Our First Martians
Mike Malin and Ken Edgett are right at home on the red planet
Obsessed? The credit goes to Malin's master camera-making and both men's skill at geological analysis of images. Like many successful researchers, they are also fired by passions that date from childhood and verge on obsession. Malin and Edgett are the nearest things to Martians humanity has yet produced.
Malin still has the space scrapbook he started as a 5-year-old in Burbank, Calif., its first entry a newspaper photo of a V-2 rocket at White Sands (N.M.) Missile Range. In high school he built camera-toting rockets from aluminum tubing and ceramic nozzles he cast himself, sending them soaring thousands of feet above the Mojave desert. At the University of California-Berkeley, while others covered radical 1960s politics for the Daily Cal student paper, he wrote of Apollo.
The Mars bug bit at Caltech when Malin, then a geology grad student, was enlisted to catalog some 10,000 images from the Mariner IX Mars mission. Most researchers turned away from Mars by the mid-1980s, following the failure of the Viking landers to find life, but Malin, by then a young faculty member at Arizona State University, persisted. "He was always a maverick," said Caltech's Arden Albee, chief scientist for Mars Global Surveyor, who flatly says Malin has done more than any other Mars scientist in the past 10 years. "He hates being told what to do."
In 1987 Malin won a MacArthur "genius grant" fellowship. Never married, free to spend the money as he liked, he used it to help start his space camera and photo analysis company in 1990, with NASA as the prime client. The setup lets Malin take part in the space program while partly insulating him from bureaucracy.
His acolyte Edgett got started on Mars even younger. In 1975 his fourth-grade teacher in Rochester, N.Y., assigned the class to write a story, and thus was born "The Legend of Joe the Martian." Edgett wrote four more Joe stories on his own. A year later he inhaled news of the Viking landings. "They made Mars real for me," he recalls. The 10-year-old memorized Martian locales, savoring such exotica as Chryse Planitia, Utopia, Valles Marineris, and the mighty volcano Olympus Mons. After studies at Arizona State, he signed on with Malin and his new company. And recently he returned to his roots, coauthoring a children's book, Touchdown Mars: An ABC Adventure, about kids who fly there with their cat.
The pair are hardly twins. Edgett is friendly and easygoing, "a huggy bear," as one old friend from grad school called him. Malin is all fire and tightly wound ambition, and more than a few other scientists are wary of him. He now turns loose all accumulated MOC images every six months, but early on colleagues accused him of hoarding data, even refusing to lend images. (Malin retorts that some co-investigators backed out on deals to help run the camera and says that he was better about sharing data than some scientists on earlier missions.) Another colleague recalls Malin brutally denigrating competitors' instruments. "It can take a compulsive person to succeed in this business, and Mike is that," says Murray of his former grad student. "I think his temperament is in some ways like the old Antarctic explorers, a Scott or Shackleton."
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