Martian Summer

by Andrew Kessler

  I certainly haven’t found that to be the case. If he thinks he’s been too open already, there’s probably no chance we’ll ever have a big heart-to-heart. This is worrisome. But still, he did say he liked me. That’s something. With just fifteen sols left in the primary mission, there’s not much time for bonding. And Peter doesn’t do a lot of emoting when we talk. There was that one inflected pause back on sol 10. Maybe there’s still hope.

  How can he be the hero of this book if he’s not going to spill it? As I sip from my fourth scotch, I start to think a lot about gravity. Maybe he’s distant for a good reason. He doesn’t want to take credit away from the rest of the team! Peter is a quiet, calm, clock-in-the-storm leader. He picks the right people—those who know more than he does—and steps back while he lets them work. Some of the JPL engineers who are used to iron-fisted management express their unease with his relaxed leadership approach. But it seems to work. And with this evasiveness, Peter tricked us into learning about him through all the people around him. The portrait of Peter is created through negative space. It’s an optical gambit from the premier Martian photographer.

  THE NEXT MORNING, WE ARRIVE FOR SHIFT. IT’S NEARLY NOON LOCAL Tucson time. I have a headache. It must be the shift back to Earth time. Tom Pike is at the back door of the SOC. His security code doesn’t work. He tries again. Nothing. This outer SOC door has a numbered keypad. Then you have to swipe your magnetic security badge to get inside. He looks up to think for a moment.

  “Geez, what am I doing?” he asks. “I put my bank code in.” He laughs. I tell him I won’t publish his bank.

  “Earth time is here. The end is near,” Tom says with a smile.

  Over the next few sols we’ll shift back to Earth time. There will be more remote operations tests and the mission will endure.

  Inside the SOC is something curious: sunshine and windows! Someone pulled down the blackout paper that’s covered them for the last few years. The paper was there to help us live on Mars time and minimize the sun’s impact on our circadian rhythms. Artificial lighting helped reduce the pain of living on the Mars clock, but now it’s all sunshine at the SOC. A sign on the wall reads, “Back to Earth.”

  “Hooray, it’s earth time!” Ray says and starts kickoff.

  “Sadly, it’s a restricted sol. Today we’ll be pretty limited,” he adds, damping any celebration. All the scientists have mixed feelings about the transition.

  There’s a simple plan and tired engineers. They work quietly. The SOC clears out early.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  SCOOPED

  SOL 77

  THE FIRST TEST OF REMOTE OPERATIONS COMPLETED, RAY ARVIDSON is back. He returns to the SOC to lead the science day in the flesh. His step is lighter and it almost looks like he’s smiling. He brings good news too.

  “We need one more subsurface sample delivered to TEGA in order to get full mission success,” Ray says. Barry Goldstein interrupts.

  “Ray, hold on,” he says over the conference phone, having dialed in to the meeting from Pasadena. “We have met full mission success by the letter of the law.”

  Ray shrugs. Silence.

  “Ray, call me,” Barry says.

  “I can’t, Barry. Why don’t I have Peter call you?” Ray asks, giving him the brushoff. He has too much work to do. Or else he doesn’t like talking to Barry.

  “I think we have a disagreement at the SOC,” Peter says.

  “That was Peter, not me,” Ray says, hinting at some behind-the-scenes tangle over whether to declare the mission a success. These upper management tensions are rarely seen by the rank and file down on the line. It’s bad for morale.

  “I will call you, Barry.” He doesn’t seem that excited. That’s probably because “success,” like beauty, is subjective. This declaration happens to be in the eye of the contract holder.

  JPL gets a financial incentive if they declare mission success by a certain date. Although, “full success” and “letter of the law” success are hard to parse. I promise myself I’ll dig through the 55,000 Phoenix requirements to figure out what the discrepancy is, just as soon as I have a free moment. Chris Shinohara says this is a problem of perspective. It’s how you see the mission.

  “JPL is great for project management, but sometimes they miss the point on science,” he says. They are structured around engineering successes. That’s at the heart of why Barry declared mission success. And why he says “to the letter of the law” when he says it’s appropriate for us to make this declaration now. We achieved technical success, but we’re not where the scientists want to be.

  “Peter wants to be sure the scientists are happy and getting what they need. Peter is good at that. He’s a great politician,” he says. “But he can’t and shouldn’t upset the partners [JPL and Lockheed] because that’s his job—to keep everyone working together.”

  “Barry, on the other hand, has a way of occasionally ruffling feathers to get things done,” Chris says.

  Chris makes a good argument. Declaring success now just seems like a cop-out. There are still five remaining TEGA cells and no sign of a short circuit destroying anything. It’s time to dig in and explore Mars. There’s work to do. No need to trumpet to the media that we’re a success. Let’s keep going! Already the days are getting shorter and the robot arm is showing some signs of wear. This isn’t the time to quibble about mission success.

  EVEN STRANGER THAN THE DEBATE ABOUT PHOENIX’S accomplishments is that Craig Covault, the Aviation Week writer and father of the great Phoenix conspiracy, is in the SOC! I’d say it’s some covert operation, but Sara sits next to him in the visitor’s seats. She must be able to see him. He listens intently to the debate; he takes notes; he scratches his head. There’s nothing too suspicious or conspiratorial.

  Throughout the day, everyone asks Sara the same question: what the hell is he doing here?

  “He wants to set the record straight, to explain his story,” Sara says. “I asked the team if they objected, and no one did.” Sara throws up her hands saying, in effect, it’s a little late for objections now.

  Sara leads Covault into the small conference room. Covault has a slow, intentional gait, giving the short trip the feeling of a condemned prisoner’s last steps. This isn’t supposed to be a lynching. Covault asked if he could give a short talk at the end-of-sol science meeting. If you thought the Nilton Renno science smackdown was popular, this is even bigger. Covault stands at the front of the room, eyes fixed on the carpet below him. Scientists flow into the room. Then Craig lifts his head and begins. I thought he’d be so much more fiendish. Instead, he looks like a regular pleasant guy with neatly parted gray hair, jowly cheeks, and standard-issue wireframe glasses—a nice gentleman who has one great job, writing about space. I’m even a little jealous that it’s his first day here and he already gets to give an end-of-sol science presentation.

  “One of my colleagues told me that MECA had some interesting stuff going on and that there would be a press conference at HQ. Then at the press conference nothing happened,” Covault says, beginning his explanation. He assures the team that he had three reliable sources and that he confirmed the White House science office had been notified. There are some groans.

  Peter ambles in. He walks through the conference room. And when he’s nearly at his seat, he pauses.

  “Hi, Craig,” he says. And then he sits.

  “Hi, Peter,” Covault says, “I was just explaining what happened.”

  “This should be interesting,” Peter says, leaning back in his chair. It’s very brave and somewhat noble for him to come set the record straight. Being a coward, I know in my heart that when I fabricate the story about aliens in chapter 42, I’m going to run like hell when the team comes looking for answers. Not Craig Covault; he’s here for reconciliation and truth.

  “I used the word ‘notified’ in my headline. It was the desk editor who changed it to ‘briefed,’” he says. Clarifying this first point of misconstruing the scientific fa
cts, Covault argues it was the word “briefed” that got the Internet buzzing.

  Covault says that while that wasn’t his fault, he does take responsibility for using the phrase “holding data.” “I am aware that Peter took issue with that,” he says contritely.

  Covault says as of today there are 2,300 citations for the story. He never expected such a huge response. And a lot of the attention came from misreading what the story actually said. That’s a valid point. A lot of the mushrooming happened from these misreadings.

  “And that’s how something small can turn into something big,” he says in conclusion.

  Are there any questions?

  “In your business, do people understand the difference between ‘not ready for publication’ vs. ‘holding’?” Bill Boynton asks with just a whiff of smugness in his voice.

  “I understand. And I blew past that traffic light,” Covault responds.

  “Saying we were holding and going to the White House actually makes it a false story, Craig,” Peter says.

  “There was already a lot of buzz about a discovery in MECA and it came down to a wrong choice of words,” Craig says, but there’s not a lot of spirit in his half-hearted defense. He’s not here to argue. He just wanted to explain how things happened from his perspective.

  No one is happy with that answer.

  “What will your next story say?” Peter asks. Boynton says it’ll probably be a bigger story, but they’re not ready to talk about it. Covault senses the crowd has turned.

  “Thank you for letting me come,” he says.

  Sara Hammond leads him out of the room. There are a couple of science presentations about dust and chemical analysis.

  Barry asks if they’re finished. He’d like to give a briefing on Phoenix’s power consumption. From his office at JPL, he tells us it’s time to consider what Phoenix’s last days will be like.

  “Starting on sol 93, we’ll start to see a decline in power,” Barry says. It’s a kind of morbid talk about how much time our lander has left. After about 120 sols, things will be very limited. And there’s no hope after 160.

  SHIFT II, FOR THE MOST PART, HAPPENS IN THE UPLINK ROOM. this is where scientists’ brilliant ideas become sets of ones and zeros: digestible bits of instructions for the lander. It’s a nondescript room a few paces beyond the front desk in the SOC. There are different, otherworldly species of engineer who dominate the uplink landscape. There are sequencing engineers, SPI IIs, and even SPI IIIs. These engineering species rarely come to the shift I downlink world. They’ll pop in briefly for the second part of the midpoint, but this is their natural habitat. It’s a whole other engineering ecosystem. Here there is little conjecture or debate. Rules rule here. This is where Julia Bell makes science happen on Mars. For all its formality in operation, it might surprise you to know that the uplink room is a far more intimate space than downlink. While the atmosphere is more intense, there’s a greater sense of camaraderie. There’s lots of gentle ribbing and feigned insults. More fights. More jokes. Mistakes come at a higher price, and that makes it a difficult but rewarding place to work.

  “You leave for a day off, and when you return six more flight rules were written,” a shift II engineer tells me. “And you better know them all.”

  When midpoint II breaks, the shift II workers get to work. They have a series of more rigidly structured meetings, the Activity Plan Approval Meeting (APAM), Sequence Walkthrough, Final Sequence Integration, Sequence Validation Meeting, Command Approval Meeting (CAM), and finally the Validation Approval Meeting (VAM). This is the sausage grinder Dara Sabahi spoke about. Then the mission manager and shift II lead sign the plan and it’s radiated out to the orbiters and then down to the lander.

  Right now we’re at the Command Approval Meeting; we’re CAMing. It’s pretty close to the end of the shift II day and the plan is almost finished. For CAM, each instrument team has a series of checklists to complete. Then they’ll explain their activities to the mission manager and shift II lead.

  Ashitey works on a movie of the dig plan. It helps get you into the mood when you watch these animations of the RA digging around on Mars.

  “Woah, who is that woman?” I ask Ashitey.

  There’s an animated woman standing on top of the lander. Holy cow! There are people on Mars and they are damn sexy.

  “Oh, she’s not on Mars,” he says and laughs. Now that’s a conspiracy! Okay. It’s not really a woman on Mars. This animated lady is a vestigial element of the software the RA engineers use. In an effort to save money, the RA team and programmers at JPL use free, open-source animation software to get the playback features on a budget. Occasionally a software bug produces a female figure on top of the lander. Even with the lady, the animations are useful. Visualizing the scoop operating in the Mars environment lets them present their work and discuss any possible dangers with the science team. They show the video instead of listing the vector angles or any of the other variables in their matrix. Vector angles can have a narcotic effect, inducing sleep in all but the hardiest scientists and engineers.

  The movie is a good lesson in storytelling. A huge annoyance for Peter is the team’s near-ubiquitous reliance on needlessly complicated graphs and technical jargon. Peter knows it’s all about how you share data that makes it relevant. Vectors and radians are hard for non-RA engineers to visualize; a scooping movie is easy. If you lose your audience, you lose the activity and maybe the mission.

  The RA is the only instrument that could easily damage the ship or get dirt in sensitive areas; so there’s an extra measure of caution for approving its activities, and that’s why they have extra tools to visualize what they’re up to. The movie lets everyone quickly agree on the digging and delivery path.

  The plan development proceeds through each evaluation and test. The process becomes more rigorous at each meeting. They run several computer simulations of their code, putting it through the paces on simulated landers. The shift II lead and mission manager grill each sequencing engineer about how their code might risk the health and safety of the mission.

  Bob Denise is mission manager. He polls the team for possible problems while he reviews each line of code in the computer-simulated mission. The Predicted Events File (PEF) provides a running commentary on the computer simulation. It’s a computerized cop that tells Denise and the instrument teams when the lander violates any flight rules or undertakes any suspicious activity.

  This questing puts pressure on the sequencing engineers to ferret out potential problems early on in the process. By the end of the evening, they should have code that’s rigorously tested, they should understand possible constraints and potential flight rule violations, and they even guess at what they believe is the top risk of the day.

  “The top risk for RA is that we faulted on 77,” Ashitey says. He worries that the encoder drift problem will likely cause the RA to safe. He explains that they risk getting nothing and might waste a sol. Every engineer must present his or her code and explain the risk involved.

  The SPI II says the top risk is dealing with a remote sequencing engineer for the first time. It’s proving harder to check each other’s work if people aren’t physically in the building. Noted. The process continues for every instrument.

  While the science team is interested in what can go right, you might argue that the shift II engineers are looking for everything that can go wrong. Hanging out in these less-trod areas of Mission Control gives you more of a dismal outlook and helps explain some of the tension between scientists and engineers—even why declaring mission success now is important for some but disingenuous to others.

  This issue of success comes back to the core of space exploration risk.

  “When you talk about risk you have to consider that that means engineering risk. JPL limits the instruments because they see some activities as risky,” Chris tells me.

  “For example, Julia Bell will say we can’t do a particular activity because it violates a rule, or it’s a ‘risk
.’ But what’s she’s saying is, it’s a risk for the software. She can’t point to how it risks the actual lander hardware. Because it doesn’t. It’s hard to find JPL people who will stand behind a risk and say ‘I accept responsibility for this.’ It’s not worth it to them,” Chris says. I ask him about Dara Sabahi, superstar engineer. He says there are lots of exceptions.

  “They have some of the best engineers anywhere. But the culture makes them very risk-averse,” Chris explains. That helps them land missions, but it also gets in the way when you’re on the ground and trying to work. Chris says you must be precise when you talk about risk.

  “When the science team wants to try new things, those aren’t real risks. They’re not damaging the hardware, they’re just pushing the limits to get good science and explore Mars,” Chris says. And that’s what we want. Of course, that attitude got him disqualified as payload manager. He says JPL flatly refused to have him in the position.

  The man responsible for the hardware was a JPL engineer named Mike Gross.

  “He’s a big, stout pit bull with a loud voice,” Chris says. “We used to scream at each other about this. But we respect each other, and we’re still friends.” They would have the same argument about risk over and over.

  “What is the risk to the hardware?” Chris says he would ask. If Mike couldn’t answer, Chris would proceed.

  Uplink is a place to look at everything that can possibly go wrong. When everything is looked at in terms of how it might fail, you get a very different sense of Mars exploration. It’s a shock when anything works at all. After a few nights on shift II, I generally have trouble believing anything will ever work. It’s just too complicated, and really depressing.

  “Somedays the spacecraft is very resilient, and other days it feels so flimsy and all comes to a halt,” Bob Denise says.

  “I’d say it’s very responsive to errors,” one of the spacecraft engineers says. But in spite of all the potential problems, they have a simple plan for our second day on Earth time. We’re moving closer to another TEGA delivery and opening up new territory in our workspace.