Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Winter 2013 | Page 25

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Roger Wiens ’82 is seen (top left) interviewing with the BBC during the return of the Genesis Mission
from space, and (top right) working on the ChemCam laser instrument, now operating on NASA’s Curiosity
rover. Doug Wiens ’80 (lower left) stands by his sleep tent at a science camp in the middle of Antarctica,
about 300 miles from the South Pole, and (lower right) builds an enclosure for a seismograph and batteries
while in Cameroon, West Africa, looking at the source of the lava in the earth beneath a line of volcanoes.

many young boys, brothers Doug ’80 and Roger ’82 Wiens
spent most of their paper-route money building and launching model
rockets. In 1971, they made a telescope to gaze at Mars when Mariner
9 narrowly beat the Russians to become the first spacecraft to orbit the
Red Planet.
In August 2012, the brothers were among the millions who watched
the “seven minutes of terror” as NASA’s Curiosity rover successfully
touched down in a Martian crater to begin its search for signs of past
life. But Roger had a special interest: he pioneered the much-talkedabout ChemCam laser that will study Martian rocks by vaporizing
spots on them.
“When I graduated from sixth grade, my classmates prognosticated
that I’d be the first person on Mars,” said Roger, now a senior scientist

at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and principal
investigator of NASA’s ChemCam project. “I’m very happy to settle
for having an instrument there.”
While Roger’s work post-Wheaton has taken him figuratively to
the heavens, older brother Doug’s has taken him to the depths.
In January, Doug, now a seismologist and chair of the Department of
Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis,
will travel to the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench in order to retrieve
data from seismographs placed four miles underwater along the
deepest point on earth.
Doug and Roger aren’t the only pair of alumni brothers expanding
the boundaries of scientific knowledge. Chris ’05 and Andrew ’09
Ewert have turned a family hobby of hacking the computers on their
W H E A T O N     23