A Mission of Cooperation

When the Soviet Union launches two rockets toward Mars this summer, in the first salvo of what could become the most ambitious study of another planet ever undertaken, it will have special meaning for a handful of American scientists who have kept alive the practice of international cooperation in space even after their own government had backed away.

Five American scientists, including Fred Scarf of TRW and Bruce Murray of Caltech, have been working with the Soviets for some time now, lending their expertise as official investigators on the Soviet mission to Mars. While they have been acting in an ad hoc capacity, they will soon enjoy the full backing of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under an international agreement signed last April by Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze and Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

Five other U.S. scientists are to be picked for the team. In exchange, 10 Soviet scientists will be invited to take part in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars Observer mission, now slated for launch in 1992.

The official backing by NASA legitimizes a process that has been going on for several years in which American scientists, working with their counterparts in the Soviet Union, have struggled to bring about a new era of international cooperation in space exploration, bridging a period when NASA was not allowed to enter into agreements with the Soviets.

Kept Alive by Scientists

The individual scientists “kept it alive,” according to Arden L. Albee, dean of the graduate school at Caltech and project scientist for the Mars Observer mission. Albee was in Moscow last December, working out the details that will finally win the full backing of the U.S. government for Americans who are already playing key roles in the Soviet Mars mission.

“Those five will be officially recognized as NASA-sponsored scientists, and we will chose five more for a total of 10,” Albee said.

The agreement is more than a formality. It means American scientists will no longer have to work their way through the back alleys to reach the highway of international cooperation.

The sometimes difficult path that led eventually to the formal agreement tells much about the differences between the two systems, and the people who worked out the pact. According to Americans involved in the process, much of the credit should go to a Soviet scientist, Roald Sagdeev, head of the Space Research Institute in Moscow and a close ally of Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Sagdeev has long championed international cooperation, partly for pragmatic reasons. The success of the Soviet space program has earned his country considerable prestige in the international arena, and the expensive scientific components that are so essential to successful space exploration could further strain the Soviet Union’s cash flow problems and possibly jeopardize some scientific endeavors.

Caltech’s Murray, a former director of JPL and one of this nation’s leading planetary scientists, said he met Sagdeev for the first time when they were both attending a scientific meeting in Europe in 1986. Murray said he was surprised when Sagdeev casually asked if he would like to take part in the Mars mission.

“He had a typewriter in Paris and he just typed up a letter” designating Murray as an “interdisciplinary scientist” on the Mars project, Murray said. A letter from Sagdeev is like manna from heaven for an American scientist in that it opens many doors that would otherwise be buried beneath Soviet bureaucracy, making it possible, for example, to get a visa and travel extensively in the Soviet Union.

“He (Sagdeev) just reaches out with his sword and knights you,” Murray said.

The invitation from Sagdeev came at a time when “NASA wasn’t speaking to Russia at all,” he added.

That was a difficult period for American space scientists who had watched their own programs grind to a halt with the explosion of the Challenger.

But it did not stop men like TRW’s Scarf, who has worked with Soviet scientists for more than a decade. Scarf is one of America’s leading experts in the arcane field of space plasma physics--the effect of such things as the solar wind on gas and dust particles that make up the interplanetary medium.

Venus Probe Investigator

Scarf was one of the principal investigators on NASA’s Pioneer Venus probe in 1978, studying the effect of the solar wind on the atmosphere of Venus. The Soviets also had a mission to Venus, and since planetary probes can only be launched during limited “windows,” the American scientists soon found that their spacecraft had company.

“A week after we arrived, the Russians got there” with their own robotic spacecraft, Scarf said.

“We were making measurements and they were flying by,” he added. “There was tremendous interest on both sides.”

Scarf had a plasma wave experiment aboard Pioneer, and the Soviet probe was similarly equipped.

“They detected lightning on Venus, and two weeks later we saw the same thing,” he said.

Subsequently, Scarf started corresponding with a Soviet scientist, Leonid Ksanfomaliti, who proposed that “we do a paper together.”

So two scientists who had never met each other began pooling their data, “and we learned a lot more” than they would have if they had gone their separate ways, Scarf said.

They didn’t meet until several years later when Scarf went to Moscow. “It was very emotional to meet this guy,” he recalled.

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That led to a series of meetings with Soviet scientists and a relationship that reached a curious turning point in 1984.

Scarf is a principal investigator on the U.S. Voyager mission. Voyager has already led to major discoveries at three outer planets and it will arrive at Neptune next year. Scarf knew NASA had a spare instrument that had been built for Voyager, and in a meeting in Austria he suggested to Sagdeev that perhaps it could be made available for the Soviet Mars mission.

“Sagdeev approved it on the spot,” Scarf said.

However, a cooperative agreement between the two countries had expired, and efforts to extend the program had mired in unrelated disputes between the two superpowers. There was also concern over giving a piece of hardware to the Soviets, although the instrument’s design was by then more than a decade old.

“The schedule began to get really tight,” Scarf said. Finally, “I sent a telegram off (to Sagdeev) and said it wasn’t going to be possible. I suggested he turn to ESA (the European Space Agency).”

The Europeans quickly agreed to supply four instruments.

In turn, they asked Scarf to serve as a co-investigator.

Thus an American scientist was asked to help run a European experiment aboard a Soviet rocket at a time when his country was not even talking to the Soviets about joint space programs.

Had Ties to UCLA

Scarf began working part-time at UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics so he could apply for a NASA grant for academic research--an avenue he could not have followed as a scientist from industry because of federal regulations governing grants.

NASA funded the travel necessary for him to participate as a member of the academic community.

Scarf recently completed his fifth trip to Moscow.

“It’s a great adventure to be part of this thing,” he said.

In addition to Scarf and Murray, American scientists who have accepted Soviet invitations to participate are Bradford Smith of the University of Arizona, James W. Head of the Geological Sciences department at Brown University, and Norman Ness, formerly of the Goddard Space Flight Center and now with the University of Delaware. The five other Americans who will be picked by NASA to join them have not been named.

The official sanctioning by NASA removes what Caltech’s Albee described as an “awkward” situation for the five who were “bridging the gap.”

“They couldn’t get funded for anything other than just visiting and talking,” he added. Now, they are eligible for research grants that should make it possible for them to make full use of the data they will acquire.

“We had an expectation that it would blossom into something more formal,” Murray said.

Timing Critical

For planetary scientists, the timing could not have been more critical.

The two rockets that the Soviets expect to launch in July will be the first of a planned series of missions to Mars. The ultimate goal is to put an automated rover on the planet that will collect samples from wide areas and then return them to a spacecraft that will bring them back to Earth around the turn of the century.

The immediate goal is less ambitious, but still very impressive, according to the Americans who are participating.

The July project is generally referred to as the “Phobos Mission” because the main target will be one of Mars’ small moons, Phobos.

The first rocket will arrive at Phobos next January. In a daring maneuver, it will sweep to within about 150 feet of Phobos and send two probes to the surface. One will be a “hopper” that will literally hop around and examine the surface.

Meanwhile, the orbiting craft will use a laser beam to vaporize the soil, scattering ionized particles that will be collected and analyzed by the spacecraft.

“It is a very impressive mission,” Scarf said.

Because American scientists will be on the scene in Moscow, the data generated by the mission will be made available to scientists throughout this country.

Reciprocity in 1992

The chance to reciprocate will come in 1992 under the agreement worked out by Albee.

Soviet scientists, armed with what they will have learned from the Phobos mission, will join the American team at JPL as full partners in the Mars Observer program, which will study the red planet’s atmosphere.

And there is a chance that the Mars Observer will provide an additional service for the Soviets in 1994.

The next mission planned by the Soviets includes releasing balloons during a Mars fly-by. The balloons would float around the planet’s atmosphere, collecting data.

“The nature of the orbit required to release the balloons does not leave them in a good orbit for radio relay,” Albee said. “The Mars Observer would be in a better position to enhance their return” by relaying messages from the Soviet spacecraft back to Earth.

If that is possible, an American craft might be able to bridge a hardware gap, just as five American scientists once bridged a bureaucratic gap.