Mars research culminates his dream

Samuel Kounaves led the team that conducted chemical analysis of NASA samples from Mars. (Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff)

One year ago today, Samuel Kounaves stood on a jetty in the predawn stillness of a Florida morning, focused his eyes on a spot 3 miles across the water, and waited for his moment.

First came the flash, an incredible white light that began lifting slowly into the sky, surrounded by blackness and an eerie silence. Then the boom came across the water, the boom of rocket power that rattled his bones and probably would have given him goosebumps if they weren't already there. In the background, millions of miles above Cape Canaveral, was a little red dot.

"It's pure science fiction," Kounaves said recently, swiveling back and forth in a task chair in his office at Tufts, where he is a chemistry professor, unable to wipe the smile from his face as he described the feeling of watching NASA's Phoenix Mars mission take off. "I don't know how to describe it. Here was this object heading to another planet; we were sending a robot to this little red dot in the sky, to Mars."

For Kounaves, that moment was the culmination of a lot. As a scientist, it was a realization of 12 years of fits and starts and aborted missions, years when his kids grew from toddlers into young adults. For the 59-year-old, raised in a small Montana mining town and weaned on the space race and "Star Trek" - who'd doodled "I want to be an astronaut and go to Mars" in his sixth-grade notebook (which he found recently) - it perhaps meant even more.

"I wish I could do better than humbling and amazing, but I can't," said Kounaves, who is one of the co-investigators of the mission and helped draft the proposal that won a 2002 NASA competition with a plan to study subsurface ice and analyze the Martian soil for habitability and evidence of the planet's climate history. "I was a part of the best tradition of the human race - exploring the unknown."

The launch was just the beginning of the mission, the start of an exciting, if somewhat nervous year. Kounaves returned to Tufts as Phoenix made its frozen 10-month journey through space, which he described as the safest part of the odyssey because "no one could cancel it anymore." On May 25, he joined the team in the mission's science operations center at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory for the most dangerous part: The "seven minutes of terror."

The spacecraft would hit the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles an hour and then have just seven minutes to slow itself, using a parachute and then retro-rockets, before hitting the planet's surface. Experts gave the $450 million project a 50/50 chance of surviving the landing. Transmissions take about 20 minutes to reach Earth, so Kounaves and the Phoenix team waited. Maybe it landed on a boulder? Maybe the retro-rockets malfunctioned? Maybe . . . Then the room broke out in cheers as Phoenix sent its first transmission through, a photo from the Martian surface. For Kounaves, it was more than pixels on a screen. It was an emotional message from the robot: "Here I am. I'm fine."

Kounaves spent the next 60 days in Arizona (Earth days, that is; the team lived on Martian time, where a day is about 24.7 hours long, so it was only 58 days to them), analyzing the preliminary data and mapping out the robot's daily tasks. On Thursday, the team announced a major breakthrough when they were able to confirm the presence of water in a soil sample, the first time water was directly touched and analyzed on the planet.

Kounaves says the mission is more than just a moment for him; it is a moment for Tufts, where many of his students worked on the design of the chemical instrument packages.

"They've been very clever about designing chemical instruments that make a lot of sense and should give us a reasonable level of accuracy," said Andrew H. Knoll, a professor in Harvard's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences who worked on a previous Mars mission. "And that's not an easy exercise when you're doing it 100 million miles away."

If he were grading the mission, Knoll said he'd give it an A.

Mars is a long way, and on those nights when he pulls out his telescope and gazes at the heavens, Kounaves still can't believe that he's working so far from home. He'll never go to Mars himself, never realize his sixth-grade dream - but he's close. There's a little part of him up there forever, and that gives him a deep joy.

Phoenix is slated to continue until November, but it landed in a northern region of the planet and a Martian winter is unlike anything we can imagine here on Earth. It will not survive until spring.

"It will be sad," Kounaves concedes. "It's a little robot. It has eyes and an arm. Robots are a personification of people into machines. It tastes and smells. And its chemistry lab is essentially the tongue that allowed us to taste the Martian soil."

He spins again in his chair, his eyes blurring across the sea of Martian photos that cover his walls.

"What could be better than exploring another world?" he asks, though he already knows his answer.

Hometown: Anaconda, Mont.; lives in Winchester.

Education: Kounaves studied chemistry at California State University-San Diego, earning his bachelor's degree in 1975 and master's degree in 1978; went abroad to the University of Geneva for his PhD in chemistry, which he finished in 1985.

Family: Wife, Aileen, works in the women's studies program at Tufts. They met in Switzerland (she's originally from Winchester). They have three children.

Hobbies: Kounaves, who speaks fluent Greek and French, describes himself as an amateur carpenter - a skill he picked up from his father - and, as part of his belief that scientists should be involved in K-12, served five years on the Winchester School Committee. "I resigned a few months ago because I couldn't do both Mars and the school committee," he says, as if that's a good excuse.

Hometown: Anaconda, Mont.; lives in Winchester.

Education: Kounaves studied chemistry at California State University-San Diego, earning his bachelor's degree in 1975 and master's degree in 1978; went abroad to the University of Geneva for his doctorate in chemistry, which he finished in 1985.

Family: Wife, Aileen, works in the women's studies program at Tufts. They met in Switzerland (she's originally from Winchester). They have three children.

Hobbies: Kounaves, who speaks fluent Greek and French, describes himself as an amateur carpenter - a skill he picked up from his father - and, as part of his belief that scientists should be involved in K-12, served five years on the Winchester School Committee. "I resigned a few months ago because I couldn't do both Mars and the school committee," he says, as if that's a good excuse.