Victor Szebehely passed away in the fall of 1997, only a few weeks after I started graduate school. Roger Broucke was my new advisor. Steve Nerem, my orbital mechanics professor that fall, tried to convince me not to study celestial mechanics. But I insisted. Dr. Nerem moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder a semester or two later (damn, I coulda gone to Colorado…)
In the spring of 1988, around March, I spoke with Dr. Broucke about a Master’s Thesis project. We hit it right off. He was a FORTRAN guru. I was a computer locknut myself – in dBase, which has the same structure and commands as FORTRAN – and I said I wanted to do a computer model of the Mars trajectory.
This wasn’t a completely random decision on my part, given the 6 or 8 Mars missions that had failed lately. It was exactly one year since my seminar in Victor Szebehely’s class. It seemed like if all I needed was time to finish my solar system model, studying an interplanetary trajectory like Mars was just the thing to get there.
I learned the basics of setting up the Mars code in Steve Nerem’s class, and a few more details in PAM Abusali’s astrodynamics class that spring. Dr. Abusali brought me a paper on NASA’s standard five-thrust trajectory model, and I was off to the races.