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A key dinner

Malin, undaunted, buttonholed Carr at a meeting of planetary scientists in Hawaii. Over dinner, he made his pitch.

"I just wanted to get on the spacecraft," he remembers. He told Carr, "Give me what's left over." The leftovers, Malin knew, amounted to only a single high-resolution snapshot on each day of the mission.
  

Mars

When Carr voiced skepticism, Malin answered that even this meager allowance would yield great scientific dividends, simply because no one had ever seen Mars at such high resolution. By the end of the meal, Malin recalls, Carr was convinced. The Science Working Group recommended that a camera be considered for Mars Observer, and Malin and Danielson were given $50,000 to investigate possible designs.

Malin and Danielson knew what they were up against. They would have to craft an instrument that not only out-performed anything ever sent to another planet, but at a cheaper price. Basically, they would have to beat the designers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California -- where most space cameras had been designed -- at their own game.

A motley crew

Faced with this challenge, Malin enlisted a graduate student of Danielson's named Mike Ravine and his roommate, Tom Soulanille, a computer wizard who designed video games.

Soulanille even looked the part of the hacker -- barefoot, clad in cutoff jeans and a thrift-shop T-shirt. But if Malin's team was strictly unorthodox by JPL standards, they were exactly what he was after.

"I wanted people who would 'sign up' -- to do this for the fun of it," Malin said, "people who wouldn't mind putting in the extra hours."

Over the next many months, Malin's team wrestled with the task of getting revolutionary performance without violating the camera's size, weight and cost constraints.

"They thought it was the neatest thing they'd ever seen."

What emerged from their drawing boards in the spring of 1985 was a telescope mated to an electronic camera in which the exotic mingled with low-tech. To save weight, they specified aluminum for the telescope structure.

At the same time, Soulanille incorporated state-of-the-art electronics and designed an elegant auto-focus system unlike anything used in space before. The hours were indeed long, but Soulanille remembers a happy sense of freedom, simply because he doubted they would be accepted.

"In large measure, we didn't have to worry about playing the proposal game of making sure it looks like something NASA would recognize and like," he said. "It was, 'Somebody should send a camera to Mars like this.'"

Consulting experts

But Malin and Danielson weren't about to submit their design to NASA without running it past the experts. They brought in a team that included designers who were working on the mammoth Keck Telescope in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope.

"They thought it was the neatest thing they'd ever seen," Malin recalled, smiling. Their main suggestion: get rid of the auto-focus system. If graphite-epoxy were used instead of aluminum, they said, the camera would be so stable it wouldn't need a focusing system at all. As a result, the camera would have no moving parts whatsoever; NASA would love the added reliability.
 
 

With high spirits, Malin's team submitted their proposal in the summer of 1985 for Mars Observer. The final instrument selections would be announced the following January; there was nothing to do but wait.

Delays

The instrument selection, originally slated for January, 1986, was delayed in the wake of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. At NASA Headquarters in Washington, scientists of the Solar System Exploration Division had reviewed the competing proposals for Mars Observer, made their recommendations, and once again, there was no camera.

Not until March did the letters of selection arrive on the desk of Burt Edelson, NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Science, for signing. Edelson had just come from Darmstadt, West Germany, where scientists had monitored the flyby of the European Giotto spacecraft past Halley's Comet, sending back closeup pictures while the world watched on live television. Edelson called in his associates and said, "I can't see sending a spacecraft back to Mars without a camera. Take another look at it."

By spring, Malin learned that his camera had been selected. Soulanille recalls a moment of panic: "Oh, they want us to build it?" But even after that passed, the team wasn't out of the woods. The acceptance letter had clearly stated that if NASA were forced to trim the payload for weight or budget reasons, the camera would be the first to go. And at JPL, which managed the Mars Observer project for NASA, hostility was rife.