Red Rover

by Roger Wiens

  We all tried to keep our minds on other things over the weekend. We tried to keep our hopes up. On Monday the announcement was finally made. Unfortunately for us, NASA selected a different project, called Phoenix, a reflight of the failed 1998 mission that was to look for ice in the northern latitudes. We found out later that what was supposed to be a short meeting at NASA Headquarters for the final selection had turned into a multihour marathon. The head of the Mars program was pushing hard to select what he believed was the mission with the best science—SCIM. But the head of NASA’s space exploration could not give up the idea of flying a lower-risk mission for which much of the space hardware had already been built. The shuttle disaster had put fear into all of the NASA managers. The Mars program leaders had looked for any possible way to keep the SCIM mission alive, but short of winning the competition, there was no way to keep it going. The Columbia accident had sunk our chances.

  Our lives had all taken an unambiguous turn. There would be no Mars sample return. Everything we had done would be filed away, or worse, thrown out. It was a dreary day for the SCIM team.

  That night I was strangely awakened. The clock showed 4 A.M. What had disturbed my sleep? It was warm and our windows were open to let in the cool mountain air. A rooster from a nearby stable was crowing—unusually early. Everything else was perfectly quiet. I noticed that it was oddly light outside even though the Moon had set. I got up and looked at the stars out of the bedroom window but I couldn’t see the source of the light. I walked around to a window on the south side of the house, where I could see the ecliptic—the equator of our solar system. My eyes were drawn to a brilliantly glowing orb almost straight overhead.

  It was Mars, bright enough to cast faint, blue-green shadows. It was almost superstar-like, but a trace larger to the eye, and it was unblinking and unwavering. I recalled the planet’s close approach years ago when my brother and I had first become familiar with it through our telescope mounted on the fence post at the edge of our town in Minnesota. I thought about how we had sketched its features. The Red Planet was even nearer now, at its closest approach to Earth in 60,000 years, and its brilliance was amazing. I gazed at it for a long time. What an irony! Mars was so close to Earth, yet it seemed so far away.

  chapter

  eleven

  THE FRENCH CONNECTION

  WORKING ON SCIM, WHILE AT THE SAME TIME FLYING GENESIS and trying to keep hopes alive on our laser project, had been like trying to drink from a firehose. Now, our attention could be focused back on rovers and our LIBS instrument. As it turned out, a friend from across the Atlantic would play a big role in our eventual success.

  Not long after our missed rover test in the desert, I mentioned our LIBS project to Sylvestre Maurice, a French colleague who had worked for a time in Los Alamos. The idea was to see if we could build an international team to develop our laser instrument.

  NASA had an interesting relationship with foreign space agencies. Collaborations in space were often seen as a means to develop closer strategic political relationships. In the first such experiment, the United States had invited Soviet cosmonauts to meet in a joint Apollo-Soyuz docking in space in 1975. This mission had been planned since 1971 and in a sense marked the end of the superpower space race. It was a political breakthrough because it meant sharing information on docking systems, maneuvering in space, and environmental conditions, such as the cabin pressure and composition of the air needed to sustain the astronauts.

  On the other side of the equation, the US government wanted to avoid providing other countries with space technology that could be used for military applications. A crucial aspect of the Apollo-Soyuz project was that the Soviets already knew how to send humans into space. Both countries had already experimented with orbiting space stations, and docking maneuvers were well understood. It was another thing altogether to partner with some country that was behind on space technology. For example, Boeing and Hughes were accused by the US government of providing technology to the Chinese following a rather spectacular launchpad failure of a Long-March rocket carrying a commercial US satellite in 1996. The problem was that providing other countries with space technology could lead to more reliable intercontinental ballistic missiles that could, in the event of a nuclear war, reliably destroy US cities. Indeed, the Chinese space program made great gains immediately after this time period, with China becoming only the third country to send humans into space.

  However, in spite of the political risks, NASA has continued to pursue working with other countries, both in the human space program and in the robotic one. Beyond the motivation of international goodwill is another one: cost. If another country contributes space hardware, it saves NASA money. Not only that: including other partners tends to stabilize programs against cancellation.

  It seemed, just after the turn of the century, like the pendulum was swinging in favor of more cooperation, and cost was a real issue for instruments like the one we were trying to develop. So I broached the subject with Sylvestre.

  Sylvestre had been a postdoc in Los Alamos in the late 1990s. He was perpetually curious, which helped drive his scientific career, and he was politically very astute. Sylvestre had spent nearly half a decade in the United States in total, so he had in some senses become Americanized, at least to the point of knowing how Americans worked. He was just a few years younger than I, and although we were from different countries, we seemed to have many personality traits in common. He was a second child from an even smaller town than I was from, in the north of France, just past the trench-warfare lines of World War I. From this small hamlet he had worked his way up in the sciences to the point where he was really coming into his own, potentially as one of the top French planetary scientists.

  When colleagues got to swapping stories, inevitably there was a request to hear about Sylvestre’s skydiving experiment. Apparently he had not been away from the farm too long when this incident happened, as the purpose of the experiment was to see if a chicken was airworthy enough to fly down from an airplane. So Sylvestre jumped from the plane holding a chicken, which he released partway down. But he had not counted on the chicken’s instinct to immediately spread its wings full length when it sensed nothing under its feet, and the poor bird lost all its feathers, never to be seen again!

  Sylvestre got married shortly before taking his position in Los Alamos. His wife, Armelle, had never lived outside of Paris, but she was in for a few changes. He took her to India for their honeymoon, an enchanting place for Sylvestre. Then they arrived in Los Alamos. The town has only one supermarket and very few other shops, which suits most scientists just fine. Shopping, after all, is not a major pastime for many PhDs. Having made their way over from Paris, Sylvestre and Armelle arrived in Los Alamos and stopped in front of Furr’s grocery store, which he informed her was centre ville, the center of the city. Armelle could not believe the world-famous community of Los Alamos could be so bereft of the basic shops that she had grown up with: Where was the bakery? The meat market? The boutique? Nearly every block in Paris had at least one of each. For a renowned city like Los Alamos to not have these was incroyable! It looked too bleak to be true. So the next day, while Sylvestre was getting acquainted with his new colleagues at the lab, Armelle took the car and explored in all directions, trying to find the real metropolis of Los Alamos. Unfortunately, there was nothing but mountains, trees, canyons, and cacti. She returned in a terrible Parisian funk. But being a strong woman, she resolved to make the best of it, and their time in Los Alamos turned out to be very memorable.

  Having known Sylvestre and his family for some time, I decided to ask him if he was interested in working with us on our laser instrument. It turned out to be the most important decision of the whole project. Sylvestre assembled a team of French scientists who had done LIBS research and wrote a proposal to their space agency. It was received with overwhelming approval and outright excitement. The French team began to work with nearly $1 million a year just at a time when our fundi
ng was dwindling to nothing. They decided to focus on developing the laser while leaving other aspects, such as the detector apparatus, to us. Despite the huge imbalance in support, Sylvestre was loyal, encouraging us to continue seeking funding from NASA.

  In spite of our low point, we limped along, submitting several new proposals. Monty, our longtime technician, retired, and we survived a few other bumps in the road.

  In the meantime, Genesis had been launched and was operating in space, and the SCIM mission had come and gone. The intriguing possibility that remained when SCIM lost its bid was an exciting new rover mission called Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). This was to be the bigger and more powerful successor to the twin Mars Exploration Rovers.

  NASA planned to follow a path of incremental development for its Mars rovers. Sojourner, which landed in 1997, was a minuscule technology-demonstration vehicle. At less than 25 pounds, it had no arm and no mast. It could take crude pictures, and it had a German sensor that could provide composition information when placed up against a rock. The MER rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which were launched as MSL was in the planning phase, were of intermediate size and capability. At about 400 pounds, they possessed both an arm and a mast, allowing for quality imaging and the ability to access sample surfaces with a brush and abrasion tool on the arm. The projected mission lifetime was ninety days, with a plan to drive several hundred yards from the landing point. The rovers were solar powered, and it was expected that over time the panels would become covered with dust, eventually extinguishing the power needed to run the rovers and ultimately limiting their life spans.

  During this time significant gains had been made in understanding the Red Planet from orbit. The Mars Odyssey orbiter, using sensors made in Los Alamos, Arizona, and Russia, had discovered that the upper latitudes of Mars contained vast reservoirs of water ice just below the surface, and that clay minerals might still contain bound water in the equatorial regions. Not only that, but the relative humidity was actually quite high at some times and places on Mars. Our neighboring planet seemed much more tantalizing and potentially habitable than it had just a few years earlier.

  Even before the MERs were launched, Mars scientists longed for a much bigger tool kit than these two rovers carried. They envisioned a mobile laboratory that could drive around on the surface and conduct scientific experiments much more like those done in terrestrial laboratories. The rover’s arm could feed samples into the instruments just as people do in a real lab. They also recognized that, because the surface of Mars is inhospitable for life, getting inside a rock might be very important to studying possible niches for organic materials. Hence, a drill was considered a necessity for the new rover. Powder from the drill could be dropped into an inlet in the rover deck and analyzed for organics. Additionally, isotope ratios could be studied, which would be crucial for understanding both evidence of life and the climate history of the planet. These measurements were too difficult to carry out in the open, necessitating an internal rover laboratory. Scientists recognized many other potential measurements that could be made in a mobile lab.

  The key was to have a big enough space to fit in as much as possible. The MERs could only carry about 11 pounds of payload each, not enough for much instrumentation at all. By contrast, scientists dreamed of having a vehicle that could carry over 100 pounds of laboratory instruments in a vehicle the size of a small car. We hardly dared hope to be a part of that, but yet we did.

  Early on in the MSL planning, a committee had met to discuss the purpose of this mission and which instruments were likely candidates. Our laser instrument had been included in the committee’s concept of the payload, which got us very excited. This didn’t mean at all that we would be on the mission, as every experiment was selected through a tough competition, but it was good for bragging rights. Unfortunately, a year later that committee had come and gone, and a new strawman payload developed by a new committee no longer carried our instrument. Still, this was clearly a mission to shoot for because of the tantalizing aspects of a bigger, more capable rover.

  For the MSL payload selection, teams were encouraged to submit proposals as groups or suites of instruments rather than as individual units. In a stroke of good fortune, we got a call from a group of experienced Mars scientists and instrument specialists who wanted to propose our LIBS device along with several instruments developed for the MERs. Here we saw a possible way out of the typical catch-22 that prevents many new concepts from coming to fruition: Without having flown before, new instruments are too risky to be selected for flight. A way around this is to be part of a package containing tried and true instruments, as this group was inviting us to do. It seemed this was just what we needed to succeed.

  Meanwhile, on October 2, 2003, we finally got an announcement we had been waiting for. NASA was going to fund our LIBS prototype work once again. It had been nearly two years since our first Mars Instrument Development grant had lapsed, and we were hanging on by a thread. Now we would have the money to actually accomplish some much-needed work before the proposal was due.

  Our new proposal group wanted to have a strategy meeting in December, and it was to be in Los Alamos. We invited our French colleagues, who made reservations for the trip. Things were starting to move.

  Then came an unexpected blow. Out of the blue, the group of scientists decided that LIBS was too risky to include in their proposal. Their leader called to announce that they were dropping us from the veteran team. Our advantage vanished, and we were all alone once again, a rookie instrument with no flight experience. If we were to propose at all, we would have to go it on our own. Should we even go through the motions? Knowing the odds, we probably would not have, except that we once again had funding from the Mars Instrument Development Program, and participants were expected to try to catch a ride to Mars. That clinched it—we would have to propose. We would go through the motions, and we would give it our best shot!

  We had already been planning the meeting in December, expecting the leader of the consortium to direct what we needed to do to prepare for the proposal. But with the group dropping us just two weeks before the meeting, we quickly cobbled together our own agenda. Sylvestre, the leader of the French group, brought his top mechanical and optical designer and we discussed who should work on what. The French team clearly had greater expertise in telescope optics than we did, and they had already worked on a prototype laser, so the telescope and laser were assigned to them. The US part of the team concentrated on designing a good spectrometer to collect and detect the light and on demonstrating the expected performance of the overall instrument. Our ideas for a new spectrometer design were not working out on paper. We were in a quandary. On a whim, we turned to a compact commercial instrument that we used in the laboratory and decided to see if we could make it rugged enough to fly. NASA would probably laugh at it, but it was the best we could do for the moment.

  We convinced the commercial spectrometer company, Ocean Optics, to send us a free unit to use in the “shake and bake” tests—giving it the levels of vibration expected during launch and the temperature range it was to experience in space and on Mars. The shake test went fine, but the thermal test came out badly. In the case of Mars rover instruments, “bake” is a misnomer, as the real challenge comes at cold temperatures. We found that the spectrometer was clearly not built even for arctic measurements on the Earth. We quickly built a model out of materials that did not expand and contract as much over temperature, and after a couple of iterations, we had a model that performed perfectly. The successful test results came in just a week before the proposal deadline.

  In addition to a technical team, each proposed experiment needed a science team that would interpret the results from Mars. Nearly all of the top Mars scientists were already involved in other proposals. We were obviously a little late. I made a few phone calls to determine who was still available, and we signed up Horton Newsom from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, Ken Herkenhoff from the US Geological
Survey, Nathan Bridges at JPL, and Christopher McKay, a well-known exobiologist from NASA’s Ames Research Center. Sylvestre also started signing up colleagues in France. A number of us would be at a science conference in Houston in March, so we planned a get-together there. Minutes before our instrument meeting, Ben Clark, a longtime veteran of missions from as far back as the Viking landers in the 1970s, came up to me unsolicited and asked if he could be involved in our project. I steered him toward the meeting room. When the time came, it was amazing to find a room full of people excited about using LIBS for Mars exploration.

  The 2004 Houston science conference was particularly exciting with the first results from the twin MER rovers. However, there was a significant gap in the rover results at the conference. The MER team was having difficulty determining rock compositions at a distance with its infrared spectrometer. Initial results suggested that the instrument was confused by the dust coating every single Mars rock. Our instrument could easily remove the dust with several laser shots. We decided to capitalize on this advantage in our proposal.

  Our French colleagues now invited us to a meeting in Paris to continue the technical discussions. Along with Dave, I rounded up two of our engineers for a whirlwind trip to the laser manufacturer and other potential partners. As the meetings were on the outskirts of Paris, away from the train lines, we had to use a rental car. We were happy to find that the car had a GPS system. It was my first time with these new devices, and we had only one problem: We could not change its language even after hours of poring over the instructions. Our rental car happened to be German, and so apparently was the GPS. As we navigated the French countryside, a soft feminine German voice instructed us when to turn right, left, or go straight ahead. I sat in the front and translated the German, while our mechanical engineer, Rob Whitaker, who knew some French, drove and interpreted the French road signs. It was a short but memorable trip.