There was cake, coffee and nostalgia about achievements in space at the University of Colorado Boulder on Tuesday, but that was complemented by no shortage of looking forward to the future there.
The occasion, little more than a week after America marked the half-century since the first manned lunar landing, was a celebration at CU Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics of the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Mariner 6 and 7 missions’ flybys of Mars.
On July 31, 1969, Mariner 6 cruised past the Red Planet, coming to within about 2,100 miles of the planet’s surface. That was followed on Aug. 5 by its twin, Mariner 7. The spacecraft, together, were the first scientific instruments to observe Mars’ “airglow” and to confirm its atmosphere was made up largely of carbon dioxide.
The spacecraft transmitted to Earth a combined total of 143 approach television pictures of the planet, and 55 close-up photographs.
The missions also heralded the dawn of CU Boulder’s legacy of space exploration, as both spacecraft carried ultraviolet spectrometers designed by LASP.
Gathered in LASP’s lobby on Tuesday near the full-scale engineering model of the Mariner 6 and 7 spacecraft, several dozen students, both undergraduate and graduate, gathered with current staff and retired researchers who were directly involved in bringing that pioneering research to fruition.
Charlie Hord was one of the retired LASP veterans critical to the Mariner mission who was on hand for the festivities.
“It was an exciting time,” he recalled during public comments at the event, as he reminisced about traveling to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in preparation for the mission’s launches.
“It was one of the most exciting missions I have ever been involved with. It was a wonderful time to be here.”
As he scanned the room, spotting other colleagues from the past and those who have succeeded him, Hord said, “I wish there were more of my colleagues left. I guess the only reason that I am still here is that I was younger than they were.”
In recent coverage of the Apollo 11 anniversary, mention was made by scientists that with computers still very much in their infancy, many of their calculations were made by hand. Likewise, for the Mariner mission, as confirmed by retired LASP research scientist Ian Stewart in his remarks.
“Back then, that’s what everyone used, paper and pen, and the back of an envelope,” Stewart said, his shirt pocket bugling with an old notebook, as if he might be called upon for his next critical calculation at any moment.
Young and aggressive
One of those enjoying the celebration was planetary scientist Don Anderson, who was at LASP from 1966 to 1973 as both a graduate student and post-doctoral student, and in that capacity worked on Mariners 6, 7 and 9. He shared an anecdote about Hord’s strong advocacy in visits to the Jet Propulsion Lab for his and his colleagues’ viewpoints on the mission, and joked about a sign posted in the NASA lab’s corridors cautioning “Watch out for the …” with the image of a buffalo with a large “X” through it.
“Everyone knew who it referred to,” Anderson said, as the crowd laughed.
In an interview as people got down to the serious business of eating cake and exchanging personal memories, Anderson said the tutelage of people such as Hord, retired researcher Stewart, and the late Charles Barth, the longtime director of LASP and principal investigator of the ultraviolet spectrometer LASP provided to the mission, were invaluable.
Now 77, Anderson said it helped that scientists such as Hord and Stewart were not too much older than he was at the time. “You could just go in and talk to them, and tell them, ‘I don’t know the answer,’ and they would help you. I don’t know how much of it was an age thing, but we were young, aggressive, and trying to get out there and do it. They weren’t ‘the grand old men of science.’”
Not yet, anyway.
Potential is ‘mindblowing’
Also on hand Tuesday was Nick Schneider, a professor in astrophysics and planetary science at LASP, who offered warm words of appreciation for the work of his predecessors. He said he interviewed with Hord 30 years ago for his faculty position at LASP.
“It was pretty intimidating,” Schneider said. “I was a year out of graduate school, coming to this powerhouse of space exploration, and he asked me, ‘What missions would you like to do?’ I had never done a mission or anything like that, and was sort of taken aback. But I gathered my thoughts and I guess I answered the question well enough. He was such a gentle and self-effacing person, he made it easy to come into this community.”
The total cost of Mariner missions 1 through 10 was about $554 million, in 1960s dollars, and this was at a time that, Schneider pointed out, NASA’s budget was 5% of the federal budget, as opposed to the current .5%, which he termed “the most appalling fact of the day.
“We’ve been 20 years from putting humans on Mars ever since,” said Schneider, who is the science lead on the Imaging UltraViolet Spectrograph team for the MAVEN mission currently orbiting Mars.
“Again, I think it’s just a lack of commitment. What NASA could achieve with adequate support could be really mind-blowing,” Schneider said.
The Trump administration has declared its intention to put men and women back on the moon by 2024, as part of a larger vision to land humans on Mars, a goal also targeted by several private concerns, such as the Mars One initiative.
“What’s our vision for the future?” Schneider asked. “It’s the future of humanity. I see settled colonies happening eventually (on Mars), but I support robotic exploration, initially.”
LASP veteran Fran Bagenal, another research scientist on hand for Tuesday’s event, said the importance of the various Mariner missions was to show the differences between the atmospheres of Earth, Venus and Mars.
“The discoveries of gases like carbon dioxide that make Venus and Mars so inhospitable” she said, “then caused us to reflect back on the changes taking place here on Earth.”