He described the moment he told his mentor, Marty Tomasko, that he was moving on. That he would build his own cameras for space. Then he interrupts himself.
“You know, I thought you were here to get my story,” he says. “You should have made more of an effort.” Peter tells me I’m not pushy enough and that you have to fight to get the things you want. He’s right. I tell him that I came here to help him but was never certain where exactly I fit. I quit my job but had no guarantee that I could stay. He didn’t make it all that easy. He says I should have said something. Woah, this is crazy, we’re having a fight. Awww, our first fight.
Peter says it’s my responsibility to get what I need. He’s busy running a Mars mission. I say he should have had a little more faith in me.
Our fight is cathartic. Once aired, our mutual grievances kind of disappear. I tell Peter that I understand what a great risk he took to give an outsider an unfiltered look at mission life. I respect that. This approach ruffles scientists’ feathers and aggressively bends NASA rules.
Still, Peter was willing to face that risk because it offers a chance to tell the Phoenix story in a different way. And no one knows if that will make things better or worse. What Peter knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is if NASA doesn’t start telling their story in a new way, they’ll turn into a dusty, dead ecosystem. Not unlike our old perception of Mars.
“I’m glad you stuck with it,” Peter says. And then he tells me a story.
“I GUESS I’M INTERESTED IN EXTREMES. I WANT TO KNOW WHERE THE boundary for life is. That’s an exciting place. I’ve been to Antarctica and it’s a dry, extreme place. And then the next step for me was Mars,” Peter says and then pauses to reflect on his leap.
“In the nineties when we were working on Pathfinder, I took a little break. I was on vacation for just a few days. I got back and no one was around. We were still a year away from landing Pathfinder and the IMP. And I was upstairs at the lab, sitting by myself watching a NASA press conference. They were talking about a meteorite they found in Antarctica. Then they said there was life on Mars! I’d only been gone a week. And someone found life on Mars. How the? What happened!?” Peter asks. That was the beginning of a new era. “It was a wedge of doubt. Before that, Mars was dead. You had a closed casket. And we broke open a few screws,” he says. Peter thought that Pathfinder might be their chance to confirm these surprising findings. They were talking about ALH84001. A piece of Mars ejected into space and landed on Earth. There was evidence of fossilized bacteria in the meteor. That meant there was a chance for a Genesis II on Mars. It was just waiting to be discovered.
Pathfinder made great discoveries and Peter’s images changed how we see Mars, but there were still no fossils. Then when Polar Lander crashed, Peter thought his career might be over. He lost every single one of his contracts.
“Starting from zero at age fifty felt so hard,” he says. He didn’t give up. Phoenix was his chance to get back to Mars.
“The tricky thing about the Mars story is finding the dog that didn’t bark. Seeing what’s not there is the key. I did think we’d see organics. It’s frustrating that it’s not a clear story. We don’t even see contaminants. Where are the organics?” Peter asks.
Peter suspects they’re burning up. They get oxidized in some kind of reaction that’s not well understood. It’s either a disappointment or a discovery. It depends on how you look. Time will tell what it means.
“We don’t know where on Mars this thing [ALH84001] came from, but it had the same composition of material. It had carbonates. And now we see carbonates. So if that doesn’t give you shivers… .” Peter says, raising his formidable eyebrows.
Peter isn’t going to be the guy who finds life on Mars. Not on this mission. Sure, on the nights when he couldn’t sleep from the stress, he might have thought about what it would be like. You have to dream big. We didn’t find E.T., but we did find ice, salty brines, carbonates, perchlorate, and snow, took the first microscopic images of Mars, measured the pH of the regolith, and did the first soluble soil chemistry experiments. Not a bad step.
“I would have loved to prove them right. That there was life up there. I wanted to; but it’s not that easy to do. Still, no one has proved them wrong,” he says. “That keeps things interesting.”
Peter helped us take another step down our long path of discovery. The random walk he thought was career—working in the lab, travels through India, building spectrometers, getting a master’s in optics, pitching his own instruments—gave him the exact experience he would need to be a freelance Mars mission captain.
“You cringe when you think about some of these things we do when we’re young. Why did I go there? Why did I fly across the world with her?” Peter asks. “And then somehow it all works out.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
STIFF JOINTS
SOL 88
THE KITCHEN TABLE IN THE SOC IS FILLED WITH THE LEFTOVERS of a summer on Mars. There’s a pair of scissors, a lunchbox, single-serve coffee packets. There’s a can of organic milk. Some crackers and a few peaches. It’s a curious pile. I study it for any clues into the psyche of the team members. Then I swipe a peach.
The usual science chatter in the SOC is peppered with flight departure times and scheduling final meetings. Summer is over.
Dave Hamara from TEGA comes into the kitchen.
“How’s it going?” I ask.
“Not good,” he says.
“End-of-school blues?” I ask.
“No. We safed,” he says.
“Oh,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. What happened?
“Well, I think I know,” Dave explains that the valve on TEGA is still clogged and we probably just lost three days. I start to get the sense that my last days will not end with a bang; more of a robotic whimper. I always figured the lander would die in a hail of alien gunfire or at least get incinerated by the LIDAR. Now it’s kind of looking like it might just chug along slowly until the Martian winter comes and it’s frozen in carbon dioxide. (Wait, that’s what happened to Han Solo! And things turned out well for him. Oh, nope, he gets frozen in carbonite.)
Bob Denise says they’ll try to hail the lander when it thaws in spring. But spring is almost two Earth years away.
“It’s possible we make some kind of contact,” he says. But even if they’re able to connect after the long break, it’s not likely much will work. Denise says there’s a shellack covering the trace wire on the circuit boards.
“At –55c the shellack will have a phase transition. It will freeze and then when it thaws, it will be riddled with microfissures, and this will cause unpredictable failure,” he explains.
But you’re saying there’s a chance, right? We might get lucky and find a limping but still operational Phoenix. If not, we all knew the stakes coming in: the lander was never coming back.
“Remember the good old days?” Ray Arvidson asks. “When we had a kickoff and there was a little gap to give people assignments to look at certain issues.”
Well, the kickmid doesn’t leave time for that, but Ray says he’d like to assign the theme leads to look at data sets for the following kickmid. There’s not enough data analysis happening. Things feel a little disorganized.
Denise is now dubbed the “ice-man.” He’s responsible for the critical path to the second icy-soil delivery. The team is desperate for one more piece of this puzzle. If they could dig into the ice again and grab some organic material, they’d really have a beautiful new story of Mars, complete with missing organics and a strange briny water.
Ray dismisses the group.
Shoot, he forgot the weather report for the second day. It seems no one cares about the weather anymore. Thankfully, there’s nothing unusual. Some dust accumulation, but it will not affect our operations.
Several scientists stop in to say good-bye. I could have sworn they’d already left. No one seems to be able to leave on their last day.
CARLA BITTER GIVES A TOUR OF THE P
IT. IT’S GOING TO BE ONE OF THE last. The people who came today get to watch Joseph and Rob Bonitz test a delivery in the PIT. They watch with mouths agape. Excited kids and adult kids pressed against the metal barrier. They stand on their tippy toes or the metal bar to get closer. They point at the arm, the scoop, even Joseph and Bob, and exclaim how wonderful it all is. Real fans. I stand at the barrier with them.
The RA is arthritic and stiff. TEGA is in safe mode. Our little lander is falling apart. Phoenix M. Lander knew the stakes when she blasted off for Mars, but it’s all so real. It’s hard not to feel sympathy as something new seems to go wrong almost daily: a clogged valve in TEGA, a failing sensor in MECA, overheating laser in the MET. It’s as if she knows the end is near.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
SALTY LIQUID WATER TEARS
I GET UP EARLY, SHOWER, AND EVEN SHAVE FOR THE LAST DAY OF the primary mission. It feels important. But I know I’m only in for disappointment. Everyone is gone. The panoramic Mars images that covered the walls are gone, looted trophies from our safari. How could they have taken all these brilliant images of Mars? It’s so darn sad.
“Why don’t you take one?” Pat asks.
“Oh, I can have one?”
“Of course,” Pat says. “You’re part of the team.”
This is going to look perfect in my lounge.
The conference phone line is open. There are about twenty people online. First order of business: figure out how to control the mouse on the computer that holds the plan.
Doug Ming kicks off the day’s first meeting, and he has good news.
“We’ve had some confirmation of success that a low-temp ramp has run,” Doug says. One more TEGA sample! I can leave on a happy note.
I don’t want to ask any more questions. I’m tired of being explained stuff. I’m tired of wanting information from people all the time. So I just listen. I think about the lander working on Mars. What it’s like up there with no one around to even see its trials and tribulations. I hang out with Joseph and Ashitey in the RA office. They are some of the lone holdouts at the SOC. They’ll stay on so they can continue to test the activities in the PIT. We chat about going home.
“WHERE IS EVERYONE?” PETER ASKS.
“Gone remote,” Bill responds.
“Yeah,” Peter says.
It’s the end-of-sol science meeting and there are only five of us. Urs Staufer is the atomic force microscope (AFM) co-investigator from the Max Planck Institute. He signed up to do a presentation of AFM sols 0-90.
“It’s my pleasure to give my first AFM presentation, and sad also because it’s my last day at the SOC. I want to thank everyone who worked on this,” Urs says.
He shows us the first-ever nanoscale images of another planet. He’s just one of the hundreds of people who did amazing things this summer. But sadly he’s left out from most of this story, along with so many others who made this grand space narrative succeed. I hope someone writes several follow-ups with titles like “Urs and the AFM Monster.”
It will chronicle the wacky adventures of the AFM team* as they put a sensitive piece of lab equipment on a harsh environment 200 million miles away. Amazing.
Line Drube, one of my Danish roommates, gives the last end-of-science presentation I’ll attend. It’s a follow-up presentation on Nilton’s nodule talk. She tracked the changes in the nodules since Nilton first gave his talk.
“Large areas on the lander struts now have some kinds of bumps,” she says.
The two masses that Nilton first noticed grew considerably. She makes a caveat that these could be frost. It’s a sensitive topic these days. Nilton is on the phone. He called in from his lab in Michigan.
“I hope that we can continue to monitor the area,” Nilton says. He tells me that his paper is almost ready. His results are exciting. He’s still waiting for the team’s okay, but support is slowly building.
Steve Wood, one of the MECA co-investigators, suggests we knock off some bits of the ice with the TECP and collect it with the scoop.
I think that’s awesome. I clap, overwhelmed by the feeling that I’m now a part of operations. Peter shoots me a look.
Stubbe, who is leaving for Germany, asks if there will be an EOS agenda so he can decide if he’s going to stay up until 4 a.m.
Peter leans back in his SMITH, P.I. Captain’s chair with the Star Trek font.
“Great idea,” he says, firmly in command of this ship.
“Thanks for coming to the end-of-science meeting. I guess we’re done here,” he says.
I leave for the airport.
PHOENIX WENT TO SLEEP ON NOVEMBER 2, 2008, AND DID NOT wake up. The JPL tweeted its final remarks: 01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000. Binary code for “TRIUMPH.”
*Making an AFM image is a precision physical process not exactly suited for the wilds of Mars. The image is made by tracing the surface of an object with a tiny probe. A carefully calibrated tip, just a few nanometers wide and cantilevered like a record needle, is dragged over the structure you want to image. The smallest laser you can imagine measures whether or not your tip flexes as it meets new features of the particle. The pin bounces up and down as it’s dragged across the surface; then somehow, the laser/flexing feedback loop is measured and adjusted and then you get an amazing 3D image of tiny things. The AFM was supposed to be a proof of concept for doing this type of imaging on Mars. Consider it proved. And there are now nano images of Mars to show for it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
SOL SEARCHING
SOL 91+
PHOENIX EVENTUALLY THAWED FROM ITS HAN SOLO-LIKE FROZEN carbon dioxide encasement. But ensuing attempts to hail the lander failed. An image of the lander, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, showed cracking and damage on the solar panels. Now Phoenix is Martian installation art. A little beachhead planted by humans on a faraway world that says “Peter Smith and the Phoenix team were here.”
In spite of the setbacks, interruptions, complaining, conspiracies, ice cream indulgences, and general drama, the Phoenix Mars mission was a resounding success. Hundreds of science firsts and new discoveries: ice, perchlorate, nutrient-rich soil, clouds, snow, sticky soil, even liquid water. It’s all detailed in the paper Peter Smith and the team published in Science magazine about the history of water on Mars.* Following the water turned out to be a good strategy.
The dean at the University of Arizona thought Phoenix’s ground-breaking discovery—work that proved the presence of a shallow ice table, discovered all the minerals in the soil, and demonstrated evidence that water had once flowed on Mars—would make for a great thesis project. Peter’s graduate school records indicated that he was only a few units shy of completing his doctoral coursework. So he took a couple classes, gathered an advisory committee, and submitted the Phoenix findings as his doctoral research. Meanwhile, Peter’s daughter, Sara, pursued her degree in the university’s Geography department. In 2009, Peter successfully defended his thesis. Sara did too, and the two walked across the stage together to receive their Ph.Ds. Then they took a cross-country road trip to drop Sara off at the University of North Carolina for her first teaching position. Peter returned to Tucson to teach a class about Mars and get back to work on several new space projects.
The Phoenix Mars mission ended three years ago but, of course, it was only the beginning. Pushing-the-limits-of-human-knowledge type science projects are always just the beginning. Two years after we last heard from Phoenix, I returned to Tucson to catch up with Peter. Post-Phoenix Peter is a bit more relaxed and engaging. He doesn’t have NASA, JPL, and 130 other scientists to wrangle every day. Yet he’s not just sitting around contemplating a memoir that corrects all the factual errors in this book. Peter is busy. He has all kinds of space projects in the works. He promises he’ll tell me about them, but first it’s time for small talk. He even asks about my personal life.
“Try this,” Peter says. He’s invented a cocktail for our meeting. It’s Squirt and gin. �
��No, it’s Diet Squirt and gin.” No wonder he doesn’t have much faith in my reporting. Peter lights up the grill for dinner. And I’m put in charge of chopping onions. Aww, it’s just like our first meeting … long before Phoenix ever left the launch pad. But this time, we’re shooting the breeze and someone even cries. Well, it’s me and it’s just the onions. But at least I can check it off the list.
“A lot has happened since sol 90. I’m glad you came back,” Peter says. “You don’t want to miss all that has happened since. You can’t just drop us at sol 90. How would we feel?” Good point. We sit at Peter’s dining room table and catch up on some science.
dr. smith agreed nilton renno had enough evidence to publish a paper documenting Phoenix observations of liquid water on Mars.
“We only had a few images of Nilton’s blobs, so it was hard to know. He did about 16 revisions of that paper. And he made a very convincing argument,” Peter says. “Still, all the fighting was a bit of a sideshow. But it did lead to a lot interesting work.” The Journal of Geophysical Research published Nilton’s liquid water paper in 2009. In spite of my moral support, I was not listed as a co-author. Michael Hecht is not listed either.
“Well, he was included, but he and a few others asked me to take their names out,” Nilton said in a followup visit. NASA headquarters invited Nilton to speak about it several times and thought his water story was a great angle for Mars.
“After a talk I gave at MIT, one of my old professors came up to me. He is a man who I really admire. This was a really tough teacher who actually failed me on my qualifying exams in graduate school. He paid me one of the greatest compliments I have ever received. He said that this observation was like what Enrico Fermi did at the test of the nuclear bomb. And then he explained that Fermi tore up a piece of paper and when he felt the blast wave, he dropped it. When he saw how far the paper fell, he computed the force of the blast because he knew the amplitude of the wave! Months later when the numbers were crunched, it turned out he was right. He had made an accurate estimate because he knew enough to make a simple test and observe,” Nilton says with great pride. “He told me I’d done the same thing! And I didn’t need everyone to agree with me to make my assertion. It was one of the proudest moments I’ve had in my career.”
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