Curiosity

by Rod Pyle

  In the interim, the rover moved toward an overlook called Point Lake to use the Mastcam to map out routes for the next sequence of drives. On the way, it used the APXS for a couple of “touch-and-go” quickie examinations and fired the ChemCam laser for its analysis.

  Also during this time, a dust storm kicked up on the planet and was first spotted from orbit. Curiosity noted a consequential shift in atmospheric pressure, and between it and the orbiters, scientists were able to track the storm's progress. It lasted over two weeks. While this Martian gale never got very close to those experienced by either Opportunity or Curiosity, another type of storm was brewing. It too involved Mars, but this one took place on Earth and centered on JPL itself…

  What a difference a few words make. Specifically, the five in the title of this chapter. The small firestorm these few words caused—a media sensation in terms of planetary exploration—were way out of proportion to the content. The media went wild for a few days and then embarked on a predatory, extended three-week watch over JPL and NASA.

  Up front: John Grotzinger is a smart man. By the end of any of our hour-long sessions together when I was interviewing him for this book, my brain hurt. It's that much work just keeping up, and he was taking it easy on me. As I have meekly mentioned here and there, I have some basic education in geology, which served me well for all of about ten minutes…then we would get to the material that felt more appropriate for the graduate students. Or at Caltech, the undergrads…in the first session of the first class. You get the idea. Thankfully, as a writer all I need to do is take notes and try to ask seemingly intelligent questions, based on what I had learned in the preceding discussion. But even that could leave one gasping.

  That's one writer's point of view. There are a lot of very smart science writers out there, and one of them is Joe Palca of National Public Radio (NPR). His coverage of the MSL mission was as good as everything else he does—which is really good. But quality does not necessarily sidestep controversy, often quite the opposite is true, even if that controversy is unintended. And here is where the tale gets interesting.

  In late November 2012, about four months after Curiosity began surface operations, Palca filed a story on NPR. In it, he narrated and produced an edit of the following exchange. He had earlier spent an afternoon with Grotzinger in his JPL office conducting an interview on mission progress. The SAM instrument had ingested the first sample and had done its job.

  On NPR's Morning Edition of November 20, 2012:

  Palca: “The lead scientist for the Mars rover mission is John Grotzinger. I interviewed him in his office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena last week. While I was setting up my equipment, Grotzinger was glued to his computer screen.”

  Grotzinger's voice: “We're getting data from SAM as we sit here and speak.”

  Palca injects a verbal definition of what SAM does.

  Grotzinger continues: “The data looks really interesting. The science team is busily chewing away on it.”

  Palca then says to the audience, “Right now, SAM is working on a Mars soil sample, and Grotzinger says the results are earth-shaking.”

  Back to Grotzinger's interview: “This data is going to be one for the history books. It's looking really good.”

  The interview continued, but that's the important part.

  To be fair to Palca, the exchange was apparently reported accurately. It was a good story on the events of the day. What got everyone's attention were the statement “Grotzinger says the results are earth-shaking.” Then there were Grotzinger's words, “This data is going to be one for the history books.” It was not said in a way that implied anything more than good, exciting science.

  But that's not what the rest of the media heard.

  In a feeding frenzy that built on itself for the next twenty-four hours, the headlines grew from this simple story like a Chia Pet on steroids, or if you were a part of the NASA PR machine, perhaps more like an outbreak of the Ebola virus. Popular Science online said: “What ‘Earth-Shaking’ Evidence Did the Mars Rover Curiosity Find?” Many other outlets took the statements badly out of context; some outright embellished them. A few headlines misquoted even Palca, saying “earth-shattering,” which is somewhat different.

  More placid accounts, such as those from Space.com, used language more befitting the situation, like “Mars Mystery,” or “Has Curiosity Rover Made Big Discovery?” which at least leaves the main points open to the reader's speculation without breathlessly churning the facts or deliberately misquoting anyone.

  Understandably, to anyone following the mission with a modicum of attention, when someone talks about a major discovery (not Grotzinger's words, mind you) with the SAM instrument after a soil analysis, the first thing that sprang to the minds of many was a possible indication of organic carbon. Certain isotopic numbers can indicate organic forms of carbon, and most of us would love for that to mean a biological origin. But that's a long leap, and not what was being said here at all.

  Soon other outlets were trumpeting headlines like “So, What Is NASA Curiosity's History-Changing Discovery?” (from the Wire via Yahoo News) or News.com's “Life on Mars? Curiosity Rover Stirs Excitement.” The LA Times said it thus: “NASA Dangles Big, Secret Mars Discovery, but We Don't Want to Wait.” Really? I certainly didn't perceive any “dangling” occurring.

  The public-relations operation at JPL now had a problem. Publicity is great, and planetary exploration can use all the help and recognition it can get. But nobody wants to be misquoted, or even mis-contextualized. Though it was nearly sixteen years before, a lot of people remembered the now-infamous news conference about the Martian meteorite from Antarctica that had appeared to have possible fossils of microorganisms preserved inside. While the case is still open in some people's minds, the announcement was sufficiently premature by scientific measures that it did not take long for dissenting voices to say “Not so fast!” and eventually the story died an ugly death (the recent discovery of some possibly biologically caused water migration in another Mars meteorite has reopened the question). Nobody at JPL, Caltech, or NASA wanted a repeat of that fiasco.

  Within days, Guy Webster was quoted as saying, “It [the story] won't be Earth-shaking, but it will be interesting…the whole mission is one for the history books.” It was an accurate assessment, and a valid attempt at informing the public without getting bogged down in details that needed to be delivered at length by the science team. But that is not the message most people wanted to hear (especially the clamoring journalists), and in the inevitable backlash, headlines such as this from the International Business Times came along: “Mars Rover Curiosity's ‘Huge Discovery’ a Dud…” It cited NASA as “breathlessly announcing” a discovery by Curiosity and cited Grotzinger as the source of “hype,” which was patently wrong and unfair, across the board.

  Unfortunately, NASA went quiet on the story at that point. Informal discussions with concerned parties at JPL indicated that they had been told, as a group, to not discuss the story for the time being.

  Grotzinger, understandably, stayed away from the microphones for a while. An announcement was made that the “discovery” would be discussed at the American Geophysical Union's conference in San Francisco on December 3, 2012. The date was not very far away, but the wait was agonizing, even though expectations had been dampened. The press, with its ever-voracious twenty-four-hour news cycle, does not like being told to wait.

  Full disclosure: within days of the first announcement, I inadvertently waded into this steamy territory. I had already shot a long video interview with Grotzinger, and before releasing it added a comment about a possible mystery within the Curiosity mission's findings—it was within that first twenty-four hours and my brain also whispered “Could it be organic molecules?” While my media statement was not technically inaccurate as such, the timing could have been better—and when I realized the immensity of the “history books” brushfire, I was not thrilled at being even the smallest part of it
. I was also writing about Mars for the Huffington Post in the same time frame, and I filed a story about this subject somewhat later, but my angle was more focused on the AGU conference and why NASA had treated the story the way it did leading up to the conference. End of disclaimer.

  On November 29, the outside world got a tidbit from JPL's media operation:

  PASADENA, Calif. —The next news conference about the NASA Mars rover Curiosity will be held at 9 a.m. PST Monday, Dec. 3, in San Francisco at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

  Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect. The news conference will be an update about first use of the rover's full array of analytical instruments to investigate a drift of sandy soil. One class of substances Curiosity is checking for is organic compounds—carbon-containing chemicals that can be ingredients for life. At this point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics.

  This was the most we'd heard since the whole dustup began, and it was a pretty conclusive announcement: there will be an MSL panel presenting results of the SAM analyses, and it's not anything “earth-shaking” (remember, those were Palca's words, not Grotzinger's). Fair enough—take a deep breath and regain some composure, media people.

  On December 3, the conference began, and a gaggle of press converged on the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Wisely, the conference's organizers had placed the Curiosity panel's main presentation at the front of the program. Once the panel had concluded an hour later, the press thinned dramatically—think of it as media attention-deficit syndrome. Everyone had seen the previous week's announcement from JPL but wanted to hear it from Grotzinger himself, and they did.

  Michael Meyer from NASA headquarters began the session by giving a capsule description of the mission's progress since landing. Our friend Ken Edgett then described the sample-gathering activities in some detail. Ralf Gellert, who works on the APXS instrument, discussed the sand drift (at Rocknest) that had been sampled. Then the moment so many had been waiting for was nigh: Paul Mahaffy, the principal investigator for SAM, spoke about the test results.

  “We really consider this a milestone, the two instruments buried inside Curiosity got their first gulp of Mars material,” he began. “It really is a rich data set.” He talked about the significance of both SAM and CheMin, as the reporters leaned forward in their seats. What was the announcement? “I'm going to talk about the highlights of the SAM data, the volatiles or gases released from these samples.” Ah, here it was. Pens were poised above writing pads in anticipation, video cameras were rolling.

  Fig. 24.1. STRAIGHT TALK: After two weeks of out-of-control press reactions, John Grotzinger sets the record straight about what Curiosity “found” on Mars. The early results of the SAM analysis of the soil did indicate organics, but it could not be confirmed that they were of Martian origin—they might have been earthly contaminants or organic material from a stray meteor. The analysis would continue, and he counseled “patience.” Image from JPL-Caltech/NASA/AGU.

  “Let me start off by saying: SAM has no definitive detection to report of organic compounds with this first set of experiments.” Drat.

  “It's not unexpected that this sand pile would not be rich in organics, as it's been exposed to the harsh Martian environment, and we really selected the site in order to scrub out the sample-processing system….” Okay, so the soil had been baking in Martian UV for eons, and was selected as much for its cleansing properties as anything else. Got it.

  He talked a bit more about how both atmospheric and soil samples were selected, ingested, and evaluated. He then discussed the relevance of isotopic numbers in test results. Graphs were shown and discussed—this was, after all, an academic conference, not simply a press-op. He then described some of the hydrocarbon atoms that had in fact been detected, and he qualified that finding: “The reason we are saying that we don't have a definitive detection of Martian organics is that we have to be very careful to make sure that both the carbon and the chlorine are coming from Mars. For example, we have to make sure that the carbon is not coming from any residual terrestrial carbon that we have in our system, or the carbon, for example, could also come from inorganic carbon, the CO2 you saw released on the earlier graphic. And as the perchlorate [in the soil] breaks up, it might produce, for example, a hydrochloric acid that reacts with some of the carbon and forms these compounds, so there is more work to do.” He concluded, “Just one final point…in this very exposed material, that is exposed to the harsh environment of Mars, there are many processes that could destroy even the organic material that we expect falls in from space….” He mentioned that cosmic rays, UV, and atmospheric hydrogen peroxide, among others, could toast any organic substances in the soil, “so it will really be an exciting hunt over the course of this mission to find early environments that might be protected from this harsh surface Mars environment and see what we can add to the hydrocarbon and organics story.” He concluded his comments and passed the baton to Grotzinger. It did seem that the “mystery” story was all but dead, replaced by a sober and reasoned description of mission progress and possibilities for the future.

  When Grotzinger came on screen, he was a bit more somber than I'd seen before—it had been a tough month. I would imagine that his mind had a number of word traps in place; true and honest enthusiasm needed, apparently, to be expressed with some care. It is indeed lonely at the top.

  “Okay, I just want to reiterate something that Paul just concluded with, that the instrument SAM is working perfectly well, and it has made this detection of organic compounds, simple organic compounds, we just simply don't know if they are indigenous to Mars or not. It's going to take us some time to work through that, I know that there is a lot of interest in that…” You can say that again! “But the point is that Curiosity's middle name is patience, and we all need to have a healthy dose of that, and the reason why is—I'm going to come back to our soil for a minute and try to give an example of that.

  “We had to do a lot of work to make sure that this [sample] was some garden-variety, typical Martian soil. We didn't want something that was adventurous, because if we thought that was the case—based on our preliminary assessment using the APXS and the ChemCam instruments—if we thought we had something that was going to be chemically very difficult to work with, we probably would not have immediately put it into the machine. Instead we went through a very long set of triage experiments to make sure that this material would not undergo a state change and maybe evolve water or something while it was in the rover, so we were very careful, and this took about a week or ten days to work through before we could do the first analysis.” In short, they wanted a vanilla-plain sample generally representative of most Martian soil that would not do anything unduly weird.

  “So being hopeful that there was no gunk that we were passing into the rover, we went ahead to the next step, and what's interesting is that if there is one—if I can try to capture everything you have heard here as simply as possible, what we have is a globally representative material, on Mars, that turns out to also be a rich repository of environmental process and history. And that's what we are trying to do with this mission as we go about assessing habitable environments.

  “Every day, we turn on an instrument…but you don't really know if it's going to work until you have actually done a measurement. And then once you have done a measurement, you wonder how well it has done compared to all the calibration and baseline testing you have done before you launched the spacecraft. So we go through that each day, and as we turn these on, as one of our team members from Texas decided to call them, we have a hootin’ and hollerin’ moment, and everybody is jumping up and down in the science team and we get excited about that. But in the end what happens with the SAM instrument in particular is this: SAM comes last. It's at the tail end of the sample-processing chain and is an extremely complicated instrument—it's p
ractically its own mission. When it works for the first time, we have a hootin’ and hollerin’ moment. But when it works for the second time, you get something that all scientists live by, which is a repeat analysis. You see that what you saw the first time is probably not going to go away, and then, when you do the third sample and the configuration is pretty much the same as it was the first time, you believe that maybe this might just be one for the history books.” There it was—a clear explanation of what the statement had been intended to mean, of his mind-set at the time he uttered those ultimately (and unwittingly) incendiary words. It made sense. “That this [result] will stand the test of time as a legitimate analysis of the surface of Mars. That's where we were with the excitement by the science team. The nature of scientific discovery, especially in this business is also very important: we live by multiple working hypotheses. As Paul mentioned, even though his instrument detected organic compounds, we have to first demonstrate that they are indigenous to Mars, then, after that, we can question whether they represent the background fall of cosmic materials that are organic in composition and fall onto the surface of every terrestrial planet,” these would be things like the carbonaceous chondrite meteors described in a previous chapter, “then, after that, we can get into the more complex question of whether or not this might be some kind of biological material. But that is way down the road for us…

  “Finally, serendipity. As any one of us who has worked on Earth understands, on a planet teeming with life, you can look at rocks that are billions of years old, and the probability of finding something that is a sign of life, or even something as simple as an organic material, those discoveries are so rare that every time we find one, it makes it into Science and Nature [two academic, peer-reviewed journals]. Every new occurrence is a major discovery. So we have to take our time, and it is going to take a bit of luck, and it is serendipity because we are going to think it through well ahead of time and go about this exploration in the most intelligent way that we can, using all of our instruments. This mission is about integrated science, there is not going to be one single moment where we all stand up and on the basis of a single measurement have a hallelujah moment. What it is going to take is everything that you heard from my colleagues and all the other PI's [Principal Investigators, the researchers whose experiments were selected to fly on Curiosity] and their instruments, we are going to pull it all together, take our time, and then if we have found something significant we will be happy to report that.”