Next July, NASA’s Casini spacecraft will complete its seven-year voyage to Saturn. As Casini arrives, it will drop a scientific probe that will plunge through the thick atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, feeding data on Titan’s climate back to Earth.

That data, according to NASA researcher Michael Allison ’73, may someday help people make more accurate predictions of Earth’s weather. “We like to think that by studying the atmospheres of other planets and their moons, we may be able to understand our own complex climate better,” said Allison, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.

Titan is shrouded under an opaque hydrocarbon haze. Below that, Allison thinks the probe will find an atmosphere with winds of 200 miles an hour and clouds of methane, a mixture deadly to humans. “Part of the fun of these missions is looking for confirmation of our predictions,” said Allison, who has worked on the Saturn project for two decades. “But part of the fun is finding completely unexpected things. I hope there will be some surprises.”

Drawn to space as a child, Allison remembers watching Russia’s pioneering Sputnik satellite pass overhead in 1957. But lackluster high school science courses dulled his interest, and as he entered Wittenberg, he considered becoming an English teacher. Thanks to a physics course, however, he found his interest in space re-ignited by the physics faculty.

As one of only three physics majors in his graduating class, Allison enjoyed a lot of individualized attention from the faculty. Beyond that, he said, Wittenberg’s broad course requirements expanded his horizons and taught him to formulate the kind of questions that help drive scientific research.

“More than anything, science depends on asking good questions, and more than anything, the liberal arts are concerned with the asking of good questions,” he said. “It’s part of thinking big. That’s a quality nourished in a liberal arts education that you don’t always find in a technical school.” — Douglas McInnis