Martian Summer

by Andrew Kessler

  “You got to see this image,” Pat says to me. It’s a high-resolution 3D image of the foot pad. It’s a kind of science homage to the first Mars image ever taken. When Viking I landed on Mars, it took an image of its foot pad so the engineers could see how it was situated.

  “It’s how I knew I wanted to work in space,” he says. Seeing that image as a teenager blew his mind. They were on Mars. And now here he was, living his dream. With a blink of Phoenix’s SSI, he took the same image. Pat says I should have a look.

  “They’re up on Sol Runner,” he says. That’s one of the specialized mission-planning software packages the team uses.

  “I don’t have an account,” I say.

  “Oh, you don’t have an account?” He’s surprised. How can I cover the mission without access to Sol Runner? Shrug.

  RIGEL WOIDA, PAT’S SON, POPS INTO BOB DENISE’S OFFICE.

  “I feel like we’re in that sci-fi film. You know the one where the lone robot takes care of the habitat after all the humans have killed each other off,” Rigel says. I think he’s talking about Logan’s Run.

  Both Pat and Rigel Woida work as engineers on the Phoenix mission. “The apple does not fall far from the tree” is a saying people use in this situation. They’re both big men with big personalities. Rigel is a bit more of a rabble-rouser than his pop. In one infamous Phoenix incident, Rigel nearly prevented the delivery of a little-discussed addition to Phoenix, the Organic Free Blank (OFB). The OFB is an inert test sample that is rigorously prepared and tested to exclude any organic material. It’s a blank, an organic free blank. They can test the background levels of organic material with the OFB. If TEGA measures organics in a sample, they’ll use the OFB to check if it’s a false positive.

  The addition of the OFB was much debated. There wasn’t really money for it. But in the end, a plurality of scientists agreed it was worthwhile. So there was a last-minute scramble at the LPL to build one. It literally came down to the wire. Chris Shinohara and Rigel, along with the rest of the team, had been up all night putting its final paperwork together and preparing it for transport to JPL on the last possible day it could be delivered.

  It took a little longer than they anticipated, and there was a mad dash to make their plane. They made a quick stop at their respective homes to grab some clothes for the trip. In his tired state, Rigel accidentally packed his toothbrush and underoos in a bag he’d taken to the gun range a few days before. Security at the airport was not happy with the shell casings in his bag. Somehow Chris managed to avoid Rigel getting thrown in jail and delivered the OFB to JPL in the nick of time. Another Phoenix crisis averted.

  “WE JUST DID MIDPOINT, APAM, AND FINAL SEQUENCE RUN-THROUGH. It goes a lot quicker when it’s just us,” Bob Denise says. He needs a moment to focus. He wants to take one last look at the plan. Then Bob does the Command Approval Meeting (CAM). And that’s it. He signs the official paperwork and the plan is pushed out into space.

  I sit in the empty downlink room in the chair that’s usually parked outside of the SSI office, “Pat’s Porch.” And, as you do on the porch, you contemplate. Or if it’s late and you consumed heavily at a 4th of July party, you rant.

  NASA, IN ITS 50-YEAR HISTORY, FORGOT WHY THE AVERAGE ANDREW B. Dreamer might love space. Going to space is difficult and bold. It’s fraught with risk and insurmountable odds. We’re not meant to be out there. Every voyage pushes the limits of our humanity. There is no routine mission to space. NASA failed the moment they let us think that. It all went flat when NASA stopped telling us that space is risky, nearly impossible. After we got over the excitement of the first moonwalk, NASA didn’t move us to the next phase. They never upped the ante to give us more insight, take us farther down the rabbit hole. Either they got lazy or didn’t think we could handle it. Either way, we were in the palms of their hands. They could have turned us into a nation of nerds, glorious math and engineer-loving eggheads. Instead they rested on their laurels, played it safe. They tried to keep telling the same story. First it was cute and funny, but soon we just wished they’d go away.

  They lost us. If only they would listen to Dara Sabahi and Peter Smith. Those are the guys you want running the show—not this Michael Griffin character. If Sabahi and Smith ran NASA like a tag-team wrestling crew, they wouldn’t always be on the defensive about success and money.

  One thing you start to notice in news coverage when you take an interest in the space program is how much each program costs. For Phoenix, it’s $420 million. The figure is repeated over and over. Contrast that with how rarely you see the cost of the war in Iraq or Afghanistan printed in the newspaper. The Joint Chiefs are really good at selling war; if only NASA could sell space so well. Heck, we could have relocated the entire Baath party to colonize Mars. War and space solved. Bamn! If the story could be reframed in terms of the bold and geektastic, NASA might have a better than a snowball’s chance in hell as not being seen as such futards. So here’s what we want: Give us heroes who explore the universe, people engaged in an inherently risky business, and tell us about them. Show us their flaws, their drive, make us feel empathy and let us root for them. We want pioneers and risk-taking discoverers. We want to imagine the folks who are braver and work harder by pushing the limits of humanity. They exist. I see them working here every day. Don’t hide them. Don’t make it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get an up-close view. Without people and a story to care about, we’re left to shake our fists at the stupidity of a bureaucratic conversion error that causes a crash or a radar turned off too soon.

  Instead of heroes, NASA gives us science goals and complex stories about the search for habitability. Those goals aren’t bad, they’re just uninteresting. How do I know? I dare you to tell me what was the science goal of the most famous of all the missions, the moon landing. You don’t know because it didn’t matter.

  We need a new story with passionate risk-embracing characters to love. Outside of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, most Americans would be hard pressed to name a third astronaut—even the one who traveled with Buzz and Neil on Apollo 11. Poor Michael Collins. In those exciting early days of NASA, they used to laugh in the face of risk. We want to laugh again.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  DOWN AND OUT IN THE SOC

  SOL 41

  We fail to heed edna fiedler’s advice. after a month living on Mars time, the allure of a day off in the sun is too great. Instead of toughing it out, too many of us make a one-day shift to Earth time. If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to go to Japan for the day and then fly back, I can now tell you: it hurts.

  The team got just enough time off to remind their bodies how wrong this schedule is. Switching magnified the brain fuzz, aches, pains, fatigue, and general malaise—I could go on. But if you think today is bad, you should have seen us yesterday. We were in rough shape. But enough complaining, there’s ice to scrape.

  There’s a new kind of badge holder here in the SOC. It’s denoted HQ and it’s worn by the enforcer NASA sent to watch our every move and report back. His name is Ramon de Paula. Somewhere in the building lurks the NASA project executive for Phoenix. He will ensure that we do NASA’s bidding … or else. We will now work under the shadow of a NASA minder.

  “They didn’t approve the plan. HQ wants an official review,” Peter explained to Leslie Tamppari yesterday when they arrived back at the SOC. He shook his head in disbelief—even though he was doing the briefing. The overlords back in Washington aren’t ready to approve the scheme the team cooked up in the four-hour special Smith session. It’s all postponed by official dictum until at least sol 44. Before sol 44 we are expected to plan and test for a new approach. Then once NASA feels comfortable, they’ll give the go-ahead to open the TEGA doors.

  Headquarters wants to be sure the Phoenix plan is really iceworthy. They want some guarantees—they love guarantees—the mission will get ice. Yestersol was a marathon planning session. The goal was a framework to convince NASA that the science team has a f
antastic approach that will yield lots of ice. It went medium well. So we threw it out. Now there’s a new plan with some newly devised tests.

  “We’re going to scrape about 80 times in the bottom of the trench,” Ashitey says. Still, no one is sure about the effectiveness of the scraping. It doesn’t look promising, and without better evidence our current plan is vulnerable to summary disposal. Right now it looks like the scoop just shifts around the dirt that’s on top of the hard stuff. The sides of the trench fall in and dirt gets moved back and forth; this gives the illusion of scraping. That’s not to say it won’t work. They’ve only had limited time in this new trench. So they’ll have to test and retest. Yestersol’s plan asked Phoenix to deliver the dirt that was already in the scoop into MECA’s optical microscope and wet chemistry lab. Carol was pleased it wasn’t wasted. We should know soon if it worked.

  Kickoff begins at just before 6:00 p.m. local Tucson time, around 2:32 p.m. on Mars. Curiously, there are lots of teenagers sitting on black plastic buckets in the back of downlink. That’s not normal.

  “These are students from a program called PSIP, Phoenix Science Internship Program. They are high-schoolers mentored by some members of the science team. They’ll be here for a few days with their black buckets,” says Cassie Bowman from the education and outreach department. The buckets have nothing to do with their education. There’s just a chronic chair shortage in downlink; the buckets are supposed to keep the PSIP kids out of the way while they complete their summer internships and watch the wonders of space exploration.

  “They will be shadowing their mentors and helping out. Please introduce yourselves,” Cassie says.

  “Welcome, students,” Vicky Hipkin says. She is the sol’s sci-lead. “So, today is a very big day. We expect the WCL success metric to be met if we get a sample in the drawer. We’ll have a big cheer for that. And it’s a big day in our progress for getting a TEGA sample,” Vicky says. Usually I like Vicky’s unflagging optimism and grand vision. But today it just feels like hype. She invites Aaron Zent, the strategic science lead, to talk through the strategic plan formed at yestersol’s marathon session.

  “In light of the fact that we’ve re-prioritized to get an icy sample, our strategic plan has changed. We intended to sample Snow White [at the Wonderland site] from top to bottom layers,” he says.

  Vicky pulls up the mission scorecard. It’s the chart with all the boxes that tells you how your mission is faring in the grand scheme of galactic discovery. This is a favorite tool to boost spirits whenever things look grim. Doug used it just a few sols ago to keep us from walking out when NASA first came to town. The thing is, it’s not a very pretty chart. They should have made one of those giant thermometers like the telethons have. Boxes with check marks just don’t do it for me. Even so, the boxes indicate that things aren’t going too bad. In spite of my foul mood and the long road ahead, the chart makes it clear that we make progress every sol.

  In fact, the baseline success requirement for MECA is nearly met. They only have to get two samples for MECA and TEGA to have “minimum success.” If the delivery works today, Phoenix will meet the MECA goal. Then they just need a sample for TEGA, and balloons will fall from the ceiling and Dick Clark will bring us champagne. The giant Peter Pan mosaic is almost complete too. The final images should come down in the first com pass. This is all good news, but who is going to be happy with “minimum success”? Not the kids on the buckets, and certainly not the overachieving scientists in this room.

  “It’s going to be a long day for Phoenix,” Cameron Dixon, today’s SPI I, tells the team. There are four communication passes to handle all the data.

  “That’s the most yet,” Cameron says. That’s the spirit. We’re going to stay up later and work harder. Minimum success is nothing. Now that the engineers feel more comfortable operating Phoenix and a larger library of safe activities exists, they’re going to put more activities in the plan and Phoenix will stay up later and later. Even though NASA hobbled the TEGA effort, the other instruments should make up for what’s lost. That’s good for science, but puts more pressure on the team to code an increasing number of activities on the same short timeline.

  “It’s is going to be very difficult to work this plan,” Vicky adds. But she’s sure we’ve got the moxie to do it. Before Vicky ends the meeting, she asks for the weather report.

  “We’re storm-free. Everything is good!” Carlos Lange says.

  Wait. Mark Lemmon says he has a question.

  “Why are 72 images missing from yestersol’s plan?” he asks.

  An engineer from the spacecraft team responds hesitantly. He says there was an error with an APID. Something got mislabeled (read: someone effed up). Lemmon shakes his head. The images to complete the Peter Pan mosaic are lost. Now he must wait until there’s available time in the sol plan to retake them to complete the image. We break.

  John Hoffman, the TEGA co-investigator, asks the bucket brigade to follow him into the conference room. He’s going to give a little lecture on TEGA to his crew of interns. I ask if I can join. He says sure. Hoffman’s lab at University of Texas at Dallas did a lot of the fabricating for TEGA’s EGA (Evolved Gas Analyzer). This kind gentleman is a controversial figure. There was a lot of strife and indigestion over the design and fabrication of an important part of the EGA, the gas ionizer. This piece of TEGA, sometimes called the ion-pump, helps move a sample through the EGA. The ionizer excites and speeds a neutral gas to carry the atomic bits through the instrument for measurement.

  Bill Boynton shakes his head when I ask him about it.

  “We thought that, together with JPL, we could hold their hands through the process,” he says. “Heather asked NASA to assign a quality assurance specialist from NASA.” Apparently they were out of practice and needed some help. Even with NASA stepping in, it didn’t work out well. Much of the EGA had to be rebuilt at the last minute. Chuck Fellows from the Tucson TEGA group had to clean all these tiny parts by hand to try to get it working. It wasn’t even clear if they would make the delivery date (or even launch). How it all went wrong is complicated. Most important is to remember that it’s not easy to build an electron stripper (ionizer) for Mars. All that matters now is if TEGA can hold it together and keep delivering amazing data.

  Hoffman’s been building spectrometers since the seventies. And it doesn’t seem like he’s slowing down any time soon. He still runs an active Mars lab, mentors students, and is often here debating science when I’m walking out the door. It makes me wonder what kind of meds he got—something better than Provigil™, I suspect. (This is the only scenario that doesn’t force me to confront the sad truth that this man has more staying power than I do.) We all sit down. Hoffman smiles sweetly at his students.

  “There are six instruments on Phoenix.” He starts his lecture with an easy one.

  I knew it!

  “Bill Boynton used a neutron emitter to show that neutrons interacted with hydrogen on the polar cap of Mars. And his analysis shows that these interactions took place about 5 cm below the surface.”

  Knew it!

  “The two parts of TEGA are the ‘TA’—the thermal analyzer—and ‘EGA’—evolved gas analyzer.” Knew it!

  “Forty-five-degree slope on TEGA designed for extra dirt to fall off. And the small grate size is to keep the boulders out.” Knew it! Knew it!

  The lecture is fantastic. I take a moment to feel superior to some overachieving teenagers.

  Hoffman doesn’t go into any of the issues that cropped up with TEGA or the problems that plagued the ionizer. The students don’t really grill him either. Now probably isn’t the time.

  IN THE RA OFFICE, ASHITEY MINDLESSLY CLICKS THE “REFRESH” BUTTON on his computer screen.

  “What’s taking so long to upload the images?” he asks no one in particular. Ashitey wants to know if they successfully delivered the sample left in the scoop to the wet chemistry lab, WCL. He’s clicking refresh in the hopes that somehow he can will the
images he is waiting for into the SOC. Not that they’d admit it, but I think they were personally offended that the sample they collected proved the source of this controversy.

  “We worked really hard to get that sample,” Joseph Carsten says.

  “They wanted us to pick up 20 cc’s!” Ashitey says in his most vexed voice. Although even at his most vexed, he has a calm, enlightened demeanor.

  “That’s like a couple of soup spoons. We’ve never even tested that in the PIT,” Joseph says. “I am amazed that we did it. I couldn’t believe we could pick that up. We got 15 cc. I didn’t think we would get it. It was a great sample. Then, of course, the President called.” That’s Joseph’s interpretation of how NASA intervened.

  “We stayed all night working on that! Then they just held it. I’m glad they used it for something,” Joseph continues.

  “Did you know, we only know when current goes through the arm? That’s like if you knew you were touching something with your finger based on the pain you felt in your arm muscles from pushing,” Ashitey says. “We can just measure how much more current we’re using. They wanted us to just go 1 cm into the ground. You can’t make sensitive movements when your feedback loop only gives you a sense of how hard you’re pushing!” He then demonstrates this by pushing his arm through the air.

  “Look at how noisy the DEMs are,” Ashitey protests. These are digital elevation maps that show the contours in the ground. “You can predict reliably in the air where you’ll be, but once you touch the surface it’s hard to know exactly what’s happening. You don’t have many senses to work with.” Since the arm is flexible and swings, there are a lot of forces acting on it. That makes it hard to predict exact position.

  “We warned the science team that it would be hard. We told them we only had a 50-50 chance. They don’t really understand how difficult it is,” Joseph says. Ashitey reminds me again that it’s really important not to muck up the whole book by getting the RA wrong.