Martian Summer

by Andrew Kessler

  This is not good science. But they are bureaucrats who think this is for the best. So much for my objective reporting. Peter quiets the grumblers and continues.

  “Now, of course, we are on ice and [Mike] Mellon predicted we would find ice at 10 cm. Now we’ve shown it’s here and at 5 cm,” Peter says. “Still that’s not good enough for—”

  “We have the scoopful we came for on this mission, and we should not waste it,” Mark Lemmon, the co-investigator for the SSI and Mars imaging master, says, interrupting Peter. Mark repeats the oft-heard sentiment that there is no better sample than the one currently sitting in the scoop. Yet, somehow Washington disagrees. Doug Ming makes an audible sigh and kicks his boot into the carpet. He looks pretty pissed-off.

  “Headquarters suggested that we could dump it on TEGA and not turn on the solenoid, saving the sample,” Peter says.

  Wait a minute.

  Peter was going to resign? This kind of non-science decision-making is exactly what Dara Sabahi had warned me about. This is not a scientific strategy. Doesn’t anyone care about the scientific method? The Phoenix mission is part of the Scout program. Scouts are innovative P.I.-led missions. Unless I’m mistaken, NASA just crapped all over that idea.

  Peter has brought us this far. He should take us the distance as he sees fit. There are angry red faces and jeers.

  “That’s all for now,” Peter says. He will conduct a special meeting later today to determine what’s next.

  WITHOUT A CLEAR DIRECTION ON WHAT TO DO WITH THE SAMPLE IN THE scoop or how to proceed with digging, most of the activities in today’s plan focus on atmospheric data and several coordinated observations that were planned a while back. Midpoint meeting starts late.

  The SSI team has several graduate students who train along with the engineers to assist with basic camera pointing and image production. They collect data, fill out reports, and provide updates to the team at kickoff and midpoint. Today’s SSI IDE is a young, relatively new U of A student.

  “We didn’t get any data,” he says casually. What he means to say is they’re still waiting for images. But that’s not what he says. He said he didn’t get data. Period. And today is not a good day to run afoul of process. An easy mistake for a budding space scientist, but a JPL land mine.

  Julia Bell, a slight woman with glasses and shoulder-length hair, stops the meeting.

  “Excuse me?” She asks with a pregnant pause.

  Julia is today’s mission manager. That makes her the captain of the engineering team. Her job is to get data uploaded to the spacecraft, and she is responsible for the second shift getting the information it needs from the first shift. She carries a huge 17" silver laptop that covers most of her tiny frame, giving the impression she’s a poorly drawn 1950s robot. But when she interrupts, the room falls quiet.

  “No,” Julia says. “You can’t say ‘you didn’t get data.’ Because you did get data! You got channelized data! And how do we know your instrument wasn’t turned on accidentally or that there is another issue?” She snaps. There is no response from the young scientist or anyone else. Maybe she’s upset over NASA’s imposition. She copes by tightening ranks and making sure discipline reigns during this difficult time. Her approach will help prevent mistakes, but her path to perfection might leave a wide swath of battered and bruised engineers in its wake.

  “The MET and RA did not report channelized data properly, either,” Julia says. Channelized data is the engineering data that tells you about the health and safety of your instrument. So if you ever find yourself in Mission Control, and you don’t get any pretty pictures downloaded, but you still get a little note from Phoenix saying your instrument is healthy, don’t ever say: “It’s nothing.” It’s not nothing to the spacecraft engineers who rely on it to make sure the science team makes grand discoveries. Rather, it’s critical for the systems engineers’ understanding of the lander’s status.

  Not properly reporting your data is a kind of sin perpetrated against JPL process and the lander. It shows a profound lack of respect for protocol. And when you sin against the lander, you sin against Julia Bell. Why does Julia get so upset when you mess with the lander?

  One of the secrets of Phoenix is that it wasn’t actually born a lander. Well, more precisely, its body was a lander but its internal software started life as an orbiter. Julia engineered the lander reassignment surgery—a robot sex-change operation. That makes her more of a surrogate mother/reconstructive surgeon than engineer to Phoenix. Since the lander wasn’t originally designed to coordinate complicated activities, she had to invent a system to enable it. Julia created the core architecture for how Phoenix implements activities and shares data between its instruments. Completing this reassignment surgery required years of focus. Rumor has it that she did it without any vacation or time off. Never.

  “We need her,” Peter says. “If something happened to her or she got hit by a car, we probably would have to cancel the mission.”

  When Julia finishes the verbal mauling of the SSI engineer-in-training, there’s an awkward silence. Poor guy has bits of shredded ego all over the place.

  Now that graduate students who never went through Phoenix training are filling important jobs, there’s some justification in cracking the whip to keep the younguns from making youthful indiscretions. When her protocol is broken, she’s not afraid to let you know. Except for her impossibly high standards, she’s usually very kind.

  It’s a big operation to turn an orbiter into a lander. Orbiters go round and round planets. You probably knew that. Julia designed a system of interoperation that lets the orbiter software act like a lander. That made it possible for the computer to use a series of sequencing engines to turn time-based operations that an orbiter uses into logic-based operations that a lander needs so all the instruments can coordinate their activities.

  “TEGA is on the deck. And might just fling dirt at other instruments to get some attention,” Dave Hamara says, doing the work of a rodeo clown and running interference to save the poor young SSI engineer from any last vestiges of Julia’s wrath. It works. He gets the meeting moving again.

  Cameron Dixon, the SPI I, takes Dave’s cue and starts to talk through the plan.

  “Then at 11:00 there’s a TECP wind/humidity activity with no RA move—” he says.

  “Wrong! You’re giving too much detail,” Julia says.

  We don’t get very far. This is a teachable moment.

  “I’m just starting my shift. I need to know what has happened and what I can expect for the rest of the day. That’s all.” Julia says. She continues to describe her role, his role, and everyone else’s roles.

  The engineers bow their heads in shame. Eventually Julia’s rant ends and we’re all wiser about how the SPI I should communicate the sol’s proposed operation to the shift II engineers and mission managers.

  It’s been a long lecture. When I look up, I see something kind of cool. It’s 6:32 p.m. local Tucson time and 6:25 p.m. on Mars. Our Earth and Mars clocks have just passed one another, like two ships in the night.

  This means we just went through one full cycle of the Mars clock. 36 days of adding 40 minutes to keep up with the Mars rotation. That’s a full 24 hours gone. Now we’ve lost an entire Earth day and the clocks are almost back in sync.

  SHAKING IS THE CULPRIT. REMEMBER THE INITIAL PROBLEMS OF MARS dirt being too sticky? Now it’s back to haunt us. Back then, the team was desperate. They were willing to do anything to get the dirt in TEGA and salvage the mission. So they shook like mad to get the dirt into TEGA. But the thing about babies, and sensitive scientific equipment, is that you shouldn’t shake them. The solenoid that does the shaking was tested at 30-second or one-minute intervals. Nobody tested the solenoid for 50-minute runs. At the time it didn’t matter. They just needed dirt in TEGA.

  Even though it seemed like a minor problem, all but solved when Barry discussed it at the press conference, it’s not. A team of crack engineers analyzed the electricity flowing thr
ough TEGA and found that a few of the TAs (ovens) now used twice as much electrical current as they should. After punching numbers into a giant calculator, pausing only to push up their glasses as they slipped down their deeply concentrated, sweat-soaked faces, they traced the problem back to a short in TA-4.

  Way back on sol 4 there was another short in TEGA. That short was a wire that had probably snapped on landing but somehow un-shorted itself over the course of the next few sols. That short was not critical because it was on the “low side.” Which means it was happening at a terminal branch in the electronics. So if it went, it wouldn’t take anything else with it—sort of like the last bulb on the Christmas light strand. This new short is a “high-side” short. So, if this goes, all the downstream electricity would be lost—the first bulb in the strand. And that’s the end of TEGA.

  No one wants to say who is at fault. So I go ask Nilton. He says JPL failed to confront the issue when problems first arose.

  “It was poorly managed,” Nilton says. “It ended up being one of the most expensive instruments on the mission.”

  “I’m not sure how Nilton knows that. He was in Michigan while we were in Tucson building this instrument,” Peter says. “TEGA had its share of problems, but I don’t believe it was the most expensive instrument on the lander.”

  It’s a complicated story, because space instruments are hard to build. TEGA was a legacy.

  “These instruments are very complicated,” Bill says. I believe him, since I wouldn’t know the first place to begin if I had to build an atom-weighing machine that worked on Mars.

  “It’s easy to build in a lab but when you have to miniaturize and space-harden something that sensitive—” Bill pauses, leaving me to make my own conclusion.

  They actually made plans to bolt it on the lander at Kennedy Space Center if things got really hairy. Luckily it didn’t come to that. Still, the wiring issues were a big distraction and probably contributed to the problems with the TEGA doors. Problems plagued the small, overtaxed TEGA team.

  AT MIDPOINT THERE’S A SIGN ON THE CONFERENCE TABLE. “TEGA ISE for Hire (Cheap).” Dave Hamara put it there. Poor TEGA.

  Midpoint starts where kickoff left off: Julia Bell points out yet another problem with reporting protocol. This time it’s with the LIDAR. I think she takes issue with how they’re describing the EVRs (Event Reports). These can be either errors or problems or sometimes just events Phoenix likes to talk about. Jim Chase insists that what she thinks is an issue, is not.

  “The problem is well understood and documented by the MET team before the mission,” he says. It’s got something to do with the operating temperature of the LIDAR. He’s really making a good argument. Julia seems to take it all in. Satisfied with Jim’s assessment, she begins to back down. In his closing remarks he says: “The LIDAR is safe.” Oh, no.

  When Jim Chase says the last word of that sentence … safe, you can almost see his head snap forward to try to swallow the words before they reach Julia Bell’s ears. It’s too bad they don’t use instant replay in Mission Control.

  Ordinarily, it might not be a big deal. Not today. Julia Bell is dead set on restoring discipline to our rag-tag group of partisans. What Jim means is that the LIDAR is not in any danger. That’s not what he said. In Mission Control speak, there are some words that don’t mean what you think they mean. This is one. Safe is not always safe.

  Julia unleashes fury from a five-foot frame. Hellfire and brimstone rain down upon poor Jim Chase. Hardly seems like a fair fight. While Jim could be easily be the center for the College of Engineering basketball team, Julia’s build is more diminutive. Still, Jim doesn’t stand a chance.

  “Safe” is a safe word in Mission Control. In the SOC, the safe word is “safe.” Whether it’s green balloons, watermelon, or Humpty Dumpty, most folks choose a safe word that they aren’t likely to say during the heat of the moment. Safe does not mean everything is okay. Safe means the instrument has shut down to protect itself from danger. If your instrument is safe or has safed, you must, please, look to see what’s gone wrong. All the instruments can go into safe mode and they do it often. It’s doesn’t mean they’re broken—although it could happen—it just means they’re outside their comfort zone.

  “I want an ISA to document this,” Julia barks. Poor Jim. Now he’ll spend his evening writing an Incident Surprise Anomaly (ISA). He picked the wrong word, now he pays: in paperwork.

  EVERYONE MARCHES TO THE LARGE CONFERENCE ROOM. PEOPLE LEAN against the walls and sit on the floor. Peter doesn’t bother to stand at the front of the room.

  “Now is the time to voice your opinion,” Peter says from his seat. “The new directive is to rasp an icy sample and get it into TEGA. We must treat the next cell as the last one,” Peter says. NASA is essentially freezing the mission—no pun intended—until they can get a scoop of ice into TEGA and turn it on for what they believe will be the last time. And hopefully, it won’t blow the whole spacecraft to bits.

  Just to make things more tense, Peter agreed at the outset of the mission to give everyone the 4th of July weekend off. So they really only have tonight to sort out a strategy and then one day to implement before everyone leaves for two days.

  Bill Boynton is particularly annoyed.

  “This will not be the last TEGA operation,” he mutters. He’s looked at the data and he doesn’t share the same concern as the head of NASA.

  “So that’s not the sample in the scoop?” Carol Stoker asks. It’s a loaded, leading question. I sense a bit of passive aggression, if I might pop-psychologize for a moment. Carol wants Peter to repeat the justification and point out how ludicrous it is to throw away a great sample. She’s probably pissed because no one listened to her when she suggested getting an ice sample from Dodo.

  “No, that sample is unacceptable to NASA,” Peter says with a sigh. He doesn’t take the bait.

  “Well, then, the smart thing to do is get a sample from the D-G trench [Dodo-Goldilocks], and move on. There’s no point in wasting time with scraping Wonderland. We can do it later,” she says.

  Peter wants the team to make a scientific decision. But the science is tangled in politics; smeared with bad timing and corroded with poor TEGA wiring. One oddity that’s important to note is that an ice sample is not actually part of Phoenix’s level-one requirements. NASA didn’t ask for this. Probably because you can’t require a mission to discover something that you’re not even sure is there.

  Now that the process-obsessed NASA—requiring Phoenix to file ten million documents outlining its capabilities and space-worthiness—sees the opportunity for a great headline, they suddenly change their whole philosophy. As a bonus, they’re undermining everything it means to be a scientist-led mission. We can discuss that later. Right now, we need to plan a mission.

  There are two clear paths from which to choose. The team can take a sample with ice from Dodo-Goldilocks (D-G), or from a trench in or near Wonderland. Both have problems. Getting ice from Wonderland requires learning how to get ice. The RA team has a good idea of what it might take and they practiced with their buckets of concrete, but the real thing is different. It will take time. And no one knows if it’s even possible. The RA team could spend weeks learning how to acquire ice, only to find it’s impossible to gather it in any meaningful quantity. So that’s a strike against the Wonderland site, specifically the Snow White trench. The problem with D-G is that the geology cabal doesn’t like the ice inside it. These are the hardliners, and they just took a stand against this liberal ice. They take issue with its provenance. The D-G ice is on the boundary of a polygon. The white material in D-G is likely frost that’s collected over time. The ice at the center of a polygon is what they want. The trench is also at a funny angle and hard for the RA to scoop. It was just supposed to be a practice area. Wonderland is what they consider to be the interesting area.

  Peter knows using the rasp at this point would be a long process. They’re going to spend a lot of time getting up to spe
ed. Committing to Wonderland means that all exploration trenching will stop while the RA team focuses on how to crack the ice.

  “We don’t have approved sequences, but we will soon. It’s one of our highest priorities … maybe approved by sol 45,” Peter says.

  Joel Krajewski laughs.

  “Or maybe 85.” Peter corrects himself facetiously.

  Joel’s team needs to develop a lot of code blocks if they want to even attempt an ice scrape.

  “There have been eight new top priorities in the last eight days,” Krajewski says, implying the science team needs to pick a direction and stick with it.

  “Is that a complaint?” Peter asks, a little perturbed. He’s had a hard day and is running a little low on patience.

  “I’m just trying to help,” Joel replies.

  The process for coding new activities is slow. Ideally a mission would land with a whole library of activities coded and ready to go. Phoenix didn’t have the money to do that. The engineers put their effort into a safe landing instead of surface operations.

  “It wouldn’t have done much good to arrive with every block validated and no lander,” Joel told me early in the mission. So the engineers code and test the activities in the library as needed.

  “Rasping would be two to three weeks before it could produce a sample we are comfortable with,” Peter estimates. He suggests if they’re going to go the Wonderland route, they should try with just scraping.

  “We’ve never sampled small particles,” Carol Stoker says. She’s going to make her move. “We were going to [sample] in Dodo, but we stopped that path. The block is written and we could do it. One day! And done,” she says. Had the team listened to her before, this wouldn’t be an issue. She makes a passionate plea: going after ice in Wonderland is a wild goose chase.

  “Before we know it, it’ll be sol 90 and the mission will be over,” she says.

  Looking for some support, she gets scientists averting their gaze instead.