As a summer intern during his undergraduate years at Cornell University, Michael Mischna had a job helping prepare the daily weather forecast for WNYW-TV in New York City. By the time he left Cornell with his bachelor's degree in meteorology, he was combining his interest in weather with a long-time passion for the planets. The work he's doing as a graduate student at UCLA could someday prepare him to become the first weatherman on Mars.

In the meantime, he's looking for water. Ice that remains in the polar cap on Mars, plus evidence of dried river beds and lake shores, provides "a strong hint that there used to be liquid water somewhere on the Martian surface," Michael says. "The interesting question is where's that water hiding?" The question becomes even more interesting when one considers that water sustains life on Earth—and may have done so on Mars as well.

Michael's interests in weather and planets first came together another summer at Cornell, when a research project provided an opportunity to take pictures of Mars from the Hubble Space Telescope. "I was following individual clouds in the atmosphere and using the motion of clouds in the atmosphere to determine which way the winds were blowing," Michael says. "No one had ever done that before." Michael learned that despite a thinner atmosphere and a more dramatic topography, Mars had prevailing winds similar to those on Earth. He published his findings, not only in a senior honors thesis, but also as first author of an article in Geophysical Research Letters.

At Penn State for a master's degree, Michael began to examine the questions that underlie his dissertation: Where is the water on Mars, and where has it been in the past? Looking at clouds made of dry ice in the atmosphere, Michael theorized that by bouncing heat back to the planet, those clouds might produce something of a greenhouse effect, causing a warmer climate.

With his interest focused on Mars, it's not surprising that Michael found his way to UCLA, where Professor David Paige was chief scientist on the Mars Polar Lander mission. Michael would have been one of the scientists working with the meteorological instruments, if not for the fact that the spacecraft crashed in 1999. Instead of theoretical findings, Michael discovered pragmatic lessons: "Don't base your doctoral thesis on results from a spacecraft, and always have a backup plan."

Indeed, there are a number of ways "to look at Mars" without actually landing a spacecraft there. One of the most promising is computer modeling, which uses data from satellites and knowledge about conditions on Earth. Michael's "model of the Martian atmosphere, its circulation and its radiation, attacks the problem of Mars' climate at a very fundamental level," says his adviser, Professor David Paige. "It will have the ability to make a smooth transition from the current Mars conditions to much warmer and wetter conditions and have the ability to simulate everything in between."

Michael hopes to "predict backward"—to calculate what Mars might have been like in the past based on what we see now. Like Earth, Mars spins on an axis, but the tilt of the Mars axis changes over time, Michael says. This is due to the fact that Mars's smaller moons aren't as stabilizing as Earth's single large moon, and Mars has Jupiter for a nextdoor neighbor, with significant gravitational consequences.

Michael believes the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide on Mars might have once heated the surface enough to sustain life, before the tilt of the planet on its axis changed enough to turn the environment cold again, too cold for life to survive.

Besides contributing to Professor Paige's broader work on Mars, Michael assists in research by Mark Richardson, a former Paige graduate student now at Caltech, who is also studying Mars weather.

Models are not the only way to study Mars. Another option is to visit Iceland, the earthbound place with a terrain and topography "that most closely mimic Mars," Michael says. He spent ten days at the Mars Polar Science Conference in Reykjavik, three of them in the field observing glaciers, past glacier floods, and other phenomena.

Of course, the best way would be to land human scientists on Mars itself, and Michael believes this will happen within his lifetime. Since he was seven or so, watching the launch of the first Space Shuttle, Michael has dreamed of being an astronaut, and his skills certainly could prove useful to a crew on that first Mars expedition.

His backup plan, however, is to find an academic job where he can combine research with another love, teaching. "I like taking a topic that sounds difficult and breaking it down in simple steps that people can understand," he says. Michael loves "the wide-eyed look" of non-science majors when they begin his general education course, The Origin and Evolution of the Solar System, and their eventual understanding of the material. Unlike the proverbial rocket scientist, he tells his students: "What I do is no more difficult than what anybody does."

Published in Winter 2003, Graduate Quarterly