Martian Summer

  At midpoint, there’s a new surprise.

  “We got 15 more megabytes of data on board than predicted. So some things will be lost; mostly SSI images and some MECA data will be lost in the buffer,” Jim Chase says during his data report. Considering Phoenix only has 100 megabytes for storage, that’s a lot of extra data. And no one really knows where it came from. More data seems like a great thing. It’s not. Great care goes into tracking these bits and bytes; extras means something is amiss. Plus, this overgrowth pushed out some of the images scheduled for downlink. They’re gone forever.

  “What kind of disconnect is there that gave 15 MB too much data?” Richard Kornfeld asks.

  The spacecraft team might want to restrict the science plan until they know why they are generating more data than predicted. Apart from Phoenix seemingly doing activities on its own, everything else is normal. I suspect the ghost in the machine objects to the changes NASA implemented and is going ahead with its original plan.

  The RA team will continue work on scraping techniques. MECA will continue to process their data. And we’ll keep waiting until we get ice inside TEGA.

  TWENTY MINUTES BEFORE THE END-OF-SOL SCIENCE MEETING, PETER meets with his scientist-in-training interns. They’re all laughing and talking about living on Mars time.

  “It’s not so bad,” one of the students says.

  “Good, I’m glad you guys are enjoying yourselves,” Peter says gently. “Let’s talk about your project.”

  “These students are here to do real work,” Peter tells me. He didn’t want them to come all the way to Mars for make-work. So he’s constructed actual projects. One team makes Mars dirt samples based on the new chemistry findings. This group will make a film. It’s a Mars version of Powers of Ten, a classic movie about the beauty of scale by the designers, Charles and Ray Eames. Peter wants them to examine the powers of ten on Mars.

  One of the highlights of Phoenix is that it can image huge panoramic vistas, atomic-force nano-pictures, and everything in between. Making interesting “data products,” as the scientists call them, is important work. Usually the camera team makes these kind of layman-friendly images that are a big part of how Peter wants the public to connect with the mission. On Phoenix, it’s been hard to put out anything more than raw images.

  In spite of the time crunch, mosaics and comparative images end up on the Web. Amazingly, it’s the public that picks up the slack. There’s a group of dedicated fans and skilled amateurs who post their work to fan sites. They do it just for the love of Mars.

  “We should be doing as much as we can to encourage that,” Mark Lemmon told me one afternoon over coffee. “These are the people who get excited and write their Congressmen to keep us in business.”

  “Don’t limit yourselves to Phoenix either,” Peter says to his students. “Look at HiRISE to get even larger-scale images.” They’re excited about the project—Peter and his students. They cook up a plan and then idly chat.

  “Have you heard about the perchlorate?” Peter excitedly asks his students. They shake their heads. I shake my head too. I don’t even know what perchlorate is. Sam Kounaves, the MECA Co-Investigator, sits nearby and overhears the discussion. He looks over, a bit shocked.

  “We haven’t announced that yet,” Sam says. Is this the big secret the MECA team is hiding!? That would explain why he’s annoyed.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” Peter asks.

  “Tomorrow … ?” Sam says with some hesitation. He definitely doesn’t want to be put on the spot.

  “We still have data coming back … and we need to prove it,” he says.

  “Always tomorrow!” Peter says. “I’m going to give your talk if you don’t.”

  Later that day, Peter gives an interview to a local PBS affiliate. They ask what is the most exciting thing he’s seen on the mission.

  “I can’t tell you,” he says with a fiendish chuckle.

  I do a Google search for perchlorate. I discover it’s a chlorine-based ground water contaminant. Contaminant!? It’s highly toxic to humans, poison. And it can be used as rocket fuel. Rocket fuel? I should follow up with someone on this.

  DICK MORRIS STANDS AT THE FRONT OF THE CONFERENCE ROOM.

  “I’m going to start,” he says quietly. Everyone talks over him. He is always so civil. The team settles down. He puts up some graphs of the multispectral images of the ice. He shows images from the sol 31 and 32 digging sequences.

  Based on his reading of the photos and data from the RA, he thinks there is a lot of dust in the ice they’re trying to scrape. He discusses the data and makes a long trail of logical steps with sound scientific principles. (I lack the tools necessary to follow these steps, but Morris has such a friendly, trustworthy look, I can only assume they’re spot on.) It leads to a conclusion that this ice is not going to be easy to scrape.

  “If the goal is to sample ice, we need to generate a large volume of dark-toned material and rapid-transfer it to TEGA,” Morris says. He explains the ice will be too hard to scrape. And based on the data, rasping is the only hope for getting a sample. It’s food for thought and justifies the decision to abandon scraping and work with the rasp.

  “You’ve got too much time on your hands, Dick,” Bill Boynton says jokingly. “You need a real job.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  NILTON’S NODULES

  SOL 47

  IT’S AN HOUR BEFORE KICKOFF, AND THE SOC IS MOSTLY QUIET. Wandering around, looking a bit lost, is Ramon de Paula. You might mistake it for the look of a man who has missed his bus and doesn’t know when the next one is coming. At the SOC, it can only mean one thing: Ramon is not on the “phx_surf_ops” email list. We can only guess how long he’s been here.

  The team kindly gave Ramon a desk and workspace, way in the back of downlink, near the kitchen in the back of the SOC. Every five minutes or so, he wanders out, does a lap around, and heads back. Ramon can’t understand why the SOC is empty and kickoff isn’t starting. He probably calculated the start time for today’s sol just like I did on my first week—adding forty minutes. Little did he know that’s just the simple math. Tired of the wandering, he swallows his pride and makes his way over to Bill Boynton’s desk. Bill is here early, analyzing data.

  “How do I find out when kickoff starts?” Ramon asks. He’s having the same issues adjusting to life in the SOC as I did back in the day. How cute. Ramon and I are two peas in a pod. Ramon doesn’t like that he’s not on the “phx_surf_ops” list. Talk to Sara Hammond, she’ll get you sorted out.

  “Be careful,” Nilton says with a raise of his eyebrows. What is that supposed to mean? Ramon will send me packing? How did he even know I was watching him? Am I that obvious? (This space book is taking a turn for the Skull and Bones.)

  “Come take a look, I have a theory about the barnacle,” Nilton says before I can press him on his Ramon warning. We look at more images of Snow Queen, the icy block under the lander. There’s no time for faux conspiracy: there’s science to do. This particular picture is a blow-up of the lander legs. Nilton superimposed some markers to highlight an area on the lander legs.

  “These particles are growing, and I think I have an idea why,” Nilton says. In the images, you can see several particles move around a bit and get larger. The time-lapse photos make it all look like a chaotic barnacle ballet.

  “This might be a briny solution splashed onto the legs at landing,” he says. “This could be a deliquescent salt. Maybe a carnallite,” he says and writes down the chemical symbol KMgCl3·6(H2O). A deliq-what? I don’t know what that is.

  “I’m going to give a talk about it today,” he says. He’ll explain.

  KICKOFF BEGINS.

  “We’d like to build a ‘super strategic plan’ to figure out how we’re going to sample until sol 90,” Ray Arvidson says.

  NASA officials decreed that Phoenix has to indicate their intentions for digging. They want to see a plan from sol 48 to 90, the rest of the primary mission.

 
; “And we want to better inform NASA,” Ray says with a smile. The super strategic plan will offer guidelines where and when the digging takes place for the rest of the primary mission. I guess HQ and Ramon feel left out.

  “This is a very long day,” says Suzanne Young, the SPI I. Phoenix is awake for 21 hours. The atmospherics theme group (ASTG) will make coordinated observations with the orbiters circling Mars late into the night. Christina von Holstein-Rathlou, one of the Danes in the atmospherics group, gives a weather report before we break.

  “This might be the first day that it’s nicer on Mars than Tucson,” Christina says. “Clear. No storms.” We break.

  I overhear someone talk about a party at Peter’s place. All the Co-Investigators and JPL folks are going over for cocktails after shift. No, I’m not invited. Yes, it stings a bit. Note to self: be more charming and slightly less intrusive.

  THE ASTG TEAM MEETS WITH LESLIE TAMPPARI.

  “We’re planning for another coordinated science day on sol 55,” Leslie says. They’ll build a “straw man” plan and divide the activities among the team members. They’ll use this hypothetical plan to secure future space in Phoenix’s schedule. These coordinated observations take a long time to build and require cooperation with the science teams who operate the orbiters.

  “I’d like to look at the nighttime science,” Leslie says. There are dozens of activities they’d like to do after 10:00 p.m., but they’re a little unclear on how to heat the instruments. The pre-heating requirements for the instruments are complicated. If you don’t pre-heat your instruments properly, they could blow a fuse. Changing fuses in the basement is annoying. Changing fuses on Mars, very annoying. If you don’t want to violate the flight rules or destroy your instrument, you need to build math models based on the weather data you’ve gathered thus far on the mission.

  “We’re working on the problem,” Joel Krajewski says. They’re making heating models that should simplify the flight rules for the science team.Calculating pre-heating requirements is confusing and unclear to the ASTG group. They’re not alone. It’s same problem many of the groups have as they start to operate their instruments at night and early in the morning. It’s one of the major stumbling blocks for getting ice into TEGA, too.

  “That’s wonderful,” Leslie says. The other co-investigators agree. The ASTG group is really excited about Joel’s heating-parameters talk. Once they get it sorted out, they’ll have 52 new observations.

  John Moores interrupts the ASTG meeting.

  “I just want to let you know that the RA safed,” he says. John is the strategic SPI. It’s his business to know what the groups are working on. The strategic SPI builds a plan for the day after the day that’s currently being planned. Today we’re planning for sol 48 and he’s working on sol 49. He gives ASTG a heads-up because this delay will push out their next coordinated set of observations. Their activities get bumped. And they don’t like it. Someone suggests that they take a stand and fight for their observations. It requires a lot of work to coordinate the timing of these observations with the team that operates the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And they don’t want to repeat the process.

  IT’S NOT JUST THE RA THAT SAFED. THREE INSTRUMENTS—THE RA, TEGA, and RAC—have all gone into safe mode. Three at once has to be a new record.

  A young engineer named Katie Dunn is the tactical downlink lead. This is Katie’s first Mars mission. Now she has three crises to deal with tonight. Depending how you look at it, this is either a peptic ulcer-inducing moment or a great opportunity. On a big mission, it’s unlikely that a young engineer like Katie would get a chance to deal with these kinds of problems. On a larger, well-funded mission, this crisis would be handed by a specialist with a bit more experience. But said specialist isn’t here and the problem is left in Katie’s capable hands. She works under Julia Bell, who is more than confident that Katie is up to the task.

  “I’m not too frazzled yet,” Katie says. “And, guess what? I saw the back of your head on the news last night.” Finally, my mission chronicling gets some of the fame and notoriety it deserves!

  Okay, no more small talk. Katie asks the RA team to join her while she scrutinizes a document called the predicted event file (PEF). She will use the document to determine which the commands the spacecraft received moments before the RA shut itself down. Then they can reconstruct the incident and figure out what happened.

  To add to Katie’s stressful evening, she’s being shadowed by an even greener engineer, Joe Stehly. Katie has him talk through the problem as a sort of training exercise. She’s not only taking care of business, but finds teachable moments in her stressful day. Yes, she does it all; Katie is the engineer of your dreams.

  “There’s no fault path,” Joe says. A fault path indicates the RA recognized some trouble and shut itself down. They don’t see one, so some sudden event caused the RA to safe. “There wasn’t enough time elapsed for a timeout. So it must have been a sudden arm problem,” says Rich Volpe, an RA engineer. That’s a bit more alarming. They look carefully through the PEF log to find exactly what time the safe command was executed. It’s almost midnight local time in Tucson and late afternoon on Mars. No one knows for sure what the problem is yet.

  “It might be a power issue,” Jim Chase says. He dodged a bullet by not pulling TDL duties tonight. Even so, he’s keeping tabs and lending a hand when necessary. He doesn’t think it’ll be necessary, however.

  Dave Hamara from TEGA pops his head into the TDL office.

  “We think we didn’t pre-heat the EGA enough,” he says. He wants everyone to be clear this is just an initial thought.

  “Twenty minutes would not be enough if the temperature dropped for some reason. We think. But we’re still working on it,” Dave says.

  Ray Arvidson asks everyone to gather quickly for an update.

  “RA, RAC, and TEGA are off the table. The SPI needs to quickly pull together a remote sensing day,” Ray says. They’ll try to salvage some science. A lost day is not what we need. Ramon de Paula comes in and asks Ray what safed. Watching him slink around and ask everyone what’s going on really makes me feel the strength of our connection. I wonder if he feels it too. Maybe I should show him the ropes. He can use my patented Mission Control information-gathering strategy. We’ll be just like Starsky and Hutch.

  I head back over to the TDL office. Katie shows Joe, her TDL in training, how to search for different command strings in the blocks. This is my big moment to learn how to do a bit of TDL–ing myself. A search command here, a PEF query there, and soon they start pulling together the pieces. Katie has things up and running in no time.

  Kristoffer Leer and Line Drube are the team members responsible for tracking down the problems with RAC.

  “We’re having trouble figuring out what’s going on and what to do. We can’t see anything,” Kristoffer says to Katie when she gets a moment to check on them. The reason that they can’t see anything is because they’re ITAR-restricted. Katie groans, then pauses to think for a moment. Now she has to explain what’s happening with the RA without violating federal law and risking a long prison sentence. No problem. Then she must act as the ITAR bridge to determine why the RAC safed. More work.

  “The RA might have hit something. We’re not sure what, but probably the ground,” she says. There is no ITAR raid.

  Morten Madsen, Kristoffer and Line’s boss, comes in to help.

  Katie gives him a brief update. And explains that the RA hit something. Could the RAC camera be damaged in an impact? The RAC is attached to the forearm of the RA.

  We all imagine the RAC dragging on the Martian terrain. It’s a horror of twisted metal and glass. It would be a sad end to our Mars imager.

  “I don’t think it’s possible that the RAC can hit the ground,” Morten says. Phew.

  “So what shall we report at midpoint if we can’t see anything?” Kristoffer Leer asks. She’s not sure. She’ll figure it out and get back to them.

  Katie continues
her rounds. She’s got the RA and RAC in triage. Now TEGA needs some attention. She thinks Dave Hamara has it right about the temperature issue. Chris Shinohara comes into the TDL office. He is a welcome face.

  “There is going to be an anomaly response team,” he says. “You’re on RA and RAC response. I’ll find an engineer to sort out TEGA.”

  Thanks.

  “We think the RA issue is pretty well understood. The scoop hit something,” Chris says. Katie says she’s already on it. Unfortunately, they don’t know what or why. They don’t want to unsafe it until they know where it is. They do want to unsafe RAC and get some images of the scoop to see what it might have hit.

  Katie marches over to the RA office. She confidently strides across downlink and she’s really hot—Wait … What? You can’t say the engineers are hot in a science book! (Mars Lag symptom 93: Inappropriate Mission Control thoughts. Focus on the mission, dammit. I wonder if astronauts ever make out in space. For shame. This is a professional Mars mission. FOCUS.)

  “Okay, what you boys got?” Katie asks the RA team.

  “We hit a rock,” Matt Robinson says.

  “And …”

  “The planned move has a trajectory and is plotted through various ‘via’ points,” Matt explains. The RA team uses several methods to command the arm. In this version, they plotted a course for the arm and gave it some mile markers for the path it was supposed to follow.

  “This worked fine in our simulation. But on the spacecraft there were probably a few ‘encoder tics’ difference and it hit a soft stop. Then it did an onboard recalculation and went through some wrist motion to avoid the soft stop. Unfortunately, it hit a rock on the way,” Matt continues his interpretation of what happened.

  A soft stop is a software limit that prevents the RA joints from moving too close to their maximum range of motion—hard stop. It can be dangerous to get too close to these hard stops, so the computer limits the RA from going too crazy when it gets excited. There are slight differences in how the robot arm moves in the test bed and on Mars. In this case a few millimeters difference could have been enough to cause the problem.