, Cassini and Huygens were a joint U.S.-European mission. The Americans were going to be primarily responsible for the orbiter—they had two-thirds of the experiments on the orbiter, and two-thirds of the vote on how the orbiter payload was going to be distributed. The probe was going to be mostly the responsibility of the European Space Agency. They got two-thirds of the instruments and two-thirds of the votes deciding the payload.

I had an instrument on the probe, so I knew that was going to have a heavily European flavor, and I thought it was important for us to get some European co-investigators and get a strong European participation. Peter Smith, who was here working with me on things in those days, and I went to Europe. I remember tramping around France and Germany visiting various places and trying to draw out interest in being a collaborator on this experiment that we had in mind for this European entry probe.

Peter Smith

This was fun because we were Americans on a European mission. But we were worried that without European partners, our proposal wouldn’t be attractive to the European judges. We didn’t know any Europeans. Back in the eighties, there weren’t very many Europeans in planetary science; they were mostly in astronomy. That’s totally changed today.

We went to the Paris Observatory one fine day, up on a hill—it looks like an old palace. There’s a big dome that astronomers used back in the seventeenth century. It’s really an interesting place. There’s a small building back in the trees and a big lake next to it with fish jumping.  Totally different from American science; this was dripping with tradition and charm.

We met Michel Combes and presented our proposal to him. We said, “You guys can help us build the instrument, and in exchange you can participate in the full science of the mission. We think you should build an infrared spectrometer.”

As soon as we made that proposal, they all broke into rapid French. Marty and I couldn’t understand a word. It was too fast. Everybody talking at once—this is the French way. It turned out, for the lab to take on our project, everybody had to agree. If one person didn’t agree, they wouldn’t do it. So several scientists over there had to choose our project over the other possibilities they had. That’s why they’re taking this quite seriously.

Eventually they said, yeah, they thought this could be a good project, and they’d probably be interested in helping us write a proposal. So we said, “Great. We’ll count you in.”

Then we flew up to Germany. We drove way away from all the big cities. At that time Germany was East and West.  Within about two miles of the Wall, in the middle of a cow pasture, there was a brand-new, modern building. That was the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy, out in the middle of nowhere.

We met this fellow that we’d heard studied comets, which at least was in the solar system. His name was Wing Ip. His response to our project: “I have no interest whatsoever.”

Oh, my gosh. What do we do now? “Is there anybody else here?"

“Well, there’s one guy who sent a camera to Halley’s comet in ’86. Try him. His name is Uwe Keller.”

So we went out to see Uwe Keller. Now, Uwe Keller, unlike Michel Combes, is bigger than I am, bald-headed, and very aggressive. He says, “Yes, we’ll do it. We’ll provide the detectors.”

“Great.” We have no knowledge of Uwe Keller, but off we went.

Now we had two Europeans. We wrote the proposal, and then I became the project manager after we won. We had Lockheed-Martin building it. I’d never managed a hundred thousand dollar project much less a twenty million dollar contract, with Marty’s help fortunately. We had a lot of learning to do as we built this instrument.

Lyn Doose

The big break came when we won the Descent Imager Spectral Radiometer experiment, which was the camera on board the Huygens probe. It was a spectrometer and a specialized camera to look at the Sun to determine the aerosol properties, and covered visible, infrared, violet and some of the ultraviolet.

Cassini was launched in ’97. I was primarily responsible for the software. It was really interesting software; it was adaptive in nature, so that if something happened in Titan’s atmosphere, the instrument would respond to it. At the same time, I wasn’t just an instrumentalist. We published papers along the way; we became experts in radiative transfer. We became one of the first groups that could really interpret photometric observations, and spectrometric observations of planets with thick atmospheres. We published a number of papers on Jupiter and Saturn based on the Pioneer results, and also on Venus, with the Pioneer-Venus results.

So we were well situated to analyze the Cassini-Huygens data when it came back, and it finally did in 2005. Things didn’t quite go the way we expected. The probe spun backwards from the way it was supposed to go. The probe oscillated a little more than we expected it to, and it went outside the tolerances. It made the data much harder to interpret than it would’ve been otherwise. But we’ve done it and actually we’re about to publish what we think is the definitive paper on Titan’s aerosols.

The highest moment is when I got up on January 14, 2005, and turned on the TV and already there were pictures from our instrument, sitting on the surface of Titan, showing these pebbles and this kind of dry riverbed. Obviously we had made it. We had landed on Titan. It was just unbelievable.

Jonathan Lunine

Cassini, of course, is a very large planetary mission. The goal is to explore Saturn and its rings, its moons—especially Titan, a large moon with an atmosphere—and the magnetic environment of Saturn. The mission came about in part because NASA was planning a mission to orbit Jupiter after the Voyager missions, and it was natural since both Voyager flyby spacecraft went on past Saturn that they would plan the same thing. The twist, though, was that the Voyager flyby of Titan turned out to be so interesting, and Titan turned out to be such an interesting place, that not only was the U.S. interested but Europe became interested.

It was a very straightforward collaboration, to get the United States to build a Saturn orbiter, and the Europeans to build a Titan entry probe that would be carried to Titan by the Saturn orbiter. The entry probe would go through Titan’s atmosphere and make measurements. That was Cassini-Huygens. By the mid-1980s, the general architecture of this mission was well-developed. There was a lot of fine-tuning of the political process so that both the European Space Agency and NASA would get going at the same time. That’s tough, because if NASA wasn’t interested, ESA couldn’t be interested, and if ESA wasn’t interested, NASA wasn’t so interested, so they had to move together.

The metaphor that vividly I remember was a balloon launching from the U of A mall, where there were like 15 or 20 manned balloons, and they were all launched. I think they don’t do that anymore at the U of A, probably for insurance purposes. You know, when a balloon takes off, it takes off. But there were these two balloons that they decided to tether together and have them take off at the same time, which was quite a stunt. Of course you can’t have one balloon get too much above the other balloon, because they’re tied together. So one balloon has to go up, then the other, and these go up in a stair-step fashion and it takes a lot longer to get to altitude before they finally cut the rope from each other and let each other go.

It was that kind of really delicate process that was required to get Cassini going in 1989-1990. A lot of us here at LPL applied for different roles; I applied for the role of Interdisciplinary Scientist, which was not someone who would build instruments, because I was mostly a theorist, but somebody who would have responsibility for a science area. I proposed for Titan’s surface, and would use instruments to understand in a holistic way what Titan’s surface was like, which was one of the big mysteries left over from Voyager.

That was my first really big proposal. It got me involved officially in Cassini. Prior to that, the mission was being studied, and ESA and NASA could involve scientists on an informal basis in the studies, but once the mission becomes official, scientists have to actually compete to get on the mission. Some well-known experts on Titan who I know didn’t get on that mission, and my career would have been totally different if I had not gotten selected.

But I did get selected, and I was later selected as well for the radar team, and I was also selected as part of the team for one of the probe instruments. So three different responsibilities. It involves a lot of travel, a lot of learning about mission planning. Just by going through that bottleneck, that narrowest point in the hourglass of getting selected for Cassini, it opened up a whole lot of things.

The launch was in ’97. It arrived at Saturn in 2004, in July, and that was just about 21 years after my first contact with the scientists planning Cassini. Now we’ve got just floods of data. The probe worked as it was supposed to. It was a real risky part of the mission but it worked. We’re getting lots of radar data; I don’t have time to work on all the data I’d like to. We’ve got several other people at LPL with major instrument responsibilities. In spite of all the attention that’s given to Mars, I’d often like to think that Cassini was an important, formative experience for this laboratory.

For the probe mission, as an Interdisciplinary Scientist, I could float around as instruments got their data back from the probe mission. I made sure I was in the porta-cabin where the imaging data came back. That was probably the most emotionally intense of those experiences, because the imaging data were received on the ground. There was a two hour period while those data packets were extracted from other kinds of data that came back from the probe in the same stream and then sent to the porta-cabin where Marty Tomasko’s camera team was located.

Once the data was on their computer, their software converted these to images, and the images were first displayed as a set of 300 thumbnails. That was the way Bashar Rizk, who was the guy in front of the computer consul, was displaying them—one second per image. So for about five minutes you looked at these 300 images, not in descent order. They were in random order, so you could see flashes of things on these thumbnails that looked like something you couldn’t recognize and then a river channel would pop up, and then something you couldn’t recognize and then a fracture would pop up. It was such a bizarre way to see these. Here were the first close-up images of Titan and the last close-up images that we’ll probably see for 20 years, all in that five minute period. That was very intense; there was a lot of screaming in that room and I was one of the people screaming.

Alfred McEwen

My major project right now is called HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter [MRO]. I’m the Principal Investigator of that. LPL is a good place to be a Principal Investigator of instruments, and whole missions, in fact, these days.

I have co-investigators at a dozen different institutions—more than that, now—scattered around the country and in Switzerland, for one. There are various elements to the operation and the software development, some of which is being done at other institutions. I have to coordinate all that, although my formula for being a successful PI is to hire good people and make yourself completely dispensable in all areas, if possible.

I had a lot of experience with the active parts of missions, but none at all with the part of building instruments. There was a fellow at Ball Aerospace named Alan Delamere, who I got to know on a proposal for a global orbiter. He builds instruments and particularly comes up with concepts for instruments.

He needed a PI, and he called me up and asked me if I wanted to do it. It was a surprise to me. I went away and thought about it for a while, but I finally decided if I didn’t do it I’d be kicking myself forever, so I had to do it.

MRO is an orbiter, in a polar orbit. It goes around Mars about thirteen times a day. This is a big spacecraft. The two previous—three previous, including the Europeans’—successful Mars orbiters have been much smaller spacecraft. This one is quite a bit bigger and more capable, in order to carry big instruments like HiRISE, which is 65 kilograms.

It also has a very large high-gain antennae, three meters in diameter, which means we can send back lots of data, which is essential for missions like HiRISE. It’s got a big solar array, so there’s lots of power. There are other instruments, there’s lots of data rate, so it’s a very capable instrument. Months ago, MRO had already returned more Mars data than all the previous Mars missions combined.

It’s a huge amount of data, and it’s very high-quality data for science. It doesn’t get the attention from the news people as the landers and rovers, because people relate to those. But for the science community, this is really the scientist’s mission.

To me, that most exciting moment was getting our very first images in-flight—pictures of the Moon and of some stars. They’re not that exciting images—we were a long ways away from the Moon—but I knew what it meant. I knew that it meant our camera was working. 

Robert Strom

We launched our second mission to Mercury, an orbiter, in 2004. So about a 31-year hiatus [since Mariner 10].  I never thought that would happen. I’m involved with the MESSENGER mission which is on its way.  I’m just hoping I live long enough to see it go into orbit. We’ve only seen 45% of the surface, so 55% is unknown territory. We’re going to go back and image that and see what’s there, so there’s a lot to find out about Mercury.  In fact, it’s the least known planet in the solar system. I want to see the rest of Mercury before I die. I do want to see that, because I’ve been waiting for over 30 years to see the other part of it.

Editor’s Note: MESSENGER completed its first flyby of Mercury on January 14, 2008. It will orbit the planet in 2011. Dr. Robert Strom recalled his first glimpse of Mercury’s far side on Arizona Illustrated on March 12, 2008: “I got tears in my eyes. That first look—after waiting so long—it was very, very emotional. This is a whole new planet. We have to look at the whole thing again.” 

William Boynton

The mission I’m associated with mostly now, the Mars Odyssey mission, was one where we finally got to send the gamma ray spectrometer back to Mars that didn’t make it because the first one [Mars Observer] blew up. In this case, they actually said that if I thought I could build a better instrument than Martin-Marietta—which was now called Lockheed-Martin—then I could go ahead and build my own design. In fact we came up with what turned out to be a much better design, and we built it ourselves, right here across the hall in this lab in Tucson.

It was a pretty elaborate project but we got a darn good instrument out of it, and made some interesting discoveries. We discovered vast quantities of ice buried just beneath the surface that nobody knew was there. Some people suspected there might be a small amount of ice just filling the pore space between the sand grains, but what we found was that it was mostly ice with just a little bit of dirt mixed in with it, rather than the other way around. That really changed people’s thinking about Mars.

We also found some interesting things going on with the atmosphere. One of the people working with me, Ann Sprague, was looking at the argon data. Argon is a rare gas that’s in the atmosphere but it doesn’t condense out at low temperatures, whereas the carbon dioxide that’s in the atmosphere does condense out at low temperatures, and that’s what makes the seasonal frost that happens in the wintertime there.

What she found is that the argon was being enriched over the poles in the wintertime, because a significant fraction of the atmosphere would move toward the winter pole, and the CO2 would condense out, and more atmosphere would come to replace it, and every time more atmosphere comes to replace it, it brings with it more argon. But the argon doesn’t condense out so we were just building up a concentration of that argon.

I looked into the data to see that, indeed, it looked like that was happening, but Ann, who’s got more background in studying atmospheres, looked at the data and she’s been processing it and found out that it’s really telling us interesting things about the motion of the atmosphere on Mars.

Originally when the instrument was proposed, it was thought it was going to be mostly a geochemical instrument mapping the elements over most of the planet. But it turned out I think probably the discovery of the ice and looking at what goes on with the argon in the atmosphere—it’s been surprising that the instruments turned out to be probably as valuable or maybe even more so in ways that we didn’t even contemplate or proposed. I think the fact that we discovered ice in the polar regions probably helped NASA decide that we really need to go with the Phoenix mission, which is going to go to this polar area.

William Boynton

I was involved in a mission called Mars Polar Lander that was supposed to land in 1999 in the south polar region of Mars. I built an instrument for that very similar to the TEGA instrument that we’re building for Phoenix—in fact it had the same name. At the time that mission was proposed, nobody knew about this ice beneath the surface, but by the time we got around to proposing for the Phoenix mission, [Mars Odyssey] had discovered this ice not much before that. It really got an awful lot of interest both from the public and from the scientific community.

I think that helped NASA make that selection, because we were proposing to fly the exact same kind of lander that crashed in 1999. NASA was clearly reluctant to fly that same lander again. But enough people studied the 1999 event that they were pretty sure they’d figured out what went wrong, and they solved that problem, and we made the case that probably no spacecraft has been looked at in more detail than this one we’re proposing because of all of the studies on why it crashed and so on and so forth. In the end NASA decided to go with the Phoenix mission. A lot of people have suggested that the discovery of the ice probably really helped NASA make that decision.

Peter Smith

In 2002, two things happened. One, we were thrashing around trying to figure out if we could use the ’01 spacecraft which had been sitting in a box at Lockheed-Martin, and if so, what could we use it for. What instruments should we include, and what would its scientific goals be? We were looking for a low-cost solution to the Scout dilemma of providing new, exciting science within a cost cap.

The Phoenix mission is shaped like a tabletop with an arm, with some instruments and a weather station—that’s it. You can’t put wheels on it, and you can’t do other daring things, because you want to keep the cost low.

At just the time we were thinking about how use the ’01 spacecraft, Boynton announced that there was ice under the soil of the polar regions. Big coincidence. To me, that was it. NASA’s theme is follow the water, and no spacecraft had ever gotten anywhere close to water. Where they had landed, there hadn’t been water for three billion years.

I thought, here’s a chance: You could just land anywhere in the polar region, and ice is under you. You don’t need wheels. Our mission is vertical. Phoenix is looking at what’s happening today. Ice is not ancient. We want to look at modern structures and modern processes. Is there any chance the ice did melt, and if so, was there biology? All of a sudden, it clicked. I’ve been awfully lucky.  Things have clicked several times for me. You’re lucky enough to have that happen once or twice in your life.

We really worked hard to win that proposal. Of course we did win, because here we are in the midst of the mission. When we wrote the proposal, one thing I insisted on against tremendous resistance was doing the operations here. That’s why we got this building [the Phoenix Science Operations Center]. I convinced the University to agree to provide us space. My feeling was the science expertise is at the universities. The students are here. We’ve got access to all kinds of resources that scientists need.

Michael Drake

I think winning the Phoenix project was perhaps the biggest excitement, in part because it’s the first time a major space mission has been controlled by a University once it’s on the surface of the planet. It clearly has had a very large impact, from a public perception point of view, on the University of Arizona—in fact the University is marketing itself world-wide around the Mars Phoenix mission, simply because we’re going to have an international press pull here. It’s a great opportunity.