Martian Summer

“I would argue against using Dodo,” Bill Boynton says in a sort of apologetic way. “If we get that [D-G] sample, we’ll find that it is ice … and that’s it.” That means that there’s little discovery value in taking this simple approach.

  “So scientifically speaking, Snow White [Wonderland] is the best bet for getting organics. I would further argue for scraping. We understand it better and can do it sooner. And we have had several samples that would remove any Earth organics; but the rasp has not been used as much, so it might be contaminated.”

  “That’s a good point,” Peter says.

  “Well, what’s the difference between what’s in the scoop in this sample? It will be the same and HQ doesn’t want that,” Carol says.

  “Our ice has sublimated!” Peter says emphatically. Probably because there’s no point in that line of argument. There’s no way to convince NASA that it’s a good sample. Yes, we all agree it’s the best sample. It’s the only thing the science team agrees on. NASA doesn’t care.

  “She’s mixing up the issues with the facts,” Rich from the RA team says to me.

  “I agree with Bill’s statement,” Doug Ming says. “And would say we need to show that water ice is in the scoop.” He makes the distinction “water ice,” because technically it could be some other kind of ice, but don’t let that confuse you. He’s very particular.

  “We put a rasp on the scoop for this very reason,” Mike Mellon interjects. “We didn’t think we could get enough material [by scraping].” There’s a lot of back-and-forth. They discuss the best methods of scraping and rasping. Timing, verifying blocks and every element is discussed ad nauseam. What’s not discussed is going back to Dodo.

  Carol won’t go down without a fight.

  “We already know there’s ice in D-G. They don’t know what’s in Wonderland. It’s a risk,” she says. Putting ice in the instrument is scientifically new and satisfies NASA’s requirement. The trenches are different parts of the polygon shapes everyone was so excited about back at landing. Wonderland is the center of the trench. D-G is at the edge in a boundary trough. The ice there would be younger and possible blown there from other parts of Mars.

  “I would agree with Carol,” Nilton Renno says quietly.

  “I think we should come up with what we want and then convince HQ it’s what they want,” a scientist from the geology group says.

  “Exactly,” Peter agrees.

  “If we scrape again [in Wonderland] and we generate more material, we’re home free,” Bill says, shifting the conversation back to Wonderland. He thinks they won’t learn anything new from D-G.

  Half the team puts a premium on ice that’s of greater scientific value. The other half? Well, Carol and Nilton think all ice is scientifically interesting and think D-G is as good a place as any. Flip a coin?

  There are a lot of loud voices in support of Wonderland. Carol and her sole ally, Nilton, can’t muster any more support.

  “Carol and Nilton would argue we do have H2O signature in the other trench,” Peter says to the vocal group of Wonderlanders. He doesn’t want their insights lost because the other opinions are expressed at volume.

  That just encourages more loud objections. Peter manages to quiet the team.

  “If we just want to give HQ a happy feeling about ice, we should go for Dodo; but it’s not obvious to me that if we get that sample, it will answer any of the questions about how it got there,” Bill says.

  “What’s the difference?” Mike Hecht asks,

  “Snow White is vapor deposited,” Carol says.

  “There’s no evidence that one was a liquid or not,” Mike Mellon responds. They start to fight about the source of ice. Things get real technical real fast.

  “Let’s hear from some others,” Peter says. “Joel?” Peter knows that whatever they decide, he wants everyone to feel like they’ve said their share and made their peace. After this morning, all bets are off for the mission plan. It’s really terra incognita.

  “Anyone on the phone have an opinion?” Peter asks with a bit of desperation in his voice.

  “Ben Clark, here,” comes a weak voice over the phone.

  Ben Clark, the elder statesman of the mission, calls in to most meetings and has a shadow presence here.

  “Well, left or right?” Peter asks.

  Left is D-G. Right is Wonderland. Clark is not quite ready to make a choice.

  “On Snow White we have the opportunity to get more data from [MECA’s] WCL and TECP on this site,” Ben says. Snow White is the site in Wonderland where they’re going to get the sample.

  “This is the center of a polygon,” Mark Lemmon interrupts. He points at Wonderland. “This is what we wrote our proposal for. That’s what we came here for,” he says.

  “Yes, the interior is what we want. The cracks are incidental,” Bill says in agreement.

  “But we could spend a month trying to get that sample. I have a one-day operation that could show us what we want,” Carol makes a last desperate plea.

  “I don’t think you can assert that it will take a month,” Mark says dismissively.

  “Let’s hear from the RA team. Rich?” Peter says.

  Rich Volpe, the RA engineer on duty, thinks for a minute. I suspect he’s hesitant to opine in the science meetings. The RA team fancies itself as Switzerland in these debates. They never express their preference unless it’s a technical matter. The RA team treats the scientists as clients.

  “We expect to see the same rate of accumulation [in both trenches],” Rich says.

  “Did you see the scoop getting lower?” Peter asks. If they can see that the RA moved lower to dig once it hit hard stuff, that might be evidence that they are accumulating when they scrape rather than just pushing around the dirt that falls back into the trench.

  “We could review the telemetry,” Rich says. That means he doesn’t know.

  “We need to design a test of scraping to find out,” Peter says. All they need is enough icy material for TEGA to register it. It would look like a little peak on a graph right around zero degrees Celsius.

  “It doesn’t have to be a lot. Bill has a very sensitive instrument,” Peter says.

  “I’m a sensitive guy,” Bill says.

  “I’ll put that in the daily report to HQ,” Peter says. Peter thinks the popcorn has popped on this debate. It’s been going on for almost two hours. He takes a poll.

  Wonderland wins a majority. Carol and Nilton lose their case.

  “I think we have a plan,” Peter says. “Nilton, don’t look so unhappy.”

  “I’m not unhappy,” Nilton says.

  “If you really want to be unhappy, join TEGA,” Bill says.

  I start to think about why it’s so important for HQ to have further proof. I conclude that something fishy is going on despite my lack of evidence.

  “There is a lot of work to do, to plan and execute this,” Joel says.

  “We should first send a plan and make sure HQ doesn’t freak out,” Peter says.

  “I think we need a plan and decision tree starting tomorrow,” Bill says.

  Carol is not happy.

  “We’ve declared every sample precious. Are we going to do something with the sample we have?” She makes one more plea to at least use the sample that’s still sitting in the RA scoop.

  Leslie Tamppari, the project scientist, assures her that, yes, they will deliver it … somewhere.

  BEFORE ANYTHING CHANGES, THE PLAN IS AS FOLLOWS: DURING SOL 38, deliver a small sample we have in the scoop now to the optical microscope. Then on sol 41, deliver the rest of sample to the wet chemistry lab (WCL). Then prepare the trench for an ice acquisition. Great it’s settled. I’m feeling proud that we hung in there with this terribly important decision in the mission. So proud, I consider calling it a sol.

  “How can we be sure the sample will have ice in it?” a voice from the back of the room asks.

  Everyone sits back down. A new debate ensues.

  “That may be a catc
h-22,” Dick Morris says. Morris describes how documenting ice would actually prevent its successful delivery. Since Phoenix doesn’t operate in real time, proving it’s ice requires taking an image of what you scoop up. By the time you would see the image, a lot of time would pass. Then you’d have to implement the next part of the plan. More time passes. It would be the next sol and the ice is gone—sublimated away.

  “Hmm … we can’t really satisfy both those requirements,” Bill says with a chuckle.

  Thinking for a moment, he realizes the whole idea is ludicrous.

  “If we could say it’s ice, we wouldn’t have to put it into TEGA,” Bill says. “NASA’s request is logically flawed.” They’re basically saying you have to put ice in TEGA so we can prove there’s ice in TEGA. Apparently NASA makes a big distinction based on which tool made the discovery.

  “We have to get this very hard material into the sample,” Peter says, trying to clarify. He wants to steer the conversation away from distracting tautological exercises. The team murmurs. He tries to get them back on track. We just need to put aside that it doesn’t actually make sense and decide on a plan, so Peter can report the plan back to NASA. Bill suggests putting the scoop on the ground as a heat sink. To try to keep the ice from sublimating, “if we’re forced to take NASA’s request literally.”

  “Yes, that would be a good way to preserve that,” Peter says, happy that everyone is problem-solving instead of bitching.

  Dick Morris worries that the scoop might stick to the ground.

  “Like if Nilton put his tongue on a pole during a Michigan winter,” Morris musses.

  “This is a mess,” Mike Hecht says.

  “Yes,” Joel agrees, sitting back down.

  Mike Mellon says he thinks there’s another practical problem with getting ice.

  “TEGA needs its sample first thing in the morning. This complicates the delivery,” he says. Using the instruments early in the morning requires heating. That hasn’t been done yet. This process requires heating TEGA, RA, and RAC. The pre-heat blocks they need aren’t ready. Plus, they’re complicated. The extreme cold of the early morning could seize up the joints for the RA and cause all kinds of problems with the RAC images and TEGA. They could even blow a fuse if they calculate the heating times incorrectly. And if I’ve learned anything from putting my fork in an outlet, it’s that fuses are important. There are several complicated power modeling simulations and loads of blocks to write before an early morning delivery is even possible.

  Our little decision tree turns into a forest of problems each time someone chimes in with a comment. The debate spawns all kinds of offspring, and inbred mini-debates take root. Instrument teams argue amongst themselves, with other groups and systems engineers. There’s an hour-long discussion of using divot images—these are close-up RAC pictures—to verify that it’s ice. It’s going to be another long night.

  “What if you get no sample at all? We’ll need another tree,” Carol says.

  Carol’s question turns the debate back on its head, and we start over. Maybe D-G is the right choice. Oh, no. Has the core premise of what HQ is really after been met?

  “If we’re not qualified to make that judgment, then we’re not the right people to run this mission. If they disagree with that, it’s their problem,” someone at the back of the room shouts. Yeah. We can’t let NASA HQ decide how we operate.

  This argument shines a light on why complicated processes have strict protocol. Julia Bell, however, is not present for the meeting. She’s in the spacecraft room preparing to upload tomorrow’s gimpy plan.

  “This is not a 1 or 0, it’s gray,” Mark Mellon says, mixing his metaphors. The problem will not have a clean solution, but we need to move forward.

  Joel steps in to help organize things. He makes a list of blocks that still require validation in order to scrape in the short term. They have to turn off some of the safety features they’ve built into the RA so it keeps digging in the hard stuff. It’s a long list. The meeting reaches the three-and-a-half-hour mark. People fade. Heads bobble.

  Finally, after about four hours, everyone is satisfied with the theoretical foundation for the plan. It’s time to create an actual plan.

  IN THEIR PUSH FOR “GOOD NEWS,” THE EPO (EDUCATION AND PUBLIC Outreach) team just sent out a press release that says they just scooped up the perfect sample. The release reads: “The scientists saw the scrapings in Surface Stereo Imager images on Sunday, June 29, agreed they had ‘almost perfect samples of the interface of ice and soil,’ and commanded the robotic arm to pick up some scrapings for instrument analysis.” Now it’ll take some quick thinking and good spin to explain why they didn’t put the sample into TEGA. I’m sure this will make the cranky LA Times reporter very happy.

  Finally, they agree to a strategy to scrape and deliver within the next ten sols. It’ll be a mess, but at least there’s a clear path to scrape and deliver, get NASA off their backs, and finally discover more good stuff.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ARM UP. STAND DOWN.

  SOL 37

  WE DRAG OURSELVES INTO THE SOC. MOST OF THE SCIENCE team only slept a few hours after last night’s marathon session of re-planning. The all-nighters feel more and more painful. There are a lot of shell-shocked, thousand-yard stares in the faces of everyone swiping into the secure entrance for shift I.

  Nothing looks different in Mission Control. There are no armed guards or metal detectors posted at the door. But don’t be fooled, we are now a mission under NASA occupation.

  Doug Ming is the science lead. He’s eager to get kickoff started. And he starts with some good news.

  “We now have 90% of mission success pan complete,” he says, half-smiling. The mission success pan is a photo mosaic of the whole landing site. One of the scientists in the back, desperate for any good news, starts to clap. He’s the only one and gives up quickly.

  “By sol 39 it should be complete,” Doug continues. He wants to lift our spirits with news of a big accomplishment. The team calls the image the “Peter Pan.” But it has some official boring name—the mission success pan—that they use to keep things on the up-and-up. The image is a high-resolution full-spectrum panoramic of the landscape. It shows off Peter’s SSI camera design.

  “Last night, after a monumental effort, Mike Mellon created a new sol tree for our TEGA sample acquisition. Of course, we still have a great sample and we want to deliver it [to MECA]. Then we’ll develop our method to deliver ice. It’s going to be a bit of trial and error. For sol 38 our main activities will be the OM [Optical Microscope] delivery of the sample in the scoop and WCL [Wet Chemistry Lab] thaw. TEGA door open and SSI images,” Doug reports.

  Doug says there’s one big caveat to the plan.

  “Obviously, we have a forward dependency of HQ approving,” he says. That’s the only mention of NASA at the kickoff meeting.

  Peter had promised the University and the Jet Propulsion Lab he would give everyone two days off for the July 4th holiday. That leaves one sol, today, to create three sol plans. Not everyone is happy about walking away from Phoenix during this crisis. Although, after more than a month of this, everyone needs a break. If we manage to plan three sols today, a skeleton crew will oversee ops at the SOC. To pay penance for missing two great discoveries earlier in the mission, I will stay with them. Everyone else will drink beer and barbecue.

  “We modified the schedule,” Bob Denise says. I guess that’s necessary for simultaneously planning three sols. He will do activity plan approval meeting (APAM) for sols 39 and 40 right after kickoff. APAM is where the shift II team digs into the science requirements and nails down a plan. Once the plan gets APAMed, sequencing begins. This is the sausage grinder that Dara Sabahi talked about. Sequencing these simplified, almost hobbled, plans is not the usual gory mess. This should be tamer, mere hot-dog making.

  The plans for sols 39 and 40 consist of remote sensing activities that already have completed sequences in the library. It’s a bit of a
copy-and-paste job from known activities that Phoenix can do with its eyes closed.

  Then the rest of the day will proceed as usual for planning sol 38. I go to uplink to watch Denise’s ultra APAM.

  PETER IS ALONE IN THE KITCHEN, WARMING UP SOME SOUP. HEATHER and Chris made some communal pozole soup. They’re alone this summer. They sent their five kids off to in-laws and summer camps so they could manage Mars time. Now they make large batches of soup for the team. What could be better than homemade soup and some quality time with Peter?

  “It’s tough to say what’s right,” Peter says unenthusiastically. He doesn’t seem like he wants to talk about NASA, or anything really. But he gamely answers my questions, even though he’d really rather enjoy his soup in peace and quiet. That’s fair. Unfortunately, I’m not getting the hint. I tell Peter that some of the team is angry that he’s not pushing back harder against NASA.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Peter asks, annoyed. “They hold all the cards. If I don’t comply, they can withhold funds or whatever they want. Not to mention that the engineers who control the code work for JPL; they can refuse to send anything to the spacecraft if their superiors tell them to. It’s impossible to move without them. We have to find a way to work together.” He goes back to his soup. I try to change the subject. The few members of the team who do grumble don’t really understand the position he’s in. It’s his mission, but without their checks, it’s hard to keep his staff fed and experimenting.

  “He’s kept the pressure off the team and given them the freedom to do their science,” Chris tells me over a beer one morning after shift.

  We manage to shoot the breeze about the equipment on Phoenix. I’m just happy whenever Peter talks to me about anything, and I hope I haven’t ruined his lunch. Peter gets up to have another bowl of soup. I sit there and worry that we’ll never bond over peyote in the desert. There isn’t going to be a half-naked Indian man taking us to find our spirit animals.

  “You know, ten years ago when we built the first SSI, you couldn’t buy a one-megapixel camera,” Peter says. Peter describes how Viking I and II used a one-pixel camera and did a raster scan. They would capture one pixel. Then use a motor to move the camera. Then the next pixel. And the next. It was all mechanical, no digital elements at all.