by Roger Wiens
Within two months of moving, NASA announced the short list for the next Discovery mission. Genesis was a finalist once again. The engineering team came back to life. The whole team worked feverishly to improve upon an already mature mission concept. We redetermined spacecraft trajectories, built mock-ups of the payload and subjected them to vibration tests and drop tests, and constructed a mock-up capsule. And we faithfully studied the issue of winds at the landing site. The team agonized over this risk, but there was not much to be done; the truth was that the danger from wind was very low. In our view, the chances of something else going wrong were much higher.
We went through the rehearsals again and eventually reached the day of the presentation to the NASA review team. This time there was no Jim Martin. And everything went smoothly—no table-pounding, no major questions. We congratulated each other, went home, and waited to hear the outcome.
About a month later my phone rang. It was Don Burnett. “Let’s move ’em out! We’ve been picked for the next Discovery mission!”
A group of us who worked on the project ran through the halls, exclaiming to anyone who would listen that Genesis had been chosen. If it had been up to me, we would have gotten the work done on pure enthusiasm. Most of the specialists who worked with us were encouraging, as our group prided itself in having the most fascinating projects in the whole laboratory. The first ever robotic sample-return mission was about as good as it got. But it would be a race against time. “Faster, better, cheaper” really did mean faster, and we now had only twenty-seven months to go from nothing to fully developed and tested instruments.
The Genesis instrument team in Los Alamos started to come together. A more experienced colleague would work with me on the solar-wind concentrator and lead the technical team on its construction. This arrangement provided the flight experience that I lacked. Another colleague, Bruce Barraclough, would be in charge of two instruments designed to monitor the solar wind’s speed and temperature and some magnetic field parameters. Bruce, although a longtime veteran of building space instruments, was in some respects an unlikely instrument manager. He had started out majoring in the sciences, like the rest of us, but had tired of it. He had been studying at the University of Hawaii, which seemed to him like the ideal place to go to school. But after he met his wife, Maureen, they both got bit by what might be called the island syndrome. They quit school, moved to a remote part of Hawaii, and lived with the island farmers for several years. Bruce never revealed what brought them back to civilization, but somehow he ended up back at school and then at Los Alamos managing spacecraft instruments. His wardrobe consisted of a good assortment of Hawaiian shirts, and he wore flip-flops year-round. Bruce had a way with people, and he was great at organizing new projects. There wasn’t a person that he didn’t get along with, and having been there for twenty years, he was friends with everyone. Although he was more laid back than most managers, the work somehow always got done.
Our new team fixed its attention first on how to design the solar-wind concentrator. People had previously built devices bearing slight resemblance to it, but those had been far smaller. One feature in common was the grids, essentially glorified window-screen material that, when high voltage was applied, acted like lenses to steer the ions to a target. For our instrument, the grid would have to be almost 1.5 feet in diameter. We wanted to optimize its throughput, but the grids with the highest throughput were also the most fragile. The traditional kind of grid used in these instruments was formed as a single piece of metal grown on a template, as opposed to a window screen–like mesh with many separate wires. First we had a company manufacture a one-piece grid that we thought would do the best job. We knew that the highest throughput would come from a hexagonal pattern instead of from square holes. After paying handsomely for a prototype, we tested it by mounting it and rapidly cooling it, as would happen at times in space. Right away it tore—badly. We realized we had a problem on our hands.
We immediately began querying our colleagues as to whether stronger grids existed. As we scoured catalogs and websites, we found a lot of grids, but they were nearly all woven, built from multiple wires. Would such a design work? Advice from spacecraft experts was inconclusive. One big question was the issue of projectiles: What would happen if a micrometeoroid hit the grid and broke one or more of the wires? Would the whole thing unravel? We couldn’t have wires pulling loose or sticking out, as that would surely lead to an electrical short.
The traditional way to investigate micrometeoroid effects was to go to a specialized test facility. I had done some of my dissertation work at Johnson Space Center’s impact laboratory, run by a short but energetic German named Fred Horz. He loaded explosives into a small cannon, which would fire down a long vacuum tube to a target chamber. The problem with this approach was that it took weeks to arrange and cost a lot of money. Genesis was a rapid, low-budget mission, so we had neither time nor funding for such a test.
With no other options, we took a low-brow approach. We drove our grid to the local sportsman’s club to shoot it up. The bullets were bigger and slower than micrometeoroids, but they would have to do. On a whim, I called the lab cameraman and told him what we were going to do. He was not busy that morning, so three of us met at the range: Bruce with his rifle, our cameraman, and me bringing the grid. We set up our target and put a few holes in it. The grid wire didn’t unravel or misbehave in any way. We were delighted to find that we had made good, clean holes.
We also tested the grids to see how they handled heat and cold—a major concern with any material being sent to space. An adviser had predicted that the tiny wires, thinner than a human hair, would undergo a phase change and shrink irreversibly if we cooled them. Such shrinking would be catastrophic to the structure of the grids. So we mounted a grid to its frame and, after calling our cameraman again, dipped it in a large pan filled with liquid nitrogen, which has a temperature of –196°C (–321°F). We analyzed the grid wires under an electron microscope before and after this and saw that no shrinkage had occurred. These tiny stainless-steel wires were tough.
One final test was needed: How much would the grids wrinkle when they expanded in the warm sunlight? We had a way to map, or determine, the shape of the grids when they were at room temperature. Dan Reisenfeld, another colleague, had built and tested a mapping station that scanned little lasers across the front of the instrument to check for wrinkles. We had thermal chambers that could heat the whole instrument, but it wouldn’t be the same as mapping the instrument in sunlight. JPL and a few other places had solar illumination chambers, but again, they were very expensive and usually subscribed many months in advance with whole spacecraft. So we took the low-brow approach: one of us found a company located in Hollywood that sold spotlights. We researched the product and found that the company’s lamps were almost the same as the spotlights used in some of the solar-illumination test chambers. So we bought one for $4,000, twenty times cheaper than the engineering versions, and had it delivered in about a week. Our tests on the concentrator grids turned out well and gave us the confidence we needed that the instrument would work.
This low-budget do-it-yourself spirit was representative of our experience with Genesis, as well as the new regime of NASA’s small robotic missions.
As I focused on the concentrator, little was getting done on the solar-wind monitors—the two instruments in Bruce’s charge. Because the monitors looked relatively easy, and nearly identical to other instruments our group had built, Bruce had procrastinated, Hawaiian style. And rather than making several generations of prototypes and test models, as we did with the concentrator, we intended to go straight into building the flight units. There wasn’t much time left. These instruments consisted of curved, flattened tubes through which the solar-wind ions or electrons fly, with a detector at the end. Electronic circuits converted the minute signals provided by single ions or electrons into numerical counts of these particles at different energies and, in the case of ions, charge-to-ma
ss ratios. We normally designed the tubes and the electronics and procured the detectors from a specialized manufacturer. The schedule indicated that our highest priority was ordering the detectors immediately. Getting them was going to take some time. First, the part specifications and price had to be agreed upon, then we had to process a pile of paperwork to order parts from overseas, as we had previously used a small company in Germany, and finally the order could be placed. We offered extra money for faster delivery, but Horst, the German manufacturer, had several orders stacked up, and it was only a two-person operation.
Weeks later, the detectors finally came—but when we tested them, they didn’t work! We puzzled over the problem for several days and finally called the manufacturer to let him know. He was baffled. He eventually instructed us to order additional units, promising more testing in Germany to ensure that they were working before he sent them. We ordered these units, but when they were delivered eight weeks later, we found that these didn’t work either. It was past the date we were scheduled to deliver the instruments to the spacecraft and less than a year to launch. This instrument was totally nonfunctional, and we didn’t even know what the detectors’ problem was. Worse, this instrument controlled the concentrator voltages and directed the different solar-wind collectors. Without the detectors, and this instrument, we didn’t have a mission.
We spent more stressful hours on the phone with our German manufacturer. He told us he could build more detectors, but it was going to take a while. He was in the process of moving his small manufacturing operation to a new building. Summer was coming on and his technician wanted to take his usual European month of vacation. We coaxed, cajoled, and offered more money, but the best we could do was to get a week or two reprieve on the delivery date. In the meantime, we were looking into other manufacturers. But no detectors from different manufacturers had the same size or input characteristics. Using another manufacturer would require a new design for the whole instrument. No one had ever designed, built, tested, and flown an instrument within one year, starting from scratch. We decided to pin our hopes on finally getting a good flight batch of detectors from our German supplier.
The new detectors finally came. I was convinced we were doomed. What chance did we have that these would be different from the previous two batches? Bruce carried the parts over to the test chamber and installed them. The test would run overnight. The next morning Bruce came back from the lab, his face beaming. The parts worked, and with no time to spare! The detectors were installed into the instrument, which was quickly put through its paces. Why the earlier parts never worked remains a mystery.
The rest of the work was relatively uneventful. We built and finished the monitors. All three instruments went through their delivery reviews. The monitors were bolted onto the spacecraft and tested in place. The concentrator was delivered to Johnson Space Center, where it was integrated with the other solar-wind collectors, which were then installed in the capsule designed to eventually make the return trip back to Earth. We said farewell to our instruments and awaited the launch.
chapter
five
BEYOND THE MOON AND BACK
THE SKY WAS STILL DARK OVER CAPE CANAVERAL. IT WAS the first morning of the Genesis launch window, a two-week period in July 2001 during which celestial mechanics—the tilt of the Earth and the position of the Moon, in this case—allowed for a successful launch. I had arrived late the night before and had not yet had a chance to see the gleaming 120-foot tall rocket that would launch Genesis into space.
At the moment I was waiting in my rental car next to the guard gate. I was supposed to be giving interviews on NASA TV, but the security guard could not log onto his computer to verify my name and let me in. Various key people on the Genesis team had signed up to give interviews with news stations around the country throughout the launch day. I had taken the first shift of the morning, but there I was, stuck at the gate. The dark gray of twilight gave way to shades of pink on the horizon. The minutes ticked by.
A car pulled up beside mine. It was Martha, an energetic young media relations officer from JPL. A few quick words with the guard confirmed my predicament. Martha went ahead to the media center to cancel the first few interviews. I promised to get there as soon as I could. Finally, at 7:30, the visitor clearance center opened, and with badge in hand I zipped past the guard shack and raced over to the media center. It was located in a small trailer next to and under the public viewing stands for the shuttle launchpad.
As I walked through the door, Martha and an assistant motioned me to a chair in a lighted area in front of a camera, all the while buzzing about what I should say and how to say it. The next interview would be in less than a minute. But what was she saying? The launch was off for today? Why? How was I going to give an interview when I didn’t know what was going on? Martha promised to find out more about the situation, but for now she only knew that some part suddenly needed more testing, and that we wouldn’t launch for at least two more days. Meanwhile, the next interview was now only a few seconds away. There was no time to argue my way out of it. The assistant had been busily clipping the microphone to my shirt and inserting the earphone. Next I heard a technician in a faraway TV station confirming that he had a picture. He quickly proceeded with a sound check and then confirmed the pronunciation of my name (“Weens”), my position on the project, and where I was from. I heard another technician say, “We’re on in five seconds.” I smiled at the thick lenses of the camera and tried to relax.
After the intro music faded, the announcer took over. “This morning was to be the launch of an unmanned space mission that will make history. The Genesis mission is to be the first spacecraft ever to go beyond the orbit of the Moon and return back to Earth. With us at Cape Canaveral we have Dr. Roger Wiens, payload specialist from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to tell us a little about this mission. Dr. Wiens, what will this mission do and why is it called Genesis?”
I gave a short answer about how we hoped to learn about the beginnings of our solar system by capturing solar-wind particles and bringing them back to Earth for analysis.
The newscaster’s voice came back on: “Now, we heard that this mission is going to be delayed several days. Is this a serious problem, and when will the mission get off the ground?”
I heard myself saying, “NASA wants to be completely sure that absolutely everything is in top shape at launch. Some information came up that caused us to want to check one part on the spacecraft, but we don’t believe this is anything significant. At this point the launch has been rescheduled for Wednesday, and we have every reason to believe we will have a completely successful mission.” My voice sounded confident, even though I was not at all sure what was going on.
After my last reply, I smiled as the red light on the front of the camera went off, signaling the end of the interview. Martha and the assistant came into the lighted area, assuring me that I had done very well. They rearranged the spacecraft models positioned behind me in preparation for the next interview. For the next hour I gave one interview after another to various radio and TV stations from California to the East Coast. The interviews continued all day with various other members of the Genesis team.
Between interviews, Martha was able to obtain more information on why the launch had been delayed. In Europe an electronic part had undergone radiation testing for a different space mission. The procedure that had been followed was significantly different from radiation testing procedures used in the United States, and the part had failed the test. It just so happened, however, that the Genesis spacecraft had an identical component. The testing carried out in the United States months ago in preparation for our mission now had to be thoroughly reviewed, and it was decided that we would carry out one additional spare-part test that would take about three days. The test had already begun a day before the planned launch, so the liftoff would be moved back by another two days.
Not everything had gone perfectly over the two years leading u
p to the launch. To save money, the spacecraft builder had decided to contract with an upstart company in Canada for the star tracker, a key spacecraft navigation instrument, rather than going with an experienced manufacturer. Star trackers are used to accurately determine a spacecraft’s orientation; a failure of these, and a spacecraft is lost. The contractor struggled to meet the requirements they had agreed to. As the expected delivery date approached and then passed, the company continued to struggle. A manager’s worst fear is that a small-dollar part ends up delaying the whole project, costing tens of millions of dollars. If it had been a US company, NASA and the spacecraft builder would have sent experts to help finish the product. But there are major restrictions on helping a foreign entity develop aerospace hardware. So all the Genesis team could do was request more progress reports. Eventually the parts were delivered—over a year late—but once in space they worked fine.
During this time period, NASA was still smarting from the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander less than two years earlier. The idea of building spacecraft “faster, better, cheaper” had its downside. To make sure Genesis couldn’t possibly have a hidden problem on the scale of the ill-fated Mars missions, NASA administered a set of “red-team” reviews in 1999. These reviews focused mostly on the flight-critical hardware, such as navigation and reentry. The reviews were held in several different cities, involved about one hundred reviewers, and took days. The Genesis review revealed no major problems, but as we neared the originally scheduled launch date of January 2001, NASA wanted to ensure that the team was not rushed. It held one more review and decided that, just to make sure, the mission would be postponed. The next good launch slot would be six months later, in July.