by Roger Wiens
FIRE!
PLANS FOR THE DESERT TESTING BEGAN IMMEDIATELY. THE exercise was being organized by Ray Arvidson, a veteran Mars scientist who was preparing to lead one of the two Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) being built for a 2003 launch. Both the original JPL field rover and the Ames clone were to be involved in a joint test. The acronym for JPL’s rover was FIDO (Field-Integrated Design and Operations), so following the canine theme the Ames team named their rover K-9. In the test, K-9 was to field remote-sensing instruments, including a camera and our LIBS device, that would allow it to be a “scout,” surveying the nearby terrain. It would be set in a desolate “Mars analog” site in Nevada and run remotely by an operations team back at JPL. The data from the instruments would be relayed to the JPL team, who would then decide which rocks to have FIDO sniff close up with its sensors. Unlike the remote-sensing equipment on K9, these sensors had to touch the samples to analyze them.
The ops team members would not know the actual location of the rovers and would spend their time analyzing images and data from the instruments to gain an understanding of the geology at the rovers’ location. The test would try to simulate Earth-to-Mars communications in some ways. Because of the many minutes it takes for radio signals to travel between the two planets, rovers on Mars only receive and send communications once a day. In this test, “uplinks” and “downlinks” would take place two or three times a day to speed up the action. The entire exercise would take two weeks.
At this point we were only using commercial, off-the-shelf components, a term known in the industry as COTS. The idea was to prove our concept cobbling together various COTS parts, which would give our peers in NASA a chance to see how LIBS worked in general and for us to see how well the various instrument components worked. COTS parts are far cheaper than custom flight parts because they have not been built for the rugged environment of space, that is, to survive the radiation environment, the reduced pressure, or the temperature ranges in space or on another planet. Our demo instrument thus came in at under half a million dollars. By contrast, for flight, each electronic circuit board would have to be designed from the ground up using radiation-resistant parts, each of which would cost a small fortune, not to mention the design of the optical and mechanical systems. We liked to keep things simple and stick to commercially available parts for flight as much as possible, but we still estimated that a flight instrument would cost at least twenty-five times as much as our demo model.
After waiting for over a year to hear how we would test our instrument, we now jumped into high gear. We had a relatively inexpensive and compact laser suitable for the job, as well as a small spectrometer. But we had to fit these into a housing that could be slipped into and out of the rover body, and into a telescope unit to be perched on the rover mast. We also had to devise a way to power these from the rover’s DC voltage power supply. Our technician, Monty Ferris, worked with Dave to wire the electronics for operating on battery power and to cram all the parts into the telescope and housing. Fortunately, our schedule allowed enough time to fly the parts out for a fit-check before the rover was shipped from the Bay Area to the desert site. Our part of the test was to start May 8, 2000—a little over two years after submitting the original proposal to NASA. We were going to send three people to the desert location and one person to the combined operations team at JPL to interpret the data sent from the rover. We were all ready to show what our prototype LIBS instrument could do.
In early May I was completing the final tests on the Genesis instruments while at the same time Dave, Monty, and I were heavily into preparations for the long-awaited field tests with our prototype laser system. Little did we know that the most devastating fire in New Mexico history would prevent us from achieving our goal.
The first part of the year 2000 had been especially dry in New Mexico. Our local ski area never opened that winter because of the lack of snow. There was no rain in April and hardly any in May. The Sun, the low humidity, the wind, and blowing dust were all much worse than normal.
The week before the rover tests, the local forest service started a controlled burn west of Los Alamos, ostensibly to prepare for the dry summer ahead. None of us were aware that the burn was to take place. After bedtime in the evening, my six-year-old son, Carson, called me and my wife, Gwen, back into his room. His bed was right next to a window that overlooked the mountains. In the dusk, Carson could see a strange glow coming from the crest of a mountain 10 miles away. He wanted to know what was making this eerie orange light. Trying to reassure our child, we suggested that it must be a forest fire, but as it was miles away, it was no problem. We said good night once again.
The talk at the lab the next day was about why the forest service had started the controlled burn, which had immediately gotten out of control. The consensus was that a burn would not have been appropriate even several months earlier, given the dry weather. The fire was still miles from the lab and the town, however, and so the weekend went on normally, with only an occasional complaint about the smoky air. But on Sunday, the wind picked up and the fire line raced much closer. By the afternoon, we could see planes circling over the mountains and the lab just west of town. The smoke cloud was now billowing over the whole town and still growing. We heard that the fire had crossed a road and was now on laboratory property.
I jumped into the car to grab the computer from my office. My building was on the edge of the forest, and I knew it might be one of the first places to burn. As I raced through town I realized that not just the lab but the whole town was in a bad situation. The western neighborhood was blocked off by emergency vehicles with flashing lights. When I got to the high bridge over the canyon separating the town from the lab, I found it blockaded, even though I had just crossed it two hours earlier. As I made my way back home I saw a huge line of cars heading out of town. There was something I had never seen before—panic on the faces of ordinary people. Los Alamos was in danger. As my family lived in an eastern neighborhood, we were farther from the fire, but it was impossible to tell what would happen next. At home I gathered a few keepsakes to be ready for evacuation.
The stand-off between the town and the fire continued into the week. I began grappling in my mind whether I would be able to leave the family to go out to the rover test site. My flight was scheduled for Thursday, and I didn’t want to miss these tests for anything in the world. But I didn’t know if Los Alamos would be safe from the conflagration by then. Fortunately, we had sent our LIBS instrument to the test site the previous week—it would have been impossible to retrieve it from the laboratory, which was now being tightly guarded. Monty, our technician, had gone out to Nevada early so he could install the device on the rover. But if Dave and I couldn’t get there, we wouldn’t be able to run the LIBS and interpret the data for the rest of the scientists. No one else knew what our instrument was capable of. The choice seemed agonizing: stay and protect my wife and small boys, or go and carry out the test that may lead to a flight to Mars—my dream. Where would I be at the end of the week—taking care of my family, or showing the scientists what our laser gun could do? The weather and the fire lines seemed to be holding for most of Monday and Tuesday, so perhaps I still had a chance to make the rover test.
But on Tuesday night, lying in bed, we could hear and feel a hot, dry wind whipping around the house. The gale whistled under the front door and strong gusts shook the upstairs. This was a very bad turn of events. We slept fitfully. Wednesday morning dawned with continued strong wind.
My thoughts went back to the rover tests. This test was going to be a heady experience, one I hoped that we could repeat someday on Mars. Despite the worsening conditions, I was trying to imagine how the weather might improve and the fire let up so that I could get to the field exercise. I thought it might yet be possible. There was still some work remaining to prepare for the trip. I had hoped to get to my office before leaving for Nevada so I could retrieve reference materials to help us interpret our data. The lab remained ba
rricaded, but it turned out that Dave had some reference files at home. I offered to Xerox the materials to prepare for our trip. Ignoring the impending disaster, I dropped off the pages at the photocopy shop in town first thing Wednesday morning.
In the meantime, I was trying to help my family cope with another day of smoke and cabin fever. With nothing to do in town, we considered the idea of going camping for a night. There were plenty of campgrounds safely on the east side of the Rio Grande, about an hour away, and I could still make it to the plane for my trip the next day. It was a crazy idea, in hindsight. We gathered our camping gear and loaded the car. Before leaving I went back to the photocopy store to pick up the reference materials for our field test.
The wind was getting even worse. In the two hours between dropping off the copies and picking them up, I could see a world of difference. The clouds of smoke were now enveloping the town, not just covering it. As I turned a corner I looked out over the hillsides just to the west. Through the smoke I could barely see a firefighting helicopter practically diving over the edge of a canyon to scoop more water from the city’s reservoir. When I stopped to get my copies, the store was closing so its employees could evacuate. I knew then that we were going on more than a camping trip. My mind was doubly occupied as I thought about keeping my family safe and saying good-bye to our rover plans. It was mental anguish. Would the people at the testing grounds understand our predicament? Would we get another chance?
By the time I headed home, long lines of cars had formed on every road out of town. Everyone was leaving at the same time. I could once again see expressions of panic on people’s faces. A utility truck with an arm and bucket hastily jumped a curb, drove across the grass, and lurched to a stop at an electric pole, perhaps to fix a power outage, or perhaps to turn off power. A little farther from the fire, a news helicopter was bucking the wind, trying to hover over our neighborhood. The gale force was roaring at nearly a constant 45 miles per hour. There was no telling how soon the inferno would be here. We tried to keep our young kids calm as we loaded the car for our “camping” trip. We were taking along our pet rabbit, much to the kids’ excitement.
Los Alamos is jokingly referred to by locals as the “Great Cul de Sac.” Nestled up against the Jemez Mountains, it has a four-lane road heading into town to accommodate the 10,000 workers at the lab, but the roads stop at the end of town. Within the city, the one main road heads first toward the mountains and then away from them, ending in our residential area. Canyons more than 500 feet deep divide the town and prevent any shorter routes. To take the main road would mean first heading several miles toward the fire, which was now entering that side of town. Fortunately, there was another evacuation route for our part of Los Alamos. It consisted of a dirt road down a narrow canyon through Indian land. The road was barricaded in normal times, but it was there for this kind of emergency. All the streets from our neighborhood and several others were funneling onto the rutted dirt road. Though it had never been used before, the evacuation proceeded smoothly, a miles-long procession winding through a desert canyon, thick with smoke.
We had arranged to go to a friend’s house in White Rock, only 8 miles away. We spent the rest of the day keeping our kids calm and trying not to think about the fire. Unfortunately, White Rock too was evacuated—in the middle of the night. We once again joined a miles-long procession of cars inching forward through clouds of smoke, this time through a darkness alleviated only by the ominous glow on the horizon. An hour later, still before the first morning light, we arrived at the house of our friends’ friends in the Rio Grande Valley and found beds for our children and eventually places for ourselves. Our hosts were wonderfully gracious—they slept on the floor. As this was before widespread cell-phone use, I had no way of contacting my colleagues who were to go to the rover test, and they had no way of contacting me. The job of taking care of my family took over. There would be no rover test.
The next morning we awoke feeling completely displaced. The first evacuation had been difficult, but the second had seemed incomprehensible. We had left our homes and nearly all of our possessions to an uncertain fate. The house was crowded with strangers and we did our best to stay out of the way. We felt utterly helpless, refugees in every sense of the word. All the local TV stations had pulled their regular programming to show live fire coverage. Throughout the day we continued to see scenes from their news helicopters, but information was badly lacking. Hour after hour the pictures showed burning homes, but from the air it was difficult to see what part of Los Alamos was being shown. The reporters seemed to have no maps and no locals to give the locations of what we were seeing. It was impossible to tell whether the whole town was burning or just part of it.
Finally, on the third day, a phone line was set up to inform residents about which houses had burned, and we received news that our neighborhood was still intact. Though the fire was still raging in many places and smoldering in many others, officials expected that the rest of the town would not be destroyed. More than 230 homes burned, and eventually, more than 49,000 acres of forest. Only a few buildings at the lab were burned or damaged. At a press conference that day, the governor and other officials reported that in spite of the huge material losses, there had been no loss of life and no significant injuries. The evacuation was the calmest they had ever seen for such an event. The town had indeed been protected by a guardian angel.
In Nevada, the laser tests with the rover had been called off. Monty, our technician, had been there early to set up the equipment. With his supervision, a few laser shots were fired, but his family was also evacuated from Los Alamos, and so he left the test site and caught up with his family in Colorado. As a consolation, rocks from the rover site were collected and sent back to our lab for identification with our LIBS technique.
A month later, our family had a chance encounter with one of the firefighting helicopter pilots at a hotel in Texas. At breakfast Gwen had struck up a casual conversation with the family at the next table. The husband was in the National Guard, and they were being transferred from New Mexico to a new place of duty. When they heard we were from Los Alamos, the man got a strange look in his eyes. Had he ever been there, we wondered? Yes, he said, during the fire. He had been one of the pilots. I remembered seeing the helicopter nearly diving over the edge of the canyon, trying desperately to save our town on the day we evacuated. We most gratefully thanked him for his bravery and hard work.
Artist’s conception of the Genesis spacecraft with collectors deployed. The 5-foot diameter capsule is located on top of the main portion of the spacecraft with the capsule lid to the upper left. Hexagonal solar-wind collectors are arranged on a stack of four round panels as well as in the lid of the sample canister, to the lower right. The gold-coated concentrator is seen in the middle. (NASA/JPL)
The Genesis crash site on the Utah salt flats. The capsule impacted on its side at 200 mph. (NASA/JSC)
The Genesis concentrator instrument used to collect oxygen and nitrogen from the Sun. The author poses with technicians Juan Baldonado (left) and Chuck Foehlinger (right). (NASA/JSC)
Artist’s conception of the SCIM aeroshell leaving the Mars atmosphere to return to Earth after collecting dust and gas samples at Mach 29. (M. Hagelberg/ASU/NASA)
Artist’s conception of the Curiosity rover firing on a rock outcrop on Mars. (J.-L. Lacour/CEA/NASA/JPL)
The author (foreground) and ChemCam manager Bruce Barraclough (background) test the ChemCam laser instrument. The blue color simulates the view through laser-protective goggles. (LANL)
French lead, Sylvestre Maurice, poses for an image taken by ChemCam’s engineering model camera through a mirror, at an effective distance of 65 feet away. This was one of ChemCam’s very first images. (NASA/CNES/LANL/IRAP)
Spark produced by ChemCam’s laser from 25 feet away on an iron pyrite crystal in the Mars sample chamber. (LANL)
The author poses with a life-size model of the Curiosity rover at the Paris air show. (G. Wiens
)
NASA’s Scarecrow rover climbing over a 3-foot-tall boulder in JPL’s Mars yard. Scarecrow has the same wheels and suspension as Curiosity—thus the same climbing capacity—but a small body, so that it weighs the same as Curiosity weighs on Mars. (R. Wiens)
The Gale Crater landing site, with its 3-mile (5-km) tall sedimentary mound above the landing ellipse. The crater is 90 miles in diameter. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Image of Curiosity’s capsule and parachute descending into Gale crater. Taken by the HiRISE instrument on board the orbiting Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)
Artist’s conception of the Sky Crane lowering the 1-ton Curiosity rover to the Mars surface by ropes. The ground-sensing radar unit can be seen on the left of the Sky Crane. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Mount Sharp and Curiosity’s shadow as viewed from the Mastcam imager in one of the first color panoramas taken from Gale Crater. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems)
The ChemCam instrument inside its protective white box on the mast of the Curiosity rover on Mars. The image was taken by the MaHLI camera on the rover’s arm while the transparent dust cover was still in place. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems)
Enhanced color image of Curiosity’s destination near the mouth of a canyon at the base of Mount Sharp, as seen with the Mastcam 100 telephoto imager from the Bradbury Landing Station. The farthest point seen in the image is 10 miles away. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems)
chapter
ten
TO MARS AND BACK . . . ALMOST
OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL YEARS, OUR LIBS INSTRUMENT WORK progressed slowly. We made incremental gains by trying better components. Our posters and talks became a regular feature at Mars conferences. We were invited to a field test the year after the fire, but in that case our instrument was mounted on a tripod away from the main area, and our interactions with the rover team were very limited. We were turned down on several proposals for new funding.