Martian Summer

  “Maybe Science should not be our first choice then,” someone suggests.

  Some team members feel a tremendous pressure to publish quickly and prestigiously; it’s Nature or Science or bust. Others feel like they don’t have enough time to deliver meaningful results and would rather take their time. This is an old debate because of that pesky data-sharing rule. Data will only be private for six months after the primary mission ends. Then anyone can jump in and use the research to do their own analysis and publishing. Some of the more concerned team members worry that if results leak, other scientists could hijack the work and publish, scooping them on their career-making research project.

  “It happened on MER,” Mike Hecht says, talking about the last Mars Expedition Rover mission. “They scooped the jarosite results.”

  Ray Arvidson shakes his head.

  “That’s just cheesy,” Ray says. I don’t know what happened on MER; but with competition lurking, I know how they feel.

  Before the end of EOS, I ask Carol Stoker about Nilton’s liquid water theory. She shrugs.

  “I wish he’d drop it for now,” she says. “He’s hurting our case for digging in D-G,” she says quickly and goes back to work. She seemed much chattier when my nemesis interviewed her. Damn.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  NILTON’S NODULES (ROUND II)

  SOL 49

  NILTON RENNO LOOKS UP AND SMILES. “I have a smoking gun,” he says. He’s sitting at his computer; it’s still an hour or so before shift I starts.

  “Morten made me an image. He subtracted pairs of images to show the difference in the nodules,” Nilton says. The images are from sols 8, 31, and 44. There’s a lot of stuff moving around. Some of the barnacles grow; other blobs fall away.

  “This will show that the water vapor disappeared and the liquid salts are growing. This is evidence of the brines … evidence that liquid water can flow on Mars!” Nilton says. Wow.

  I know just enough to know that this is big. I’m here for some kind of “Eureka.” I’m not quite sure how to comport myself at such a moment of discovery. End-zone dance? I have yet to see anyone spike their laptops, so maybe that’s not appropriate. There’s not a lot of training for these sorts of things at space camp. I express my enthusiasm with a hearty handshake and a genuine exclamatory.

  “That’s amazing!” I say. I also want Nilton to fill me in on the mud-slinging that’s happening behind the scenes. It’s slightly easier for me to digest. There are lots of emails flying around that continue the assault on “Renno the Heretic.”

  Nilton says he isn’t too fussed by the naysayers. Potentially making the biggest Mars discovery since the discovery of the planet helps numb the pain. It’s a sweet salve. Sure, he’s a little annoyed that people aren’t more supportive, but he has his allies. And today Nilton is going to do a follow-up presentation.

  “If I can make a thermodynamic model, the case will be bulletproof,” Nilton says. “I sense there will be a lot of opposition.” There’s no hint of irony. I personally hope no one throws anything. I need to just get there early; news is spreading quickly.

  I SIT NEXT TO MORTEN AND WAIT FOR KICKOFF TO START.

  “I would co-sign a paper on liquid water,” Morten Madsen tells me. He thinks Nilton has a beautiful idea and he would love nothing more than to support it.

  “I’m not 100% sure he’s right just yet, but the evidence from the image should be looked at.” That’s noble. He’s working to help Nilton solidify his idea.

  “I can’t make it to today’s EOS. Do you think you can give me a report?” Morten asks. I would love nothing more.

  Kickoff begins.

  “Today is a big day,” Doug Ming says again. He should consider a trademark on this line, seeing as he uses it every day. And it’s true. Still, I fear for the day that’s small.

  “We’re hoping to do a rasp and scrape test! And we’re looking to deliver to TEGA by sol 56. There are a lot of activities in the plan today. Almost every instrument is involved,” Doug says. It’s all hands on deck.

  He turns things over to the instrument teams.

  “We successfully extracted ourselves,” Ashitey tells the team. He is happy to report the RA successfully unsafed and got to work scraping. Most of the scrapes went very well, he assures us. The RA team says they really pushed their limits yesterday by scraping the hard stuff with all their might. The idea was to examine what mix of scraping and rasping is optimal for the big ice delivery. Then something went awry.

  “Then we exceeded our resources. And we believe that’s what happened,” Ashitey says, telling us that the RA is safed again.

  “RA had 54 minutes allotted in the plan to scrape. When it got about three to four minutes away from that time limit, it recognized that it would not finish its task. When it knows it can’t finish a task, it starts to park itself and then safes to prevent other commands from executing,” he explains.

  “It did what it was supposed to,” Ashitey says. We all feel proud of our tough little arm even though he’s safed again. Then I remember a little trick Ashitey once told me.

  “You have to say something nice or fun to put the scientists at ease. Don’t ever just say the instrument has ‘safed.’ Too often they just hear ‘safe’ and it gets them all worried. Then you have to explain yourself. You don’t want them worried. There’s no need and they have other science things to worry about. If they feel good about what’s happened, they’ll let go.” He told me this once when he didn’t have time to explain what was going wrong with the RA. Before he walked away, he added, “Now you probably know more than the scientists.” I felt really great, for a second, before I realized he taught me this trick and then used it on me. He’s good.

  TEGA is also in safe mode, and its engineers report they were able to replicate the heating issues on the engineering model in the PIT (where Phoenix II lives). That’s not as compelling as the RA news.

  “Today we need to unsafe TEGA and figure out if we need to continue digging and scraping or none of the above,” Doug says. We break.

  ECHH. THE WRITER GIRL IS BACK … AGAIN. I HAD A TERRIBLE DREAM where I threw the scoop at her. That’s so hostile. I was fine with her sitting in kickoff, even talking to Carol, but now she’s waiting to talk to Nilton. He’s my source! Does she have to talk to everyone?

  I’m so distracted by petty jealousy, I hardly notice all the scrambling going on around me. Doug Ming calls the group together.

  “We have to redo the plan,” he says. “There is a lot of scrambling because I screwed up. There was an APID missed. And now we don’t have the images we need to go ahead with the plan.” A sign outside the SSI office says “5 days with no lost images.” But there won’t be a sixth. The SSI team created a new 3D map of the trench and it’s lost in space. The image is key for the RA team to better understand the scrape area. No one is sure the scrape test is working, because the images are inconclusive. Without the image, the RA team doesn’t want to move ahead. Doug says he downgraded the APID accidentally, in a burst of scrubbing to get the plan cleaned up. Now the image they wait on won’t come back to Earth until the next communications pass. It’s too late to be useful.

  There is a new plan coming together. This time around, Doug goes through the APIDs very carefully.

  “Several errors could probably be blamed on fatigue already,” Joel says. “It’s part of the reason we want to get back to Earth time.” Rich Volpe from the RA team just warned me about this sort of thing. Since it’s getting later in the mission, there’s a feeling of urgency mounting. Team members will push to maximize the number of activities in a plan. That’s the wrong approach. It results in sloppy errors and accidents from both humans and machines trying to do too much too quickly.

  “The optimal plan has fewer than the maximum number of activities,” Rich tells me. Yes, they say it like that, because whenever they offer dire warnings, it’s in their awesome engineer-y syntax.

  LET’S GET READY TO RUMMMBLE. NILTON REN
NO VERSUS SCIENTISTS: round two. Even a few of the shift II engineers sneak away from their sequencing meeting to attend. It’s packed.

  Miles Smith’s writer friend floats in and takes a seat that one of the scientists reserved for her. Geez. There aren’t usually any visitors in the EOS, but I guess she’s a VIP. She’s just getting comfortable when—

  “Is everyone aware there’s a journalist present?” Mike Hecht asks. Uh oh. “I’m sorry to do this.” Hecht apologizes to Ms. Nemesis. Apparently he knows her too.

  “I’m not comfortable with her in the room. I propose we discuss if this is a good idea, before we continue with any, possibly contentious, EOS talks,” Mike says.

  Nilton smiles. Vigorous debate ensues. The poor woman is sitting right there. It’s awkward, and I’m really glad to escape people’s ire this time. Some say there should be openness. But most everyone thinks that if they are going to express half-baked ideas, the press should be excluded until there is a concrete plan or some conclusion. So far, this has been a closed forum.

  “I don’t want to have to watch what I say and I don’t want anyone to print anything that would embarrass the team,” Mike Hecht says. I wonder if he also meant me in that line. I stop taking notes.

  “So you’d like her to leave?” Sara asks.

  Yes, they would. Now it’s even more awkward, and she seems miffed. She pouts as she grabs her things. When she gets up to finally go, she looks at me for some kind of defense. I slump low in my chair and search for an aphorism that lets me feel less guilty about being a coward. Discretion is the better half of valor. That works.

  Now that she’s gone and we’re free of any “intruders,” we can get started.

  “When the lander touched down, the surface temperature directly under the lander reached approximately 500 Kelvin.” Nilton starts his second groundbreaking and contentious liquid-water talk with landing day. He builds up to the events that formed the nodules. Landing caused mud and salt to splash all over the place.

  “Then the top millimeter of material cooled quickly,” he says. This is the starting point for his argument about thermodynamics. It gets a little hairy here. But he says the thermodynamic properties of saline solution melting cycles produce eutectic solutions. This time I’ve come armed with a month’s worth of chats with Nilton. I hold tight to my tenuous grasp. Here’s how I understand it: We have a salty brine, like pickle juice, but this salty liquid is a Mars sludge. It formed through a process of pure water freezing out of a salt solution. Each time the temperature changes, more pure water freezes and the saltier part concentrates—the more water that leaves, the higher the salt concentration. Since salt lowers the freezing temperature, this lowers the melting point of the solution. If this process is iterative, heating and cooling more and more, the pure water will slowly freeze out of the solution and soon you have some kind of super antifreeze, our Martian pickle brine. Instead of regular table salt, we now have something a bit more exotic.

  “That’s what we see on the lander legs on Mars,” Nilton says.

  This is an idea Nilton toyed with for a while. Now it clicked. Nilton directs our attention to an image of the lander leg. The crowd is polite and listens quietly.

  “The larger particle is growing and the small particle is shrinking. In general, growth is a function of size,” Nilton says.

  “You’re not accounting for thermal inertia,” Mike Hecht says, breaking the silence.

  Nilton ignores the comment, but his face stains and his cheeks tighten.

  “This should demonstrate the principles I have outlined,” Nilton says and then walks the team through a series of equations.

  “Thermal inertia is not accounted for!” Mike Hecht objects after Nilton finishes his mathematical rundown.

  “I’m not sure I agree with that,” Bill Boynton says to Mike Hecht.

  “Maybe it’s hydrazine,” Mike says. Hydrazine is the rocket fuel the lander used in its propulsion system. There was some concern it might contaminate the landing site if it leaked. Nilton knows the ins and outs of the hydrazine situation and is prepared for the questions. His group conducted several experiments before launch. Suddenly all of Nilton’s extra-curricular experiments make sense. Nilton ignores the side debate brewing. His next slide reads “How can we test this?”

  There’s a bullet-pointed list of ways to test this hypothesis.

  • Estimate the atmospheric humidity near the leg

  • TECP measurement nearby

  • Ice temp

  • Estimate leg temp

  • Calculate droplet growth rate and compare calculation w/measurements

  “Thank you,” Nilton says in conclusion and sits down. There’s no fight this time.

  The talk is over, and the engineers leave before the short-term planning meeting begins. The meeting doesn’t last long before Joel Krajewski comes in with an update. TEGA is pulled from the sol’s plan. Their pre-heating fix still doesn’t work. They need another two sols to update flight software so work can continue.

  IN SMALL GROUPS, MEMBERS OF SHIFT I TURN OFF THEIR COMPUTERS and leave. There’s a going-away party for one of the young scientists who works on the Atomic Force Microscope. She’s getting married and won’t be back before the end of the mission.

  Bill Boynton offers me a lift to the store so we can pick up some celebratory wine. What are you supposed to drink at 8:00 a.m.: red or white? This is when my Mars watch comes in handy. It’s just after five on Mars. I go white. Boynton gets red.

  I ask him about the wiring problems with TEGA that still continue to plague us. This is probably why they don’t invite me to too many parties.

  “The wiring was done poorly,” Bill tells me again with a sigh. These are problems that were baked in when Phoenix inherited instruments from the Polar Lander. TEGA has lots of wires packed into a small space. The designers saved space by sharing wires across circuits. They got a lot of savings by using the same circuits for all eight sets of TEGA doors. It seemed like a good idea at the time; but now that one has problems, they all share in the mess. Any yet, Bill doesn’t seem bitter or resentful. Just the opposite.

  “I’m happy with the data we have,” he says.

  WE’RE NICELY BUZZED FROM OUR MORNING COCKTAILS BY 8:45 A.M. We hang out, joke around, and share tips for sticking with Mars time.

  “You have to ignore all clocks,” Sam Kounaves says, although he admits he just fell off the wagon this week after a quick trip back east.

  Heather Enos arrives late. She pretends to kick me out again. But I’m prepared this time.

  “If you’re willing to stick with us this long and take our abuse, you can be part of the team,” she says. I feel warm and fuzzy.

  WHILE WE ENJOY OUR COCKTAILS, PHOENIX WORKS. THE RASPING TEST should be happening right now. Phoenix firmly plants the back of its scoop on a flat section of the hard material. It’s got to get the position just right; the area the science team chose is no bigger than a large fist. When it finds the proper position, Phoenix presses the load plate on the back of the scoop into the bottom of the trench. Applying firm pressure, the rasp slowly begins to turn, pushing its way into the cemented ice. After some careful drilling, Phoenix lifts its arm to examine the site. Phoenix snaps a photo. It worked. Now for the tricky bit. Phoenix has to articulate its wrist front, back, and front, so the rasp-tailings collected in the special chamber flop over the barrier and into the back of the scoop. If it works, Phoenix will send its documentation home for us to evaluate and then get some well-deserved robot rest.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  FEEL MY RASP

  SOL 52

  I SLEPT THROUGH MY FIRST ALARM, MY SECOND ALARM, AND THEN the whole shift. Seventeen hours of sleep might be a new record. I guess I was tired. It’s probably not normal to lose an entire day. So long, sol 51, how we shall miss ye.

  The SOC is oddly quiet three minutes before kickoff. With thirty seconds to kickoff, there’s a mad rush of bed-headed scientists filing reports and filli
ng seats. I guess I’m not the only one who’s tired.

  Vicky Hipkin is the sci-lead today. She looks over the first rasp and pronounces it a great effort. Good work, Phoenix. Soon we’ll see the results of yesterday’s expanded scrape test, and then we’ll complete the scrape rasp combo for tomorrow’s big activity. A full dress rehearsal for the TEGA delivery. This is it: twenty or so coordinated activities to prep, drill, scrape, and then practice the delivery. These coordinated events put Julia Bell’s sequencing engine achievement on glorious display. The interoperation is denoted in the plan as “The Monster.” If they can nail this, NASA will give Phoenix permission to proceed with the real delivery attempt. It’s a short day, with laser focus on the rasp and opening the TEGA doors. We could have ice and be outta this mess in a couple sols.

  Shift lead is Miles Smith.

  “There is a very aggressive tactical timeline. And there is only one uplink opportunity,” Miles says. That means if things are running behind in terms of the data upload, they can’t switch satellite relays and extend their day. There’s just one shot to make uplink. If today’s plan is successful and we can deliver “ice” to NASA, we should have our mission back in a couple sols. Miles pleads with the team to work efficiently to make this uplink and stay on track. The engineering team hasn’t missed one yet, and he doesn’t want the first to happen on his watch.

  There’s just one problem. TEGA might need to update its flight software again before proceeding. It seems there’s a file missing.

  “Is the file needed for the TEGA door-open activity?” Miles asks.

  “Open door should be okay, but ‘Check-Out 1’ does need the file. So there’s 1-in-700 chance when the EGA turns on, it safes. There probably should be a lien,” Dave Hamara says. Mission managers put a lien on a plan when they need to move forward but have an unsolved issue. If they don’t solve it before uplink, they know to pull it from the plan.