The Genesis craft, shown in a NASA illustration, is the size of a
dining table. It will collect material cast off by the sun.

Island man behind
mission to collect
dust in solar wind

The Genesis spacecraft project
manager hails from Hawaii

Interview with a project manager

By Rod Ohira
Star-Bulletin

Kalihi-born Chester "Chet" Sasaki is planning a real 2001 space odyssey for NASA.

Sasaki, 58, is project manager of the $216 million Jet Propulsion Laboratory's "Genesis: Search for Origins" mission, which is scheduled for launch at Cape Canaveral in January 2001.

The Genesis spacecraft will journey toward the sun, collect particles from the solar wind, or material flung from the sun, and bring the material back to Earth in August 2003 for scientists to study.

If successful, the mission will yield the first materials returned from space in the new millennium.

Genesis is the second sample-return mission approved by NASA since 1995.

An ambitious seven-year, $316 million JPL mission called "Stardust" was launched in February to retrieve dust and particles from a comet in Jupiter's inner solar system.

"But Genesis will be the first one back, so it's pretty exciting for us," Sasaki said during a recent vacation here.

"We know what's in the solar wind, so we're fairly sure about what we're going to collect," he added.

But giving scientists samples to analyze could provide some new answers, since the sun contains 99 percent of all material in the solar system, Sasaki said.

"It's like looking at kids in a family who all evolved from the same parent," he said. "Data from Genesis could tell us why planets like Venus and Earth are so different."

The last NASA sample-return mission before Stardust and Genesis occurred when Apollo 11 brought back 842 pounds of moon rock in July 1969, said Sasaki.

An article by Michael Milstein on the new space probes in the February/March 1999 issue of Air & Space/Smithsonian noted the significance of the mission:

"Studying the elemental makeup of today's solar system is like reading the last chapter of a novel and trying to guess everything that happened before.

"All the original characters are still there, though -- not inside the sun, where nuclear fusion has scrambled the evidence, but in its outer layers.

"Pristine samples of the solar nebula should still be found in the million-mile-per-hour stream of charged atoms known as the solar wind, which boils continuously from the sun's surface."

To chase the solar wind, which is deflected by Earth's magnetic field, the Genesis spacecraft will be positioned at a point where the gravitational pulls of Earth and the sun are balanced.

"The big thing for us is finding out how to fly the trajectory," Sasaki said.

"We estimate it'll take three months to get there."

Once in position, the spacecraft will expose its collectors to the solar wind, trapping particles in ultra-pure silicon wafers.

"The big job will be how to get the embedded particles out when we bring it home," Sasaki said. "The technology to do it is not there, but they're working on it."

The Genesis mission is a partnership between JPL, California Institute of Technology, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Johnson Space Center, and the Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory.

Sasaki, whose parents used to own a Shell service station in Kalihi, is a 1959 Farrington High graduate.

"I wanted to be a schoolteacher and never had any big dreams about space," he said. "Now, I find it very exciting."

'It's like looking at kids in
a family who all evolved from
the same parent.'

Chester 'Chet' Sasaki

GENESIS PROJECT MANAGER

After two years at the University of Hawaii, Sasaki transferred to the University of Illinois, where he earned his degree in mechanical engineering in 1964.

While in the Air Force, Sasaki got a master's degree from Arizona State and became an aerospace engineer.

He left the Air Force as a captain in 1976 and went to work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

At JPL, he's worked on projects involving Voyager, the Viking orbiter spacecraft, the Galileo Jupiter mission, and the Infrared Astronomical Satellite.

The Genesis mission is Sasaki's first as a project manager.

"It's a one-shot deal," he said of the mission.

"What we collect from Genesis is going to be good for the next century."

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Interview with a
project manager

A September 1998 interview with Chester Sasaki appears on the Genesis Web site, http://genesismission.jpl.nasa.gov. Here are excerpts:

Question: What is a project manager?

Answer: The job responsibility of the project manager is to manage the resources, schedules and cost elements to achieve the objectives of the project.

Q: What is your everyday work life like?

A: I get in early, about 7ish. I often stay until 6 or 7 p.m. I frequently work four to eight hours on one day of the weekend. About 35 percent of my time is spent in meetings with people, either face to face or on the telephone. Another 35 percent is spent on electronic communications, e-mail and telephone. The remainder of the day I am trying to understand the project. This involves reading, analyzing budgets and cost performances, and visiting schedules. I review everything, but ... try not to micromanage.

Q: What kind of career path led you to become an engineer?

A: I didn't think very hard about what I wanted to be. I was always good at math and science in grade school and high school in Hawaii, so the technical area was a natural to go into. Engineering was available, so I went into that at the University of Hawaii.

Q: What has been the most surprising thing about your education and career history?

A: Becoming project manager for Genesis ... the opportunity came out of the blue.

Q: What advice can you give to young engineers?

A: Just the age-old thing that never rings true to young people. I didn't believe it when I was younger. "Do something you like."