For Juno mission leader, zeal pays off

SAN ANTONIO - Like millions of "Star Trek" fans, Scott Bolton had a lingering dream - albeit one rooted in idle fantasy - of somehow, some way, boldly going where no one had gone before. He even admits that may have been in the back of his mind when he wandered by a recruiting desk for a little-known government lab whose initials, JPL, offered no real indication of what it was all about.

Jet Propulsion Lab? Well, Bolton did not have much interest in jets or how they were propelled. But a little research revealed its actual job was space exploration. That piqued his interest in a big way. The problem was that the lab supposedly would talk only to graduate students, and he didn't even have his bachelor's degree yet.

Oh well. It wouldn't hurt to swing by and pick up some information, which explains why Bolton showed up in the daily male undergrad uniform of tattered jeans and T-shirt. The recruiter thought he was nuts.

"How can you interview for a job dressed like that?" he asked, unaware that JPL had limited its interviews to grad students only. "Go home and change."

More than three decades later, the 58-year-old scientist leading one of NASA's boldest-ever science missions smiles at the recollection of that young University of Michigan student whose knowledge of space rested in part on Capt. Kirk's irrepressible enthusiasm. Bolton may not have gone any farther from Earth than an airplane can take him, yet today he's sitting in the catbird seat, poised to unlock the mysteries of the biggest planet in our solar system.

"I never envisioned doing anything this great," he said. "It's fair to say I never set a goal this high."

The next year or so promises to be the summit of his career. As principal investigator of the space probe Juno's mission to Jupiter, Bolton speaks with a boss' pride about the team he put together and how it persuaded a skeptical space agency to take on the planetary big kahuna, whose origins and characteristics, if fully understood, could explain much about the development of the entire solar system.

"Without us, this would not have happened," Bolton said in an interview at his office at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, where he has worked since 2004. "They didn't know they wanted to go there until we told them."

Intense radiation

On Saturday, Juno did its first close fly-by of Jupiter, 53 days after sliding into orbit on July 4. Although this close encounter was designed as a big instrument check of sorts, making sure all eight are adjusted to yield maximum usable data on subsequent passes, Bolton is anticipating more, confident that the spacecraft is robust enough to handle what Jupiter will dish out.

"I am expecting a lot," he said. "And I'm expecting to be surprised."

After one more long, elliptical orbit, Juno will burn its main engines again and begin shorter, 14-day trips around the planet's poles. Each close pass is planned carefully in an effort to find out as much as possible about Jupiter's fierce magnetic field, polar auroras, atmospheric structure, gravitational field, the nature of its core, and so on. NASA's robotic science missions often surpass minimum expectations, sometimes by years, but it would surprise no one if Juno were to expire before its 37 planned orbits. The radiation at various points is so intense that no amount of shielding can protect its instruments for long.

"They had to be faced," he said of the environmental and technical challenges, including the do-or-die moment of the orbital burn. "We never stuck our heads in the sand and said it would be OK. The tension keeps going up with each orbit."

However many orbits they get, with Juno Bolton has come full circle. He was still in college when he stumbled into a talk about Voyager and what it had observed as it flew past Jupiter in 1979. He still remembers seeing "amazing images" of the big planet and its moons, even if the impact of the presentation on him was a bit vague. It was hard to wrest away the dreams of a "Star Trek" enthusiast.

"I was into space exploration," he said. "I wanted to go to other stars and galaxies."

With NASA's human exploration effort stalled after the end of the Apollo program, Bolton ultimately settled for other planets, and a voyeur's role at that. After the JPL recruiter persuaded him to come back later, dressed for a proper job interview, Bolton soon found himself with an offer of employment. He thinks his overall zeal and willingness to do anything impressed the recruiter, given that his knowledge of anything space-related was little above zero.

Bolton soon stepped into a job in mission design, the planning side of the Caltech offshoot that had become the main player in NASA's robotic exploration program. His first mission to work on was a proposed foray to Halley's Comet, which was to make its swing by Earth in 1986. That mission did not get approved, a failure which intrigued him. He wanted to know why it failed, which provided an early introduction into the influence of politics upon space exploration.

"It showed me how much NASA is tied into the political system," he said. "You have to listen to what people say they want and what Congress wants. You better not make a mistake or you might lose the whole mission."

In 24 years at JPL, Bolton worked on Voyager's encounter with outer planets and had major roles with the Galileo and Cassini missions, among others. Galileo was NASA's first spacecraft to enter orbit around Jupiter, and Bolton managed the Galileo Magnetospheric Working Group. Unlike Juno, Galileo spent its eight years near Jupiter in an equatorial orbit before it was finally sent to its demise with a plunge into the Jovian atmosphere in 2003.

Approved in 2005

Jupiter, it seems, has always been on Bolton's mind. He convinced colleagues on the Cassini mission to turn on its instruments when it headed past Jupiter on its way to Saturn, its primary destination. Galileo was not dead yet when he was busy coming up with the next mission there, hoping to fill in the many blanks still remaining about the big planet as well as answering some of the questions raised by Galileo's data.

Juno is very much Bolton's baby, and it was a long time coming. He competed for selection by NASA's science officials but met with no success, having been told that the technical doability of the mission was not doubted but the scientific purpose was of marginal value. He disagreed - both conclusions were dead wrong, he said - and doggedly kept at it.

He rejiggered his approach, lobbied the scientific community for support, then assembled a team that included others who once had hoped to have their own missions to Jupiter approved. As scientists elsewhere began to speak of the need for more information about Jupiter, NASA reconsidered. One review followed another, and then an all-day presentation to the committee that would pass ultimate judgment. Every question had to be answered on the spot, Bolton said. And the answer best be right.

NASA finally gave Bolton and his associates the go-ahead in 2005. The painstaking building of the eight instruments and camera went on year after year, with Lockheed Martin tasked with the spacecraft itself. Juno launched in August 2011 from Cape Canaveral.

Five years and 1.7 million miles later, Juno was at last on Jupiter's doorstep. As July 4 arrived, a dicey engine burn was needed to place the large spacecraft into planetary orbit. Had it not gone according to plan, Juno would have headed off toward oblivion, one more piece of Earth-made space junk. But the 35-minute burn went off perfectly.

"We're in orbit," Bolton announced from mission control at JPL in Pasadena, Calif., where he had gone for the orbital insertion. "We conquered Jupiter."

Well, not quite. The environment surrounding the planet is so harsh that Juno's life expectancy remains unknown. The earlier orbits will stay out of the worst radiation fields. That should give it plenty of productive close passes before things start getting hairy. But if the expectations are wrong or something odd happens, the spacecraft could be effectively dead in a few months - a sad end to a billion-dollar mission.

No pain, no gain

Risk comes with the territory and is accepted without question. Bolton was explaining the nature of such gambles to his two children, 12 and 14, as they drove to the JPL offices on July 4. He cautioned them that the drive home later that night might be a somber one.

"I reminded them of the risks in life, that there is no gain without pain," he said.

But not this time. A few hours later he was on top of the world, a euphoric moment that made the early frustrations, when many did not see the value of returning to Jupiter so soon, all but forgotten. If the rest of the mission goes equally well, Bolton will have plenty of Juno-supplied data to occupy him for much of his remaining career. And perhaps another mission to somewhere.

Meanwhile, the latest voyage of Capt. Kirk is in theaters now. Bolton, still a fan, believes the dream of human spaceflight will live long and eventually prosper. In the meantime, he said, the next best thing isn't so bad.

"It's our job to lay the groundwork for the next generation to follow us," he said. "We have to keep going through the story of the solar system until we figure it out."