
DATE: Monday, July 14, 1997                 TAG: 9707140036

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   86 lines

ODU SCIENTIST DREAMS OF A RED PLANET TRIP

An international team of astronauts takes the better part of a year to fly to Mars.

They land, explore, gather samples, all while breathing oxygen-rich air created from elements found on the Red Planet.

Their work done, the astronauts climb into a return vehicle that was dropped on the planet the previous year, fuel it with more stuff created from the Martian atmosphere and water, and zoom home.

What sounds like a story line for a summer blockbuster movie is something that 55-year-old Robert L. Ash hopes and expects to see in his lifetime. It's what the Old Dominion University researcher and administrator has been working on for two decades.

``I'm doing my level best to stay alive because I'll know that's going to happen,'' Ash said with a laugh last week.

It's not surprising that Ash is having a blast with all the news coverage of the Pathfinder unmanned probe now on Mars and the literally out-of-this-world pictures it's beaming back to Earth. He has always been fascinated by space, and Mars is his thing.

It's a rare moment in the sunlight these days for untold numbers of scientists, engineers and other researchers who toil for years largely unnoticed on the big and little things that make such projects work.

Researchers like Ash and his colleague at ODU, Lepsha Vuskovich. Ash long has studied the availability of water on Mars, and how that and the carbon dioxide atmosphere could be used to create breathable air for humans and burnable fuel for spaceships. He published the first study on the topic in 1978.

Ash is ODU's eminent scholar of aerospace engineering and vice president for research, economic development and graduate studies, so now he deals more with research grants than actually ``turning the knobs.'' Vuskovich is an associate professor of physics who is experimenting to find efficient ways to separate oxygen from Mars' air.

``If you can get water and carbon dioxide, you can make all sorts of chemicals,'' including air to breathe and fuel for rockets, Ash said. ``That's what we said we can do, and we're even more convinced now that that's the case.''

New indications from Mars are that vast floods once coursed over the planet, and there's speculation that there still might be water lurking somewhere, aside from the frozen polar ice cap.

As an engineer known as a ``resource processor,'' Ash worked from 1977 to 1979 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., now familiar from TV news as the control center for Pathfinder. He has done research work off and on for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration since 1963.

Now he's keeping up with the Mars exploration goings-on like most everyone else - by watching CNN. Later, he and other researchers around the world will get to see the raw and analyzed data from the rock and soil samples and be able to conduct their own research.

The unprecedented findings could lead most anywhere, even to signs of past or present life, Ash said.

``There's still a very good chance that there could be organisms under the surface,'' he said. ``That in itself is a very. . . plausible possibility.''

Manned flights could accomplish more than unmanned ones, Ash said. Finding a safe yet relatively economical way for people to travel to and return from our neighbor planet spurred his research.

Since fuel makes up 80 percent of a rocket's weight, finding a way to get or make fuel on Mars for the return trip would lighten the outgoing load and save money.

Why do it? Because we learn, Ash said. The technologies being tested - robotics, miniature cameras - could have uses here, from handling toxic waste to thrilling baseball fans with tiny TV cameras like those used in the catchers' masks at Tuesday night's All-Star Game.

Also, if as believed Mars long ago was much like Earth, we might learn why it lost its surface water and its atmosphere changed. A huge meteor crash? Natural evolution over time? And more importantly: Can the same thing happen on Earth?

``What really motivates me is that we need to have the ability to both understand and improve the way we live . . . on this planet,'' Ash said.

But there's more, too.

``I really do believe that as humans we have this burning desire to see how we fit into the big scheme of things,'' Ash said.

``And I think we need a few dreams to support us, and we shouldn't be totally preoccupied with just getting through the day.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

LAWRENCE JACKSON/The Virginian-Pilot

Lepsha Vuskovich, left, and Robert L. Ash of Old Dominion University

hope to someday see people land on Mars. The machine is an

experiment in making oxygen from the planet's carbon dioxide

atmosphere.