The Mission

by David W. Brown

  In April a letter addressed to Jonathan—well, it was so much more than that: a manila envelope, nine by twelve, thick with something more than a single sheet of correspondence inside—arrived in the mail. He traced his finger on the return address. Center for Radiophysics and Space Research. Cornell University. C. Sagan. He opened it, and there was a letter in there, two pages, dated April 18, 1974, and it was typewritten, single spaced: “Dear Mr. Lunine . . .”299 It opened with a thank-you for your letter, and explained that all good colleges and universities, including Cornell, offered scholarships to students in financial need, and it went on to describe what he should study in high school if he wished to be an astronomer, and what happens in college, and enclosed were reprints of recent scientific papers from the Mariner 9 mission to Mars—Mariner 9! The first spacecraft to orbit another planet! And there was Sagan’s signature, scrawled carefully, just so, and Jonathan was holding this, reading it, and it was just—I—what—he’d never seen a real science paper before—the odd two-column format, the peculiar typeface, the diagrams, and those paragraphs: dense as neutron stars. And Jonathan was holding the letter, the science papers, and feeling the texture of the thing—the thickness of the paper—and he smelled it, took it all in, and he just looked at it and the words, and he read the letter and the papers again and again. He was now a part of something. He was connected to this thing: astronomy, space exploration. He lived on a spinning ball of rock ninety-three million miles from the sun, and he had this. This thing. These pages. This was his. He was part of it.

  Thus began a continuing correspondence with Sagan, whose advice was solid, and Jonathan followed it for a couple of years, but the seventies were on the downslope, and the space program and science more broadly were not doing well, and there was a stereotype out there, and Jonathan heard it, and he couldn’t shake it: of the person with a physics Ph.D. driving a taxicab. And Jonathan had to be realistic here. He was smart and he needed to make something of himself, needed to make sure he didn’t bring the financial circumstances of his adolescence with him into adulthood, and he agonized over it—it felt wrong, but he was set on it—and he decided to become a medical doctor. He held doctors in high regard—they saved lives!—and he appreciated the gadgetry, the high technology. And—very important—it was a guaranteed job. So he read books on the heroes of medicine and volunteered at Manhattan’s renowned Mount Sinai Hospital, where he worked for an oncologist, making graphs of data for her and sending out reprint requests. He wrote to Sagan about this decision, and Carl was gracious, responding in his customarily wry tone that medical research carries with it some of the frontier excitement of astronomy.

  In his senior year of high school, Jonathan discovered that his pediatrician had gone to Cornell—Jonathan had dug up an article the doctor had written in 1930—and when visiting his office, found out that he had up-to-date Cornell course catalogs. As Jonathan flipped through the pages, his pediatrician said in passing that, hey, I have these tickets for a talk by Frank Drake, a Cornell astronomer, and do you want to go instead of me? Jonathan nearly said no—his destiny was in medicine. The offer even offended him on some level. I’m going to be a doctor—what don’t you understand about that? But for whatever reason he said OK.

  Drake, one of Sagan’s colleagues at the university, had worked on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the sixties and seventies, and in that evening’s lecture, he outlined the latest science from the radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. And once again, there was Jonathan, on this ball of rock swinging round the sun, and there was this guy Drake speaking, revealing Arecibo findings that were helping to unlock the secrets of the universe, and with every word and across each passing minute, Jonathan could feel the physician’s life slipping away like a lab-coated ghost leaving his body. He was too shy to approach Drake after the lecture, though he wanted to, but as he stood in the elevator, going down, he made his decision—or rather, unmade his decision and reverted to the first. He didn’t want to be a medical doctor. He’d never wanted to be a medical doctor, not really. He was going to be an astronomer, follow in the footsteps of Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. And that is what he did.

  Despite his continual, coincidental connections to Cornell, Lunine didn’t go there, just couldn’t afford it. He went instead to the University of Rochester, in western New York. During his last two summers, he worked at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, which organized the Lunar Science Conference, the proceedings of which he had read in the Sky & Telescope magazines of his youth. (The conference, later renamed the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, would host his heresy and undoing.) After earning a bachelor of science in physics and astronomy, he cast his eyes across the map to figure out where to go for graduate school. Jonathan applied to Cornell, MIT, Caltech, and the University of Arizona, among others, and was accepted by each of them. It came down to Caltech and Arizona, but Caltech put on a better show, and so Caltech it was. He packed his ’72 Datsun 1200—a prototypical college student car, standard transmission, aftermarket air conditioner that, when you turned it on, caused the car to lurch as though you had just applied the brakes. There were twelve-inch wheels on the thing, and he learned that them there were pretty small wheels, son, because he had a blowout on the Joad-like drive to the West Coast, and the guy at the service station put a standard size tire on it. It was August and somewhere past Houston, the nonfactory air conditioner gave out, and west he went down Interstate 10, through the Chihuahuan Desert and the Sonoran Desert and the Mojave Desert, and it was a rolling lesson in how a sweat lodge can alter one’s frame of mind. From Amarillo to Flagstaff, then through Phoenix and on to Los Angeles, he survived the West, his horse a Datsun with a bum wheel and broken AC.

  His dissertation at Caltech was titled “Volatiles in the Solar System” (volatiles being things that like to vaporize and become gases). The finished product was a behemoth at three hundred twenty pages, and came in three parts: 1. a theoretical study on the thermodynamics of clathrate hydrates (water ice formed in the presence of high-pressure methane or other gases); 2. the evolution of Titan, Saturn’s cryogenic moon; and 3. a model that he put together with his thesis advisor and another professor proposing a global ocean of ethane and methane on Titan. There was some poetry in all this: Carl Sagan had once proposed an ocean of methane on Titan, but data from the spacecraft Voyager 2 didn’t jibe with pure methane. Jonathan’s ethane-methane ocean solved the problem. That ocean part of his thesis was completed early—in 1983—and Jonathan submitted his model for publication. Cornell that year was, coincidentally, having a conference on satellites of the solar system. Jonathan put in an abstract, though not on that topic—he focused more on the mundane. He flew out there with his thesis advisor, they having together hatched a plan in which he (i.e., Jonathan) would surprise everyone with his ethane ocean talk.

  It was a great conference. They scheduled his talk for the evening, lowly Lunine, and his advisor (in collaboration with a Cornell physics professor) bought Jonathan a couple of beers to ease things along. After downing them, he took the stage, stood before a nice-sized crowd, and gave his talk on the ethane ocean model. The Q&A period led off with a question about whether organic solids would sink or float in an ethane-methane ocean. Jonathan was about to reply, when he was interrupted by a voice from the back of the room—this lilting, mesmerizing baritone—and up sprung this man declaring boldly that he knew the answer.

  It was Carl Sagan.

  He climbed onto the stage and placed on the overhead projector a transparency listing the densities of various organic solids, and comparisons to the density of an ethane-methane ocean.

  Jonathan’s emotions slid across an internal spectrum from resentment to acceptance: if he was going to be upstaged by anyone, it may as well have been Sagan. There was also an element of curiosity and suspicion: nobody knew that Jonathan would be discussing the ocean or the details of his model, or would have had a transparency at the ready .
. . unless Sagan had been one of the referees on the paper Jonathan had submitted for publication. The boy who’d written the famous astronomer a fan letter a decade earlier was now officially his colleague.

  THE ROAD TO the final shootout selection gave both teams a nice stretch of time to really work up some acrimony and indignation.300 The shootout ran for about eleven months, culminating in each team handing in a NASA study report, a European Space Agency study report, and a joint summary report explaining how the two missions would work together, should they fly together, which they weren’t required to do. The NASA reports alone for each mission would be door stoppers—well over four hundred pages—and collectively, you had the spacecraft equivalent of Infinite Jest. The shootout would culminate in full presentations by each team at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, during which the respective mission’s science, technical design, management, and cost would be discussed, and panels sick of lugging around these foot-high stacks of reading material would keep drilling down into details, divining fact from science fiction. The Titan team would talk on December 9, 2008, and the Europa team two days later.

  The stakes were just so high: the future of outer planets exploration for ten, maybe twenty years—the proposed launch year for the winning mission being 2020, and then the travel time, and then the prime missions. Jonathan, especially, felt drawn into what he came to see as an arena. Titan had defined his academic and professional career, so he was aggressive in criticizing the Europa Jupiter System Mission . . . even when he wasn’t strictly invited to make those criticisms. The Titan tribe developed a slick marketing campaign of videos and brochures that really sold its vision: the Montgolfière floating above, waves lapping on the shoreline below. Titan science since the heady Huygens descent had exploded. Not only had scientists discovered elaborate lakes of liquid methane, but so too had they found a vast network of capacious seas.301, 302 The Quad Studies submission for Titan exploration called for a lander. The shootout study would build a boat! And a balloon. And an orbiter.303 And while Titan science swelled and ripened, so too did that of Enceladus, tiny Enceladus, which, like the sculpture of its mythological namesake at the Palace of Versailles, jetted water vapor (and salt and silica grains) into space from vast stripes of boiling slush. From there, it snowed upward. Saturn was where the action was, and the Titan team castigated the Europa mission in NASA hallways, grumbling to anyone who might have some say in the matter, “Well, I’m just glad we’re not building a Christmas tree like the Europa mission,” and just letting it hang. And that’s how they felt, the Titan people. Galileo barely launched. Cassini barely launched. You’re telling me this Europa mission is going to launch, no sweat, by the numbers? You think Congress won’t step in and start scrutinizing this battlestar sure to be annihilated in mere months, at best, by the radiation that engulfed their little ice moon?

  For their part, the members of the Europa team just could not believe what they were hearing. Christmas tree? Cassini was still getting data from Titan! And the Titan people, meanwhile, were developing the most ostentatious, convoluted mission in the history of space exploration. Boats and balloons and orbiting satellites? Good luck keeping even one of those under cost. The Europa team had been developing its spacecraft, science, and a broader mission for a full decade. There were no surprises here, and Europa’s science was mature enough to bottle and store in a cellar. The Europa team knew how to study its target, understood the thrill of its target, the unanswered questions, the implications of an ocean beneath the ice. But the community and NASA leadership had been hearing about it for so long that it seemed, maybe, like old news? And with the Titan team promising golden-age sci-fi versus some boring old Europa orbiter, it was just discouraging. If you were on the Europa team, you just knew it: the Titan team was going to pull this thing off.

  BOB PAPPALARDO FELT most acutely the suspicion—if not animosity—radiating from the Titan team, and his troubles began with a parting directive from the outgoing Alan Stern. Missions in development didn’t always blow budgets because of engineering obstacles. Sometimes, said Stern, it was because of basic inexperience on the part of project leaders. So, he directed, in order for a principal investigator to propose a large mission, she would be required to have served either a four-year stint in some mission leadership role or two two-year tours as such.304 Managers needed to know how to make difficult decisions and twist arms and sometimes fire respected colleagues when situations warranted. However, in a field as young as planetary science, there was a problem that Alan had perhaps not considered, and Susan Niebur, formerly of NASA and now running a consultancy, spotted right away . . .

  It had been a tough six months for her, Curt, and the kids: first, chemotherapy to rid her body of cancer cells and reduce the tumor burden in preparation for a double mastectomy, which she had, to remove any undetected cancer cells that survived the slow poison drip. Then there were the tattoo sessions to mark permanent aiming points for another seven weeks of radiation therapy.305 She felt great physically, relative to the previous couple of years, but she carried mortality now on her shoulders, and there were things she still wanted to do before dying.306 Not that she had given up! Not that she had accepted it—dying—or that she was dying. But she was in an in-between state. She didn’t know—couldn’t know—if her body was growing cancer elsewhere. And she was a scientist. Inflammatory breast cancer had a ninety percent recurrence rate in the first five years. So much of her body was being blasted with radiation that lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system, was now a likely side effect.307

  Susan’s family was foremost in her life, and the preponderance of her time went to her children. But in the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth hours of her day, she founded a group called Women in Planetary Science in hopes of correcting a punishing gender imbalance in the field. In part, she was frustrated that so many of her colleagues with children were unable to attend the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference each year because it offered no provisions for day care or nursing mothers. The annual gathering wasn’t only about the science presentations you were missing; you skip a major conference, and you lose out also on the networking opportunities such assemblies facilitate, and your career consequently suffers. To get things going, Susan organized a breakfast, and twelve people responded, and the night before, she expected maybe eight to show up—you know how it goes—and the next morning, one hundred and eight women were there.308 So the project was off to a promising start. She launched a website for the group to highlight news relevant to women in the field, encourage discussions, and share the stories of women who had pioneered planetary science.309

  And right away, she identified that years-long mission leadership requirement as a big problem in need of a solution.310 You have a field that is predominantly male, with mostly men as mission leaders, and from the start, practically no women were eligible to propose missions—ensuring that the problem would perpetuate. Moreover, the exchange of business cards being an important element when teams first organize, no women at conferences (see: no nursing rooms, no child care) meant no way to network your way onto teams and work your way to leadership positions to overcome the . . . and so on.

  Back in the San Gabriel Mountains, the leadership requirement wasn’t doing Bob Pappalardo any favors, either. He would never put his professional problem in the same galaxy as the one Susan was working to solve, but given the paucity of outer planets missions relative, especially, to Mars, outer planets scientists also hurt for opportunities to gain the requisite skill set to propose missions. If Bob, Europa’s study scientist, was going to be its project scientist (should Europa win the shootout), he would have to find a way to solve his lack of project leadership experience posthaste.

  The lab was one step ahead of him on this one.

  Bob was told he needed to meet with Charles Elachi, the lab director, which was a little unnerving. The meeting would be about Cassini. Were they kicking the camera lead off the team? Bob wondered. That was Assistant Professor Pappalardo’
s goal all those years ago, after all, before being brought into the lab, what he had written down in that what-do-you-want-out-of-life workbook from the self-help section of the bookstore: lead scientist on a camera instrument. He wanted it to be to Jupiter, though Saturn would work. But maybe that wasn’t the plan. Maybe they wanted him to be a Cassini deputy? No, that was too much.

  So he met with Elachi, and the director gave it to him straight: Cassini is moving into a different mission phase, we’re replacing its project scientist, and you’re our guy.

  Pappalardo was stunned.

  By 2008, the planetary science community numbered in the thousands and growing, and the number of flagship planetary missions that launched in a single lifetime might reach five, and that number was shrinking. Project scientist of a flagship mission simply was not a job one aspired to. I mean, maybe for Europa, sure, but he had been building that mission his whole professional life. That was one thing, and even then, the lab wouldn’t put it in his contract. But Cassini!

  Well, of course he said yes, but right away, Bob voiced concerns about his obligations to the Jupiter Europa Orbiter and the joint Europa Jupiter System Mission study, and he was also still working on his book on Europa. But Elachi blew off his concerns: You have two deputies on each job, Bob, and two coeditors on the book. Figure it out. In the case of the Europa study, there was Louise, who also supervised the Planetary Exploration Group at APL, and Dave, who worked down the hall in Pasadena. And of course he had Ron Greeley, who was the American cochair of the joint science definition team, and Karla Clark, the study lead. On his book, he still had Krishan Khurana, codiscoverer of Europa’s ocean, and Bill McKinnon, who was revered in the field.