Martian Summer

by Andrew Kessler

  “Wicked Witch,” Doug says.

  “Oh,” Heather says. A little surprised. And not all that thrilled. Bill named it while she was away yesterday.

  “I figured we were going to put it in the oven and cook it, so it seemed good,” Bill says sheepishly.

  “Geez, you take one day off… ,” Heather says.

  “You could have called it gingerbread cookies,” Peter says, making the point that cookies are more likely to go in an oven than witches. But a sample by any name would be just as sweet.

  AT THE MIDPOINT, BILL BOYNTON TAKES A SEAT AT THE CONFERENCE table.

  “This is Chuck’s job,” he says. Heather stands behind Bill with her arms on his shoulders. He’s going to present the engineering data today.

  “It’s a noisy signal and we’re at the limit of our detection range, but we see a peak in the calorimetry. We see melting up to 18 degrees. The temperature probe is outside and so this is indicative of a little ice and a porous sample!”

  Heather’s eyes well up with tears as Bill speaks. His voice is full of contentment and pride. Not only did they get the sample, but it actually has ice in it! All assumptions are off, we’ve got ice and detected it beyond a doubt. Any number of things, most notably sublimation, could have kept us from measuring the signal. But it’s there, clear as day, in the chart Bill shows: melting at precisely 32 degrees Fahrenheit. This is how they know it is ice.

  “When we came here, we suspected it was water and now our mass spec [spectrometer] shows we have indeed been sitting on ice for 63 days,” Bill says.

  “We reveal this tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. in a press conference. So, please keep it quiet, so Bill can have his moment in the sun,” Peter says. He earned it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  PRESS CONFERENCE

  SOL 65

  I HAVE A HANGOVER. SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE. WE ALL TOOK A NIGHT to celebrate and got carried away—not without just cause. Last night the TEGA team and the engineers from the atomic force microscope hosted separate champagne parties. The MET drank wine with visitors from the Canadian Space Agency. Doug Ming watched the NOVA documentary about the mission. The Danes barbecued steaks and drank beer. Walter tried to teach them all how to ride a unicycle. I celebrated with a Washington Post journalist named Joe Bargmann, who was here to do a story on Peter and the famed Virgin Galactic engineer, Burt Rutan. We drank too many martinis and celebrated Martian accomplishments. He gave me some advice on telling a good story. I hope it pays off.

  LATER THAT MORNING, SARA HAMMOND INTRODUCES THE TEAM AT the press conference. She’s wearing a lovely business suit and it’s all very formal. A little too formal. Michael Meyer, the chief scientist at NASA, flew to Tucson for this breaking-news press conference. He sits on the panel with Peter, Bill, Vicky, and Mark. Meyer goes first.

  “NASA has agreed to extend the mission to the end of the fiscal year,” Meyer says dryly. “That’s about sol 124.” This is great news but not the way Meyer says it. It’s a little troubling that NASA’s chief scientist sounds like an accountant. You’d think he’d be more excited to announce the big ice discovery and restore a bit of glory and prestige to the Red Planet and NASA. Maybe he has jet-lag. Still, great news.

  “The minimum mission success has already been met and full mission success is not far,” Meyer says in his monotone deadpan voice. It’s probably my hangover talking, but he doesn’t even seem prepared or excited. He just kind of flounders. I mean, why would the chief scientist at NASA talk about funding and fiscal years when we’re here to talk about how our concept of another planet just changed forever? If we’ve learned anything from the Ghostbusters, it’s that you shouldn’t cross the beams, or if you’re not a fan of Ghostbusters, don’t mix your message. The science guy shouldn’t talk about accounting, he should be talking about how awesome Peter and the team are for sticking with the sticky soil. I’m not sure why he seems so uncomfortable up there. This isn’t a deposition. We’re celebrating a great Mars finding. Can’t they find someone that looks happy about space? We’d be better off if they put one of the interns who sit on the buckets up there. At least they’re excited to be here.

  Peter thanks Meyer for extending the mission.

  “We’ve had the good fortune to land on ice,” he says assuredly to the small crowd of scientists and media who showed up, and, of course, the TV audience at home. After a brief statement, he passes the conch to Boynton.

  “We’re really pleased to taste ice and it tastes fine,” Bill says dramatically. He makes the most of this big moment. “There’s only a little ice because of sticking. We tried twice and then it stuck. We didn’t expect that. We decided to call the sample Wicked Witch.”

  Then Boynton pull out a tall and squished witch’s hat he’d been hiding under the table. He talks about Hansel and Gretel and the Wizard of Oz.

  “I’m melting. I’m melting,” he says, quoting the dying words of the Wicked Witch. We all laugh.

  Peter hates when the science team does this sort of thing. The whole mad scientist and geek thing rankles him. But it’s far better than Meyer’s stiff demeanor. At least Bill has verve, a point of view. It’s really time for Peter to embrace a bit of that joyous nerdiness.

  Vicky Hipkin shows the LIDAR movie of beams at night. She’s got a great TV presence. She’s exciting and clearly loves what she does. Even the bloggers agree. There are loads of comments about the “red-headed Scottish girl” lighting up the space blogs just moments after she finishes. She even gives a weather report and makes it sound fun. Summer average –3 max and –79 min.

  Hipkin passes the puck to Mark Lemmon. He shows the mission’s masterpiece, a great mosaic of the entire landing site. The image known jokingly around the SOC as the Peter Pan. But he doesn’t call it that. Happily Ever After Pan is now the official name. I think even Sister Wendy, the cloistered art critic extraordinaire, would proclaim this photo a masterpiece. It’s a triumph of human spirit created by stitching together five hundred impossible images taken of another world. We take a moment to drink it in.

  Then Sara opens up the floor for questions. First, there’s the standard fare. Dave Perlman of the San Francisco Chronicle asks if it was difficult to get the scoop of ice and if this contribution is the climax of the Phoenix mission.

  “There’s more to come,” Bill says. Another reporter asks what does finding water mean.

  “Now we can move on and look for life,” Mike Meyer says.

  They take one last question on the phone. It’s from an industry veteran, Craig Covault from Aviation Week. He’s been covering space for ‘Av Week’ for decades. This is an important trade magazine for NASA, so it’s a professional courtesy to give them the final word.

  “Where are you hiding the MECA team?” Covault asks.

  The team laughs, thinking it’s a joke. But I don’t get it. And that’s not the profound/insightful question anyone was anticipating. There are no MECA representatives because it’s a press conference about TEGA. Peter laughs and says he’s hiding them under the table. And then that’s it. And our profound moment ends on a flat note. There’s polite applause and everyone goes back to work. There’s still a lot more to discover.

  PART III

  IT’S DRY

  FREEZE

  DATE: AUGUST 03, 2008

  AFTER THE PRESS CONFERENCE, THE MISSION TAKES A collective sigh of relief. We move forward free of NASA minders or bureaucratic directives. With a month left in the primary mission, the mission hits a sweet spot. We already discovered ice, maybe liquid water, imaged the landing site, made huge gains in Martian chemistry, and got a mission extension.

  Peter takes a few days off. He deserves it. It’s been more than two months of grueling “24.40/7” work. What could go wrong if our fearless leader takes a few days to recharge his batteries? While he’s away, his number two, Barry Goldstein, seldom seen in the SOC but omnipresent on the conference phone, helms the ship.

  “Barry, take the COM,” I imagine he said as he sho
ved his three-iron into his golf bag. “If I’m not back in two days, wait longer.” And then he rode off into the desert. Peter’s vacation is not a romp on the beach. That’s not his style. This is more of a working holiday. Peter must play golf. But it’s not an ordinary match. He must defend the honor of the mission, squaring off against a rival in a modern jousting ritual … golf. Peter left Mission Control to play a round with a rival space legend, astro-engineer extraordinaire Burt Rutan, builder of Richard Branson’s Space Ship One and defender of the civilian spaceflight program. Once challenged, Peter had no choice but to go to Palm Springs and show this Virgin Galactic plane-building upstart how space is really done.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  TINFOIL HATS

  SOL 67

  “I DON’T EVEN THINK THEY’RE ON SPEAKING TERMS,” AN ENGINEER says when he sees Barry Goldstein pass Ramon de Paula in the hall.

  “They’re supposed to support Phoenix and they’re barely ever here and when they are here, they seem to know very little about what’s going on,” says an engineer—who doesn’t want to go on record—about our NASA headquarters liaisons. He’s afraid of offending HQ.

  Some of the TEGA team and mission managers think a few simple conversations could have settled the ice dispute amicably and without wasting a month if only Ramon de Paula and his partner Bobby Fogel understood the issues and made some modicum of effort to mediate instead of meddle. We need to ask Barry about these things.

  “I’ll introduce you two,” Karen McBride, from NASA headquarters, says. “He’s a great guy.” In the past, Barry proved tricky to track down. There was a lot on his plate the last few weeks with the NASA standoff and running a Mars mission. When I mention this to Karen, she says she’d be happy to make things a bit easier. Today, I get the formal introduction.

  We take our places for kickoff. Vicky Hipkin is the science lead. Today, she’s all business. There are no aphorisms or science invocations. Barry stands over her and fidgets. He keeps interrupting her flow.

  “I’ll let Barry explain,” she finally says.

  “This is the 50,000-foot view of what’s happening,” Barry says, relieved. Barry explains that late yesterday, there was complete outage of the deep space network. The Canberra, Australia facility—one of the three Earth-based relays—went down. No one thought the plan would get uplinked.

  “So now we are about twelve hours behind schedule,” he says. Canberra is back up and now he wants to see if they can rush a plan through in the next five hours. Vicky says some of the activities from yestersol’s plan need to be repeated.

  “We may need to re-run WCL-0. But we will attempt the first AFM (Atomic Force Microscope) scan,” Vicky says.

  “I feel good we can move forward with the plan,” Barry says quickly.

  They’re going to do a TEGA high temp ramp, the first AFM, and exploratory trenching; these will be the core activities. There’s a new SPI I on duty. He moves slowly.

  Barry paces. Sits. Stands. Rubs his hands through his hair. And wants to get on with it.

  When the SPI I pauses, he seizes the opportunity.

  “Are we done?” Barry asks. Kickoff finishes, but there’s more to say. There’s something besides the problem with the deep space network that’s bothering him. Barry asks everyone to stay in their seats. He rubs his hands together.

  “There’s been a flurry of activity in the press. Vis-a-vis a series of meetings at the White House not regarding the discovery of water. Please don’t talk to the press. This looks silly already. Refer all inquiries to Sara and Guy. This will be straightened out. There is some communication going on outside of the proper channels,” he says, looking disappointed. I wonder what this is all about.

  Apparently, this morning Aviation Week & Space Technology published a story that Phoenix had briefed the President on an important new finding but is hiding the information from the public.

  “Please. Do NOT talk to the press,” Barry says again.

  Vicky writes a new expedited schedule on the whiteboard. There’s going to be a mad dash to deliver the plan and find out what’s going on in the press. Maybe someone leaked information about the MECA perchlorate findings or Nilton’s liquid water.

  Craig Covault, the writer who asked the funny question at the end of the ice press conference, just wrote a story for Aviation Week & Space Technology. The headline reads: “White House Briefed on Potential for Mars Life.” We talk about the potential for habitability all the time. There doesn’t seem anything too worrisome about it. Still, Barry and Vicky are stressed.

  “What did you do?” Heather Enos asks me, in a mock-serious tone after Barry Goldstein says no one must talk to the press.

  “Sorry, I can’t talk to you,” she says. It’s not a great day for Karen McBride to introduce me to Barry.

  While the story doesn’t seem like a big deal, it explodes all over the Internet before you can say “series of tubes.” The re-reported stories make it worse, declaring that “potential” means something far different than what it means at the SOC. Uh-oh. Many of the stories citing Covault insinuate that Phoenix found life on Mars and now we’re trying to hide it! Nothing could be further from the truth.

  Reading it again, you can see where things went wonky. This is primo conspiracy fodder. Technically, it doesn’t mean anything that someone who works at NASA HQ could have told their buddy who works in the President’s science advisory that it’s possible there could be life on Mars and therefore that makes the headline true. We all know there’s potential for life on Mars. That’s why we’re here. But that’s not how the non-space press and tin-hatters read it. The first line of the story says, “The White House has been alerted by NASA about plans to make an announcement soon on major new Phoenix Lander discoveries concerning the ‘potential for life’ on Mars, scientists tell Aviation Week & Space Technology.” That probably isn’t true, but it’s coming from a very important trade paper and it’s already attracted a lot of readers.

  A commenter on Slashdot.com, the “news for nerds” site, imagines the moment when the Phoenix scientists tell George W. Bush about the findings.

  “Oh man, imagine briefing unintelligent life on the discovery of intelligent life,” the writer comments. We’re about to watch the birth of a conspiracy theory—from the inside.

  When the world actually learns that Phoenix is not covering up an alien discovery, there will be a lot of sad bloggers, reporters, and conspiracy theorists.

  If you read the article, it’s pretty tepid. It says: “sources say the new data do not indicate the discovery of existing or past life on Mars. Rather the data relates to habitability—the ‘potential’ for Mars to support life—at the Phoenix arctic landing site, sources say.” Somehow Craig Covault heard about some exciting new MECA findings. What he heard about was probably perchlorate. Only he doesn’t know it’s perchlorate, just something. They haven’t said anything publicly about it because the team isn’t even 100% sure it’s perchlorate. Still, Covault smelled a good story and figured that it would be announced at the big ice press conference. Instead, there was nothing. The press conference focused on the TEGA results and ice; now he thinks there’s a conspiracy afoot.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  OY COVAULT

  SOL 68

  “WHAT SHOULD I DO IF PEOPLE ASK ME QUESTIONS?” WALTER Goetz asks me. He is concerned.

  “You’re supposed to refer them to Sara Hammond. But, not if I ask you. Then it’s okay,” I say. He thanks me.

  There’s no official word from NASA on the conspiracy. It’s not really a conspiracy, but try telling that to the Internet. Phoenix is a top news story on countless fringe and mainstream sites around the globe. We can only imagine the chaos at HQ. They sit around their big mahogany table scratching their heads, cursing the Internet for spreading information with such viral-like efficiency.

  “We need a plan!” says shadowy bureaucrat #1 to his subordinates.

  “We’ll need a few days to come up with
something, sir,” shadowy bureaucrat #2 says.

  “Okay, get me something by early next week,” shadowy bureaucrat #1 says.

  “We are on it!” #3 says. “Now shall we do Italian or sushi for lunch?”

  The only official word comes in the form of a couple of tweets. “Heard about the recent news reports implying I may have found Martian life. Those reports are incorrect.” This is the first comment posted on the matter. What, are we in the seventh grade? The tweet comes from the Twitter account of Phoenix M. Lander, as channeled by Veronica McGregor, a tech-savvy JPL press official. For all their failings in press relations, Phoenix does use Twitter to keep younger tech-savvy fans engaged. Twitter does have some limitations, dealing with a growing NASA conspiracy chiefly among them.

  Before shift I starts, several Mars conspiracy stories start to hit the social news circuit. They seem to grow in number with every refresh of the browser window. Not all of them fan the flames. Some offer interesting analyses of the situation. Keith Cowling at nasawatch.com comments: “Why is PAO [Public Affairs Office] letting a robot take the flack on this? Oh yes, the Av Week article did not claim that Martian life had been found. I guess robots do not read all that well. There is a vast difference between ‘potential for’ life and ‘discovery of’ life. Aviation Week is very clear on what it is reporting. Why can’t NASA PAO be equally as precise in what it is denying?”

  WITH ALL MY BLOG AND CONSPIRACY THEORY READING, I’M LATE FOR kickoff. I arrive just in time for Palle’s weather report.

  “Clear skies with some dust activity a few hundred km away,” he says.

  “Wow, some activity!” Vicky Hipkin says.

  “I got tired of saying the same thing,” Palle says.

  Bill Boynton looks disturbed. He’s emerged from his office and finds Barry Goldstein.

  “No chlorine or oxygen,” Bill says to Barry, throwing his hands in the air. “You write the press release.”