Martian Summer

  “Now, those guys had some engineering challenges,” he says with a slight smile.

  Space imagers are not like any camera you can buy off the shelf. The CCD chips in them are carefully calibrated, and each pixel defect is carefully understood. The glass lenses must be custom-made. They take thousands of test images to “characterize” the camera because the chips make each one unique. Then calibration targets are used to understand light variations. These calibration targets are carried to Mars so that they can continually correct the images for accuracy as lighting and other conditions vary. The targets are reference points like Pantone color swatches. Some use pigment and a rubber compound. Others use crushed-up minerals that they might find on Mars, like hematite or goethite.

  “The camera properties vary with time and temperature,” Peter says. “These cameras need to work consistently through an extreme temperature range throughout the mission. Something between –100 and –20. That requires a careful understanding.” But further explanation will have to wait. Peter finishes his soup and stands up. Okay, back to work.

  ON MY WAY BACK TO DOWNLINK FROM MY PETER SMITH SOUP ACCORD, I pass Joseph Carsten from the RA team.

  “You want to come test the delivery in the PIT?” Carsten asks me.

  I do want!

  There’s a pretty severe warning on the door to the PIT. Access is extremely limited. There’s even a list of names of who can enter. My palms get sweaty whenever I go through that secondary security door and walk up the ramp to the lander. I’m never quite sure it’s okay. It’s so damn exciting, you’re pretty sure you’re breaking some rule.

  Joseph is here to test a hypothetical delivery plan. He’ll present it to Ray and the team. If they like what they see, this will be the approach. This delivery is extra tricky because the oven doors aren’t open all the way. And this particular cell sits at an awkward angle. This is the first delivery to this side of TEGA. The tented doors, the solenoid scare, and the new side mean lots of extra documentation and special care.

  Joseph went to JPL after graduate school in robotics at Carnegie Mellon. His advisor’s interest lay in autonomous driving software for roving missions. Joseph got his robot driver’s license while he helped develop some new robot driving technology. It was great timing. The team at JPL that operated the Spirit and Opportunity rovers needed to update their driving software. They chose to implement the package Joseph worked on. JPL recruited him to implement it. His robotics cred helped land him a spot on the Phoenix mission.

  “I was a late add,” he says. He moved to Phoenix from the rovers just a few months before landing.

  Tonight, Joseph’s working alongside Rolfe Bode in the PIT. Rolfe is the PIT test engineer on duty. I met him at launch. In fact, he’s the only person who contacted me after we watched Phoenix roar off into the sky to offer me a tour of his lab. Now I feel guilty for never taking the tour.

  “You want some cookies?” Rolfe asks. “My wife made them. They’re chocolate chip.”

  Rolfe and Joseph are both pretty relaxed about the long night ahead of them. Even though they wear matching Phoenix lab coats and anti-static grounding bracelets, they couldn’t look more different. Joseph is fresh-faced and lanky, maybe 100 pounds if soaked. Rolfe is the gentle veteran who looks like he’s seen it all—the hearty space veteran. We all eat cookies.

  Joseph fiddles with a video camera to document his practice run. His mission tonight is limited to finding the best delivery pose for this particular TA oven in TEGA. TEGA is shaped like a little house. The doors to the ovens are positioned on each side of the “roof.” One side of the ovens is oriented uphill, toward the scoop head, and the other is sloped downward. This is the first delivery on the more awkward downhill side.

  Rolfe says this is the first time he’s worked on the surface ops phase of a mission. Usually, test engineers like Bode work just until the lander or rover launches or arrives on a planet. Then their work is done. Then the fun part comes. It’s what the RA team calls the “ice cream phase.” It means that the engineers who do all the work before landing have equally long hours but don’t get any of the ice cream. Once the spacecraft launches, guys like Rolfe usually look for new work. Move on to the next mission, and miss out on the windfall of dessert and glorious new discoveries.

  “Don’t forget about those folks,” Rolfe says.

  There might be only 130 or so faces coming through this building, but it took a cast of thousands to get Phoenix on Mars.

  “Sometimes you feel like you’re not doing much to help the effort,” Rolfe says. “But I guess without us, they’re not going anywhere.”

  Joseph holds a little bucket under the scoop and they dump out an old sample. We wait. Nothing happens. We shoot the breeze. Still nothing happens. I hope it’s not broken.

  “Did we turn it on?” Joseph asks. He flips a switch.

  Phoenix II comes to life. The arm rises and tilts its scoop head to rid itself of the old sample. Joseph is there to catch it in a little cup. Then we sit quietly while Rolfe and Joseph calculate and code.

  “Let’s do real-time commands” Joseph says after about fifteen minutes.

  “Okay,” Rolfe says, “I’m ready.”

  Joseph reads off the coordinates. Rolfe enters them into his machine. They remind themselves to check the sequence length. New flight rules dictate delivery be less than three minutes. They can’t risk another short.

  I wonder what will happen when they get the rasp going. Maybe they should have some kind of flight rules to keep it from running too long. I don’t want that rasp shorting on us too.

  Everything is in place. Joseph presses the red button on the camcorder. Rolfe initiates the sequence. The RA moves slowly into position … very … very … slowly.

  Can’t it go any faster? How can I get anyone excited about Mars machines if Phoenix II limps along like this? There’s even a wire support hanging down from the ceiling to brace the RA joints.

  “Sorry, it’s built to Martian gravity specifications” Joseph says, defending his robotic arm.

  “We have to simulate the gravity the arm would feel on Mars,” Joseph says. Mars only has one-third of the gravity we have here, so there’s a lot more pressure pushing down. Fair enough.

  The scoop tilts into position, struggling and straining to cope with Earth’s heavy gravitational effect and dreaming of the day it might work unencumbered on Mars. The rasp kicks on with a whirl. The vibrations reach the sample at the back of the scoop, and a narrow dirt convoy streams out. It’s just like the soldiers Ashitey described. There they go, marching off the edge in an organized single file. Joseph measures the amount of sample delivered. He snaps a few photographs so he can show the team the highlights. Then they’re free to choose their favorite approach.

  With the arm moving at a snail’s pace, each test can take an hour or more. We’re going to be here a while. I don’t mind at all. Testing dirt deliveries, even slow ones, is the best way to feel like you’re really living on Mars.

  NILTON CONFESSES TO ME THAT HE FEELS A LITTLE RESPONSIBLE FOR all this trouble with NASA.

  “I sent an email to the entire team after we didn’t sample the ice from D-G [Dodo-Goldilocks],” he says. The email said not dumping those little clumps of ice into TEGA was a big mistake.

  “The ice could have even had salt in it,” he says. “It would be a great sample. If there was briny water, the purer water would freeze out first and push the salts up and keep raising the freezing point. This is the best chance for getting salts and organics. I was really annoyed.”

  Nilton wrote up his concerns and emailed them out to the entire team. It was the same time the TEGA short happened. He didn’t realize the short was so serious. But NASA and JPL were busy investigating the implications for the mission if TEGA failed. Some team members thought that the timing caused NASA to overreact. An angry Doug Ming confronted Nilton and suggested this note might have caused the whole mess.

  There’s an easy fix, in Nilton’s op
inion. Grab some ice from Dodo and move on. We wouldn’t be here planning all night. The mission could continue like normal.

  “There are a lot of geologists here that want a specific sample, and so the team pushed for the other trench scoop. But that’s not the primary goal of the mission. We are here to follow the water,” Nilton says. The ones who reject D-G say this white stuff is just frost deposited from the atmosphere on a cold finger and not the ice they’re after. But they can’t be sure unless we sample it. Nilton doesn’t like the idea that they know what’s best when we really don’t know much of anything. They should take a step back and look at the wider goals before pushing for any one activity.

  IN SPITE OF BEING COLLEAGUES AND FRIENDS, CARLOS LANGE disagrees. He says the center of the polygons is representative of the region. He thinks Dodo is the wrong choice. That’s an idea that’s popular with most of the geologists.

  “Dodo is a boundary feature and accounts for less than 10% of the area. That’s not to say it’s not interesting, but all the models and hypotheses they want to test are geared for the polygon center.” He makes a good argument. The team is headed in the right direction in spite of Carol and Nilton’s objections.

  “Then again, I’m not sure they should listen to me,” Carlos says. He has strong opinions but a lot less Mars experience than Nilton and Carol, or Doug and Mike. Before Phoenix, he was interested in math models of dust moving in your lungs. Now he’s obsessed with dust in the Martian atmosphere.

  AS IT GETS LATE, THE MOOD LIGHTENS IN THE SOC. PEOPLE LOOK forward to an Earth day off. Over coffee, I have a mock debate—D-G or Wonderland—with Maria Banks from the outreach department. She’s one of the overnight notetakers. Maria keeps the media team updated in the wee hours when no one else wants to be here and/or nothing exciting happens. It’s a pretty sweet summer job. She is a graduate student at the University of Arizona, and her research requires her to stare at images of Mars all day. She’s doing research on a big camera called HiRISE attached to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

  We argue the merits of a quick delivery from Dodo or going for broke with Wonderland. We both agree it’s not fair that NASA stepped in. Maria has some good ideas about keeping the scoop pressed to the surface so any ice would stay cool and not sublimate. I tell her Bill proposed the very same thing. Great minds … and all that.

  Me? I’m less confident. They both seem like good options.

  Joe and Rolfe are still testing in the PIT. They have hours and hours left to go. I peek my head outside; the sun is just starting to come up over the desert’s horizon.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ALL THE LANDERS, INDEPENDENT

  SOL 38

  HAPPY JULY 4TH. SHALL I WAX POETIC ABOUT NASA GETTING TO space and the meaning of freedom? Just kidding. We’re having a party! The TEGA team hosts a Phoenix party in the hills overlooking Tucson. The best thing about the party: they invite me.

  I catch a ride up to a beautiful home in the hills with Peter’s assistant, Frankie. The house belongs to Dr. Gerard Droege, M.D. Don’t let his curly gray hair or reading glasses or medical degree fool you. He’s the most junior member of the TEGA team.

  “Thanks for coming,” Droege greets me at the door. Chris Shinohara and Heather Enos unload several dozen pounds of meat from a giant cooler.

  “There’s beer over there, and the chicken should be done soon,” Chris says.

  “Wait! No reporters at this party!” Heather says. My stomach knots up. Doesn’t she know I need a day off and beer too? I was at the SOC the whole day; I swear.

  “I’m just kidding,” she says. “But nobody talk to this guy!” This is hazing. Heather introduces me to Chris’s brother and some other family members. I promise her everything from this point on is off the record. So I won’t say anything about what happens from this moment—

  THE SWIMMING, BEER, BOOZE, AND FIREWORKS PARTY IS OFF LIMITS TO any salacious gossip that would really flesh out the characters in this book. Such personal disclosures might persuade Congress to double or triple NASA’s budget. But I will respect the team’s off-the-record wishes.

  Instead, I’ll take a moment to talk about the host of the party, Dr. Droege.

  Gerard Droege is the man who inhabits this beautiful house and its extremely well-curated art collection. He is a junior at the University of Arizona. And please call him Jerry.

  “He’s a great guy,” says his advisor. She’s about twenty-five years his junior and wasn’t really sure why he came to the U of A to get his computer science degree. Droege has one year left to finish his degree. He’s already done his medical degree, internship, and residency, and worked in private practice as an obstetrician for twenty years, but he was living a lie. He didn’t love babies; he loved planets. In spite of an extremely successful practice in Westchester County, a swanky suburb just north of New York City, Jerry decided he’d had enough.

  “I used to keep the Journal of Geophysics in the waiting room,” he says. That should have been a clue that he was no ordinary obstetrician.

  Every delivery, I suspect, he’d look down at the lumpy mucus-covered crying little alien heads and think, “I should be working in space.”

  “I always complained about wanting to change careers, especially to a particular friend. I guess he got tired of hearing it,” he tells me. His friend, Leo, invited him to a party where an astronomy professor was going to give a talk.

  “I was blown away,” Jerry says. “I went up to talk to him [the professor] afterwards.” They talked.

  “There’s more where that came from. You should consider taking an evening class in astronomy,” said the affable professor. Jerry enrolled right away. And that was it. Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson taught the Columbia University extension course. Okay, so it wasn’t just any adjunct professor, but one of the most passionate and interesting astronomers working today. Tyson is the head of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. You might recognize him from one of the many science TV shows he’s hosted. Once the seed was planted and Jerry felt his planetary baby kicking, it was obvious. He couldn’t be an obstetrician anymore. All that space angst developed into something much bigger, and it was starting to crown. And just like this birthing metaphor, it really needed to come out.

  “I started doing the math on how I could go back to school. What would I do with my practice? What would I tell my employees? I didn’t know, but I could figure it out,” he says. He could make sacrifices. And no matter how he computed, it didn’t seem like any sacrifice was bigger than not following his passion.

  “I was willing to start over. I was willing to go back as an undergrad and then go to grad school. It didn’t matter,” said Droege.

  Tyson is a pretty great mentor to have, if you’re going to drop your entire life and become a space man.

  “He [Tyson] told me if I were serious, I should consider moving to Arizona. He said if I were persistent, I could find a home there.” The next day he called his two employees, his nurse and his receptionist.

  “I promise to find you both jobs,” he said. “Then I told them I planned to move to Arizona and go back to school.” It came as a bit of a surprise.

  Then he put his practice up for sale and filled out his application.

  “It wasn’t that big of a deal,” he says. He just abandoned his career, moved cross-country, and went to school with kids half his age.

  “Well, if I failed, I could always go back to delivering babies. I was fully prepared to do four years and then on to grad school to try,” he says.

  When Droege arrived, he registered for classes and went looking for a job.

  “I just went around and knocked on doors,” he says. Droege started at the Lunar and Planetary Lab looking for his after-school job. At the time, Bill Boynton and Heather Enos were hard at work with TEGA calibrations. Overwhelmed.

  “We were happy to have some extra help,” Bill says. He was in luck. They needed cheap labor. Jerry wanted an opportunity. He was willing to work late, learn
anything or do anything.

  “He was a quick learner and more than competent. We felt lucky to have him,” Bill Boynton says of Droege. Jerry worked like mad to get up to speed on the complexities of planetary mass spectroscopy. At the end of the year, he’d proved his worth. They offered him a full-time position as a technician. This was far better than anything he’d imagined. After his first year, he’d secured his place on a Mars mission. When he tells the story, all I can think about is this line in The Alchemist: “And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

  “When they [Heather and Bill] told me they were going to hire me, I just kind of said, oh thank you. And that was it.” They were all hanging out having a good time celebrating some achievement or the end of the year. “Then I got in my car and it just sort of hit me. I was overwhelmed. I just cried the whole way home.”

  Thanks for having me at the party, Jerry.

  BEFORE THE PARTY, I SPENT THE DAY AT THE SOC, AS PROMISED. THERE was no way I’d miss another moment of this mission. No way. Not after the last two moments of discovery. So I sit with the skeleton crew as we go through the motions.

  “You have a report for me, Pat?” Bob asks Pat Woida. Bob Denise comes into his office. It’s about fifteen minutes before the final tag up with Denver. He wants the instrument reports from Pat Woida, who, along with his son, Rigel Woida, and Joe Stehly, are what’s left of today’s Phoenix crew.

  “It’s a lot easier when you only have to track down two people,” Bob says. He’s enjoying the calmer side of mission life.

  “I’ve done my IDE duty for SSI, RAC, and MECA OM. They are all healthy and look good. There are a few EVRs, but no show-stoppers. They’re having some compression errors on the images.” Pat gives Bob the run-down, conducting what would be a two-hour meeting in thirty seconds. The plan is simplified observations and remote sensing. They’re activities that have already been done. Bob takes the plan to review the errors.