DATE: Friday, September 19, 1997            TAG: 9709190996

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY AKWELI PARKER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: HAMPTON                           LENGTH:   92 lines

CHARTING THE THE RED PLANET STUDENTS HELP MONITOR PROBE'S COURSE

Like a cautious bather, the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft will dip briefly into the Martian atmosphere at 9:30 this morning, taking electronic notes on drag and density before popping back into space on its egg-shaped orbit.

Here on earth, George Washington University professor Gerald ``Gerry'' Keating and his students will translate that data into a space-age navigational chart for upcoming Mars missions.

``I feel a little like Christopher Columbus,'' says Keating, head of the Mars Global Surveyor Accelerometer Team based at NASA-Langley Research Center.

The team includes workers from Langley, George Washington's Joint Institute for the Advancement of Flight Sciences in Hampton, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of Arizona.

Surveyor is expected to beam back high-resolution pictures and data on the planet's atmosphere, composition, interior and history.

Eventually, says Keating, scientists will be able to piece together photo images to simulate skimming the planet's surface and swooping through Martian canyons.

Surveyor took its first breath of Martian air around noon Wednesday. Through January, the ungainly bird is to compile ``vertical structures,'' or tube-like samples, of the planet's upper atmosphere. Researchers believe that atmospheric conditions on Mars fluctuate wildly and must be better understood before we send more expensive spacecraft, let alone people, there.

For instance, says Keating, ``one of the things that keeps me awake at night is dust storms.''

As Mars nears the sun during its elliptical solar orbit, the planet's atmosphere expands and kicks up dust storms. Air density could multiply by 10 - bad news for Surveyor. Air that thick would cause it - or future expeditionary craft - to vaporize.

The Surveyor team will keep close tabs on such phenomena, and if need be, ``get out of there'' by firing the probe's thrusters and boosting it to a safer altitude.

Surveyor uses a fuel-saving, hence money-saving, method called aerobraking to enter Mars' orbit. The ship uses drag from the atmosphere to slow it down until its 45-hour, elliptical orbit is eventually pared to a two-hour, nearly circular one.

As orbit times decrease, the team's baby-sitting duties - making sure the spacecraft doesn't get in trouble while in the atmosphere - will increase. By January, surveillance will increase to 24 hours.

``Unfortunately, it means no Thanksgiving, no Christmas,'' laments Keating.

As it did with the Pathfinder mission that landed in July, NASA is flying Surveyor for a relative bargain, at $250 million. It is the latest in a series of ``Discovery Missions'' designed to explore space ``faster, better and cheaper'' than NASA's budget-busting projects of old.

The accelerometer team's low-rent digs, then - a creaky, computer-crammed trailer - would make even frugal NASA bean-counters nod in approval.

``We're cheaper, anyway,'' jokes Keating.

Looks aside, says Keating, the no-frills operations center makes for ``a natural classroom.''

And a pretty good one, too, according to graduate student George Cancro.

``It's just a tremendous amount of learning,'' says Cancro, 23.

With baggy corduroy shorts, boots and a surfer haircut, the stubble-chinned Cancro looks more like an alternative rock star than a rocket scientist. Yet, such youth isn't a big deal around NASA.

He speaks dreamily of one day working for NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, where all the bold ideas bouncing around makes a person wonder, ``are these really government workers?''

``I've been impressed with the fact they're putting young people in areas of a lot of responsibility,'' says Cancro.

Four other George Washington students work on the project for tuition and a stipend that's ``not much.''

The real reward, Cancro says, doesn't come from a bunch of abstract formulas on a chalkboard, but real-life, applied science.

``We'd have a difficult time pulling this off without the students,'' says Keating.

Besides their low salaries, students' enthusiasm and vast energy reserves make days like Wednesday - when team members stayed at work into the wee morning hours - almost seem easy.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Mars Surveyor's atmospheric testing is the clues - or warnings - it may provide about saving our own planet.

Mars is thought to have aged much faster than Earth, despite many similarities between the two.

The next planet most like Earth is Venus, where the surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead.

``All greenhouse effect,'' says Keating. ``That's why we worry.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos

NASA/JPL Caltech A computer-made image shows the Mars Surveyor

probe and in Mars' orbit.

BETH BERGMAN/The Virginian-Pilot

Graduate students Brandon Wilkerson, seated, and George Cancro

check out information about the Surveyor.

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