Mike Robinson wasn't drawn to
the space program like other kids. But once he was in, he found it was too
much fun to leave.
"More important than how I got into it is why I stayed," said
Robinson, the MSL-1 mission scientist. "I've enjoyed it. I've always
thought that we're just starting to scratch the surface of critical experiments."
That work involves undercooling of molten metals, an area where Robinson
has worked for most of his 25 years with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.
Although it sounds like a contradiction, liquids can stay liquid far below
their normal freezing point if they are pure and are cooled slowly and gently.
Understanding how a metal behaves when it is deeply undercooled will help
materials scientists on Earth refine how they make advanced materials for
the 21st century. Deep undercooling of certain alloys can form glasslike
metals with unique properties.
"We're looking at whether you can get deeper undercooling in space,"
Robinson explained. "If the answer is 'no,' then we shouldn't be doing
it in space. If the answer is 'yes,' then we open a whole new avenue of
research."
Looking for that answer uses part of the recipe for making buckshot.
"I've spent most of my career at the drop tube," a 105-meter (344-foot)
vacuum tube. Metal samples are melted at the top and dropped and allowed
to cool during the 4.5-second fall. About 5,000 times, according to Robinson.
"I've worked with 30 principal investigators from across the country,
and countless co-investigators" over the years of using the drop tube,
he said. "Working with the drop tube and containerless processing is
very interesting."
He has also worked with experiments aboard suborbital rockets and NASA's
KC-135 training jet (aka, the Vomit Comet), and most recently, aboard the
Space Shuttle. In 1994 he was the U.S. project scientist for a German flight
program called TEMPUS which uses electromagnetic fields to position a sample
in the middle of a furnace while in orbit aboard the Space Shuttle.
As the mission scientist for MSL-1, Robinson is the lead scientist representing
all the mission's investigators, helping ensure that their scientific objectives
and needs are met within the resources available from the spacecraft.
His office is filled with stacks of experiment data and tapes from experiments
with the drop tube and TEMPUS's first flight. As one might expect in a scientist's
office, one wall has a periodic chart of the elements. Another has a "Far
Side" cartoon of a bear waving a hunter to put the cross hairs on his
buddy, an allusion to Robinson's love of bow hunting every fall. More important
are the non-professional drawings from his sons, Jonathan, 14, and Matt,
16. Near the front of his desk is a baseball autographed by the Little Leage
team he coached a few years ago (they won the league championship).
"Both kids are into space," he said. "They talk about what
I do on the missions and we put together the little cardboard cutout models
that we get." They also have visited the drop tube.
At the same age, he was not as interested in space, but got involved because
NASA's education outreach program offered him a co-op position in 1972 as
a co-op while he was a student at Tennessee Technical University. After
graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor's in physics, he joined Marshall
full time, then started work on a master's in physics at the University
of Alabama in Huntsville. In 1988 earned his doctorate in materials science
at Vanderbilt University where his advisor was Dr. Robert Bayuzick, another
investigator at the drop tube and on TEMPUS.
After MSL-1, "I'll be a full time research scientist again," studying
data from TEMPUS and continuing experiments on the drop tube. Still, going
from the Shuttle's few hours of free-fall experiment time down to the tube's
few seconds of experiment time will be a change. He would like to go in
the other direction.
"There's a lot you can do with the drop tube," he said. "There's
a lot you can do with Space Shuttle. But it's hard to beat the long flights
where you can afford to make mistakes. With space station, you can do riskier
experiments that you couldn't do on a 16-day mission. You can be more adventurous
- and that is what experimentation is all about."
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Authors: Dave
Dooling, Mike
Robinson
Curator: Linda Porter
NASA Official: Greg
Wilson