Getting to Mars has been among the greatest frustrations in the space program. Numerous robot spacecrafts have died on the way to Earth's neighbor planet. To be sure, Paige will have a long time to hold his breath on this one. Launched aboard a rocket from Cape Canaveral in January 1999, the Lockheed Martin Astronautics-built Lander isn't scheduled to arrive on the Red Planet until the following December.

Touchdown is scheduled for the warmest time of year on the southern region of Mars, a terrain that appears to consist of alternating layers of clean and dust-laden ice. Temperatures at the polar region should top out at a little below 0 degrees Celsius and drop to minus 80 to minus 90 C. Directed by Paige and his team from new offices on Gayley Avenue, just a few blocks from the campus, the Lander will power up the integrated payload—dubbed the Mars Volatiles and Climate Surveyor (MVACS)—and deploy its variety of scientific instruments designed to enable first-ever detailed studies of the atmo-

sphere, climate, meteorology and surface volatiles—liquid water, ice and frozen carbon dioxide.

"This mission was created to help understand the abundance and distribution of water on Mars," explains Paige, an expert on planetary climate. "We will search for water in the soil, for ice both on and beneath the planet's surface, and for water vapor in the area around the lander and the atmosphere above it. We are also searching for minerals in the Martian soil that may have been formed long ago, when Mars had a much warmer and wetter climate than it does today.

"Finding the answers," he observes, "affects our learning about how planets and climates evolve."

"Giving it to academia is a very different way of doing a space mission," says Paige, who makes a point of stating he is a scientist, not an engineer. "No one like me has ever been in charge of a whole payload before for a mission of this scale." With 87 days for testing—the estimated amount of time that the solar-powered lander can operate before the season changes and the sun's rays fade—and a cycle of sunlight and darkness totally out of sync with ours, Paige and his team will be conducting tests day and night. The 37-pound payload, about a backpack's worth of gear, includes four major scientific instruments: a meteorological package with sensors to record atmospheric pressure, temperature and winds, and a tunable diode laser to measure water vapor as well as the atmosphere's isotopic composition; a thermal and evolved gas analyzer that will determine the samples content of ice and frozen carbon dioxide; an imager designed to take color stereo photographs of the surrounding landscape; and a robotic arm two meters long that will dig and deliver surface samples for analysis. A camera on the arm will also take close-up snapshots of the Martian surface.

Additionally, Paige is a coinvestigator on an atmospheric instrument, the Pressure Modulator Infrared Radiometer, for the Mars Surveyor '98 Orbiter, a companion spacecraft launched separately to conduct additional experiments from orbit while the lander is on the planet's surface. Like a weather satellite for Mars, it will measure temperature profiles of the Martian atmosphere and monitor its water vapor and dust content.

Though Paige admits the nearly yearlong voyage Lander must endure to reach its destination will seem like an eternity at times to him, it's a small price to pay to see the dreams of a career come to life. The youthful scientist's urge to pry loose the secrets of Mars took root back in the late '70s when he was an undergraduate at UCLA, working on the Viking Mars mission with his professor. And on the wall next to Paige's desk (he was technical adviser to Star Trek: The Next Generation) still hangs an eerie oil painting depicting what the surface of Mars might look like with a lander on it. It was given to the scientist long before he became the real-life star of a mission to Mars.