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By Linda Schmidt Mars is the ultimate adversary,” says Wayne Lee ’90. “It always has the home field advantage.” As chief engineer in charge of entry, descent, and landing for two of NASA’s Mars rover vehicles, Lee knows all too well that the astronomically complex technical challenges, coupled with a landscape of jagged rocks and unpredictable dust storms, crushed numerous earlier attempts to land a vehicle safely on the surface of the red planet. In 1999, NASA had two highly publicized failures, and a British team of scientists lost contact with their probe in December 2003. “It was a do-or-die mission for the agency,” Lee says. So, when Spirit and Opportunity both touched down safely last January, the success resuscitated the beleaguered NASA program. The rovers, originally designed to operate for 90 days but still alive after 11 months, have sent back thousands of photographs and massive amounts of data, including evidence of an ancient sea that once may have supported life.
Lee headed a group of 50 engineers responsible for the entry, descent, and landing of the rovers, and is quick to interject that the success was a team effort. “We kept looking for problems, for ways to break the system, then looking for ways to fix it,” Lee says. “I would tell people, If you haven’t found anything wrong, you’re not looking hard enough.” The initial tests for the landers were not promising. “They hit the ground and--poof!--they exploded,” he says. “That’s when we knew we were in for a long ride.” The team ultimately developed a complex airbag system made of eight layers of Kevlar, a bullet-proof material. Then, in six short minutes on January 3, 2004, Mars Spirit faced its greatest test. The landing was loaded with unforeseeable dangers. “There are lots of things on Mars that can do you in,” Lee says. “You can spend a lot of time perfecting the spacecraft, making it as bulletproof as possible, but you can’t guarantee success.” But Spirit was flawless: It plunged into the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 mph, inflated its parachute and airbags, then bounced and rolled to a dead stop on the ground. Lee may well have learned to overcome the odds as an undergraduate at Cal. “From dealing with being one in 30,000 to the difficulty of the academic course load—all that makes you very ready to take on the world,” he says. Strange circumstances also played a part in Lee’s success. One day in his senior year he was planning to meet a friend in the Life Sciences Building. “I took a wrong turn and wound up in the basement, and saw a flyer that said ‘Spend the summer at the Kennedy Space Center,’” he recalls. “I never found my friend, but I applied for the program.” He spent the summer helping design experiments to fly on the Space Shuttle. It was so much fun that he chose it as a career. After completing his master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Texas in 1993, Lee joined the Mars Global Surveyor Project, serving as chief mission planner. He has worked on three different Mars projects to date; in the next ten years, NASA plans several more, including a sample return mission, which will bring Martian soil and rocks back to Earth, slated to launch in 2013. “Space flight and Mars exploration is about understanding the universe, where we came from, who we are, and where we’re headed,” Lee says. “What excites me is that I get to come to work every day and know that the things we do will be a part of history.” |
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