Within NASA, scientists feared they had lost their chance to return to Mars. Shortly after Mars Observer disappeared, Dan Goldin journeyed to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to rally the troops. Although Goddard is only a short commute from NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., the head of NASA is not in the habit of dropping in, so his presence signaled a major announcement. For many scientists, it was their first close-up look at the man whom George Bush had appointed in 1992 to run the agency. At Goddard, he reminded the scientists that NASA attempts to do difficult things, risky things, and the possibility of losing a spacecraft was an ever-present hazard, but the risk didn’t mean the mission wasn’t worth doing. They would continue to explore Mars. Conditioned to regard managers as antagonists, the scientists were impressed.
Under Goldin’s leadership, the loss of Mars Observer provoked NASA to hone and intensify its Martian agenda. The agency decided to launch a pair of missions to the Red Planet approximately every two years, whenever the orbits of the two planets brought them into a favorable alignment, beginning in 1998. Each mission would have a distinct identity and purpose, but, taken as a whole, they would culminate in sending humans to the Red Planet. What sounded like a rather vague statement of intent acquired sudden conviction in August 1996, with the announcement of possible fossilized life in ALH 84001. Goldin suddenly began pressing JPL and the scientists to make specific plans to bring a sample of Martian soil back to Earth to continue the search for life. Donna Shirley and the other managers said they couldn’t do that much on their subsistence budget.
Returning a sample of Mars to Earth is a complex, costly, and hazardous undertaking. You send two spacecraft – a lander and orbiter – to Mars. The lander scoops up enough soil to fill a can of Coke, and then it must launch itself from the surface of the Red Planet and guide itself to a rendezvous with the orbiter. NASA has never done that before – launched a spacecraft from a distant planet. If that part of the mission succeeded, the orbiter would bring the sample to Earth, where new hazards would arise – for instance, the sample might be dangerous or even lethal to terrestrial life. The safe handling, testing, and decontamination of the sample would amount to a large project in itself. NASA confronted a similar problem with samples of the moon in the sixties, and set up an elaborate, isolated lunar laboratory at the Johnson Space Center, where moon rocks were analyzed with great care by technicians wearing long rubber sleeves and working behind glass until the rocks were found to be harmless. There is much greater concern about possible harmful effects of Martian soil because of the greater likelihood of life on Mars. The quarantine will likely be extreme and long-lasting. When you talk about a sample return, you’re talking about spending billions of dollars and placing the lives of everyone on the planet in some degree of jeopardy. You’re talking about a mission almost as complicated as a human mission to Mars.
NASA expanded its string of Mars missions into a more formal, and better-funded, program of exploration. “The Human Exploration people at the Johnson Space Center came along and said, ‘Okay, we want to fly humans to Mars.’ Dan Goldin set 2018 as a date, but the Johnson Space Center said, ‘Well, we think it should be earlier than that. We’d like to do it by 2011,’” Donna Shirley said. “To decide whether to send humans to Mars by 2011, you need to make a decision by about 2005 that you are going to invest in doing that, and you need to have the information necessary to make the decision. The only way to get the answers by 2005 is to fly by 2001.” Just when it looked as though Mars might get a lot more money, Congress realized that the International Space Station was generating huge cost overruns, and it sucked up money that might have gone to human Mars exploration.
Goldin didn’t give up on the idea of sending people to Mars. He directed scientists at NASA to make plans for an eventual human mission. Although the project was unfunded and unofficial, it was real enough, and the scientists and engineers went at it with the zeal of true believers. Their enterprise went under vague names, such as Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO) and Human Exploration and Development of Space (HEDS), names that meant different things to different people, and wouldn’t upset Congress. But to those within NASA, the names meant one thing: sending people to Mars. So a lot was riding on the success of the little Pathfinder mission; the implications went far beyond the success or failure of its experiments. It was, potentially, the first step in the most ambitious exploration in history, but few outside of NASA realized that.
The loss of Mars Observer meant Pathfinder’s site selection team was forced to rely on twenty-year-old Viking data. Since Pathfinder was designed to plummet to the Martian surface, it would not be able pick and choose a landing site as Viking had. The site would have to be selected in advance, and it had better be good. A lot of the responsibility for selecting a site fell to Matt Golombek, a young geologist. If you can recall the kid in the seventh grade who always seemed a couple of steps ahead of the teacher, let alone the class, and who was wiry and agile and had a way of laughing off anything that bothered him, you have a sense of Matt Golombek. He came to the agency from Rutgers and the University of Massachusetts as one of the new generation of planetary geologists that included Maria Zuber and Jim Garvin. “You only do this because you love it. It’s not like you’re going to get rich or famous. You’re especially not going to get rich,” he says. Although he reports to work at JPL, which is a government facility, he is, like everyone else there, technically employed by Caltech. It’s a peculiar arrangement, which he facetiously likens to a “money-laundering scheme to lower the number of civil servants.” Matt maintains a certain skepticism concerning government work. “You know what they say about civil servants, don’t you? They’re like rusty old guns. They don’t work, and you can’t fire them.”
Despite his youth, Matt brought with him long experience in Mars exploration. “I was the pre-Project Scientist on all the Mars missions before Pathfinder for ten years, and there was a whole string of them. I was brought in originally with something called the Mars Rover Sample Return, which was actually a politically motivated study to work with the Russians, which didn’t go anywhere.” This was followed by assignments on other luckless missions, including Mars Observer. “I think one of the reasons they assigned me to Pathfinder as the Project Scientist was that I was young. Part of their thinking was, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter who we appoint. It’s not going to mean anything.’ I wasn’t sure I even wanted the job, because the mission was an entry, descent, and landing demonstration that would have little or no science of benefit to anyone. What the hell do you need a Project Scientist for? There’s no science, right? I mean, Pathfinder’s main goal was to land safely, period.”
To achieve even that limited goal, he spent two years mastering every detail of the choices before making his recommendation. The pixels in the old Viking images concealed many potential hazards. “Imagine if you looked at an image to select a potential landing site, and the smallest you see is the size of a football stadium, and you are worried about things that are the size of a meter,” Matt said. “All we had was very coarse, low resolution remote sensing information about Mars, yet we had to guesstimate that the place we would come to rest would be safe, and that the rover could travel out on it. That’s a very difficult job. It was a two-and-a-half year process. We did an exhaustive study of the options, of cost, and of the kind of science you could get at different places.” He had to factor many subtle requirements into his choice. He looked for a spot where Pathfinder’s solar cells would supply power, and where the antennae could communicate with Earth as often as possible. He wanted an area free of mesas, which would confuse Pathfinder’s navigational system. Those and other constraints eliminated ninety percent of the surface of the planet. Geological factors eliminated a number of other tempting targets; if an area was too dusty, too cavernous, or too rocky, it was eliminated from consideration.
There was something else on his mind. What was the point in going all the way to Mars only to land in a dried-up, featureless lake bed and watch