Mike crossing a stream in Katmai National Monument in Alaska, where I was studying the results of a large volcanic eruption in 1912 (my pack, weighing 40 kg (90 pounds), includes four cameras!)

Getting Started

I decided to work in a space-related field when I was very young. Exactly when I cannot remember, but I clipped articles from newspapers that described rocket flights several years before the first satellites were orbited (when I was 5 or 6 years old). Throughout my education, I studied as much science as I could, in class, by going to the public library and reading, and by visiting the Griffith Park Planetarium (in Los Angeles, where I grew up). I continued to keep a scrapbook of newpaper and magazine articles until I went to college. At first, I wanted to be an astrophysicist (a combination of astronomer and physicist), but in college I became interested in the geology of other planets and pursued that direction of study. During my undergraduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley (I received a B.A. degree in physics, with a minor in English literature), I worked for two professors who were studying samples brought back from the Moon. When I went to graduate school (at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena), I worked with a professor who was part of the Mariner 9 camera team and the leader of the Mariner 10 camera team.