Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008
After NASA's Mars Polar Lander spacecraft suddenly disappeared in space in December 1999, Laurel resident Brent Bos, who had worked on the mission for three years, nearly changed jobs.
"That was probably the toughest thing I've gone through in my career because we'd done so much work in it," said Bos, a research physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. "I almost left the group."
Had a mentor not convinced Bos to stay on, the 38-year-old Laurel resident never would have gotten to be part of the team that led the successful May 25 Mars touch-down of the Phoenix Lander spacecraft.
According to Bos, approximately half of all the missions sent to Mars have crashed, making his involvement in a successful project on the planet a privilege afforded to a rare few.
"It's the first Mars mission to be led by scientists," said Bos, who recently returned from several weeks in Tucson, Ariz., where he analyzed data sent from a camera attached to the spacecraft on Mars. "I find it very exciting and something that is going to live on beyond what we do."
The purpose of the mission is to determine whether there has ever been life on the Earth-like planet.
Bos has wanted to work in space exploration since childhood, when, as a second-grader living near Grand Rapids, Mich., his class took a field trip to a planetarium.
"Something just clicked there and it never really left me," Bos said. "I knew I wanted to be involved in space exploration."
In 2002 he received his Ph. D. in optical physics from the University of Arizona while working on the Mars missions at the school. That same year, he moved to Laurel to work in Greenbelt on the Mars projects and the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble is due for replacement in approximately 2013.
"Brent is a very dedicated, hardworking, smart person," said Mark Wilson, an optical physicist at Goddard and Bos' group leader on the telescope project. "Brent brings ... experience in both analysis and in actual hardware tests, which [means] he can bridge technical or communication gaps between people working on the James Webb Space Telescope."
Last week, the Phoenix Lander team got some good news when NASA granted the $457 million mission a 40-day extension, until Oct. 1. That gives the team more time to cook the sticky, icy soil its spacecraft has found on Mars and to analyze the soil's composition.
"The big concern was, ‘What if we dig and dig and dig and we never get to the ice?'" Bos said. "Once we saw the ice, we named one of the images "Snow Queen" and another one "Holy Cow" because ... it was just great. [But] finding the organisms is kind of the Holy Grail."
In part because of the differences between Martian and Earth time—a Martian day is more than 39 minutes longer than its Earth counterpart —the mission presents only eight opportunities for the team to have the spacecraft cook the soil. So far, it has only used two, Bos said. Adding to the mission's time crunch, the sun will soon set on the planet—for an entire season.
"Our batteries will die when the sun sets for winter in early 2009," he said. "So it's a short mission."
Bos hopes at least one of his three children takes an interest in space and science in the future. Sons Caleb and Austin are 6 and 2, respectively, and daughter Claire is 4.
The children accompanied Bos and his wife, Michelle Bos, to the Phoenix Lander's launch last year from Arizona.
"I am proud of the role Brent has had doing the work he loves," Michelle Bos said. "I'm glad that he is able to contribute to something both exciting and important and that our family can support him doing that."
E-mail Anath Hartmann at ahartmann@gazette.net
