Martian Summer Read online

  PRESS CONFERENCE. RAY ARVIDSON AND BILL BOYNTON DO A microphone level check. Sounds good. We all sit around the long table in the image processing room.

  “Bill and Ray, thanks to you guys for doing this,” Jane Pratt, the JPL press boss, says.

  “We’ve got a lot going on right now but, hey, this is what we do,” Bill says with a sigh. There’s a hint of passive-aggression directed against the outreach team for forcing him to ignore his research and waste his time with this whole endeavor. It’s possible this press conference affords him a happy opportunity to break from the rigors of finding life on Mars. Probably not. I wonder if he’s taking Provigil™, too. Not that I’m insinuating that. I just wonder, is all. This is conjecture based on the inflection of his voice, melding with various complaints about media outreach I’ve heard, and my inability to process the thunderstorm of thoughts raging through my mind. I conclude he’s probably hopped up on Provigil™ and that his hyper-attentive state would be far better suited to digging for Martian dirt than facilitating public relations. Maybe it’s just me. I don’t know. Paranoia has me in its clutches. He’s got to be taking Provigil™. Maybe not. I’ll drop it.

  But there’s a problem with the telephone queue for reporters who dial in. There are far more than expected. This is great! People care!

  Thirty-nine participants on the line. That’s everyone. We are ready to start. The operator tells us she is going to play some music and then we’ll be ready. I get a little nervous. I’m not sure why. I don’t have to do anything. Maybe it’s time for another pill.

  Jane Pratt kicks off the meeting. She introduces Ray Arvidson and he starts to talk about the images of Dodo-Goldilocks trench. He shows the topographic and elevation map; images made using the SSI. The exciting development in the trench is that a there’s a nugget of light-toned material. Maybe salt. Maybe ice. Something interesting, that’s for sure.

  The images are color-coded based on elevation.

  “I’m going to talk about the ‘red part’,” Ray says. This is the top to one of the important polygon shapes. The image shows we excavated from the top of a polygon into a trough.

  “We think we clipped an edge of the light-toned material. When we’re in the trough, it’s deeper or lower or non-existent,” Ray says. The “light-toned” material is almost 99.999% certainly ice. Still, Ray hedges. He doesn’t want to tell the media they’ve found ice without proper scientific confirmation. Boring. But he hints at finding something.

  “We’ll keep looking at it to track the change. If it’s just a cold finger we should see frost. If it’s an isolated piece we’ll expect some sublimation,” Ray continues and then lays out the digging plan for the next few sols. “We’ll be excavating a new trench.” The trenching strategy is important to the scientists but clearly boring for the lay media, which seems to only understand “life” or “no life,” “water” or “no water.” They want water, ice, or aliens. There are no other stories.

  Bill Boynton does his spiel and says how pleased he is with TEGA’s performance. What he skips is all the good stuff I’m only just learning about: the mess of design process, finger-pointing, a complete rebuild two weeks before the mission, and that, in truth, he’s just happy it actually works. The imp in my brain really wants to tell this story. The media, nay, the world needs to know how hard this all really is. It only appears simple because without living in Mission Control for a few days it’s impossible to factor in all the things that can and do go wrong on Mars, 200 million miles away, that would never be a problem on Earth. Ranting over the phone line will wake them from their Mars stupor. But Sara’s chronic admonishing look reminds me to act otherwise.

  “We’re looking for H2O, CO2, and SO2. But we don’t expect to see it at low temperatures,” Bill says of the first two heating runs that TEGA has made so far. He finishes up his turn, and it’s time for questions.

  The San Francisco Chronicle reporter asks if they’ve dislodged white material. Ray shows him the chunk in the image.

  A reporter from The Tucson Citizen asks if there is water.

  “Probably,” Bill says. “Water is chemically bound in minerals, which it releases as gas, giving the fingerprint.”

  The Los Angeles Times writer is up next. Oh, no.

  “So your predictions are wrong, then, if at 20 centimeters you haven’t found ice?”

  “Good question,” Ray replies, diplomatically. “In fact, we’ve only dug 5-7 cm, but the bottom of the trench is 20 cm from the top of the polygon. The RA can go 50 cm deep, but it’s only 5-7 cm here.” Headline: “No water.” Geez.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WONDERLAND

  SOL 22

  IT’S 5:07 A.M. LOCAL TUCSON TIME, 14:22 P.M. ON MARS. SUZANNE Young and Richard Kornfeld sit at the edge of the conference table in downlink, reviewing the satellite schedules for relaying data. They need to precisely coordinate the timing of Phoenix’s messages back to Earth. Missing a data pass could cause them to lose a day of science.

  “Can we go through it once more?” Kornfeld presses Suzanne. The timing doesn’t sit right with him. Suzanne has already done the work and she’s taken him through it.

  “Don’t you trust me?” Suzanne asks, gritting her teeth a little.

  “Trust is good, control is better,” Kornfeld says. Suzanne rolls her eyes. Kornfeld continues without skipping a beat.

  “I love working with him, but somehow when he’s on duty the shift lasts three hours longer than what’s posted on the schedule,” Suzanne says with a wink. “And be prepared for a lot of pressing questions,” she adds. There’s a method to Kornfeld’s madness. He’s slow but he gets things done right. For those of you who don’t subscribe to Engineer Aficionado or didn’t recognize his voice from the above chat with Suzanne, Kornfeld is the guy who called the play-by-play at landing just a few weeks ago. He’s a real engineering celebrity. Now you recognize his Swiss German accent. There’s no mistaking that precision cadence and warm staccato that captured the world’s attention on landing day. He had the whole world hanging on his every word.

  I keep the video file on my computer for the moments I need a little boost—beyond the copious amounts of Provigil™ coursing through my veins. It does far more for the psyche.

  Kornfeld has a gift for engineering-inspired gems. If you’re giving him some long-winded answer during one of his friendly inquiries, he’ll say “I was looking for a binary answer,” meaning “yes” or “no.”

  LANDING DAY OPERATIONS TOOK PLACE AT THE JET PROPULSION LAB in Pasadena. JPL may be wonky with their press, but they’re awesome at landing spacecraft. They’re really the only game in town. Even the European Space Agency consults with JPL for Mars landings. So they get to enjoy all the glory for that. On landing day, Peter and his landing team were all in Pasadena while we waited back in Tucson. Peter stood in the other Mission Control, the Pasadena-based landing center.

  “Fire the thrusters,” he’d scream at Kornfeld.

  “Thrusters fired, sir,” Kornfeld would respond.

  “Ah, sir, you do know that it takes fifteen minutes for the signal to travel to Mars,” Kornfeld would say after a long pause. It’s more fun to imagine Peter yelling at his crew, but landing doesn’t happen like that. It’s all controlled by Phoenix’s computer brain. About a thousand precisely timed events that all rely on one another have to occur in the span of seven minutes. Since it takes about that much time for a signal to even reach Mars, Peter wouldn’t get to say much before the lander was already on the ground in a pile. Supervising the collection of data is all there is to do during landing on a mission like this.

  “Landing happened ten months ago,” Pat Woida said back on landing day. He’s so practical. “There’s no point in being nervous now.” The landing for the most part was a fait accompli after the final instructions were uploaded by the Phoenix engineers. There are several opportunities to adjust the trajectory so Phoenix hits the atmosphere just right, but the last opportunity for a course correcti
on passed hours ago. There’s really nothing left to do but sweat. And in spite of the over-air-conditioned space, I do. Once the landing operations terminate, JPL hands over control to the SOC in Tucson and Peter races back from the JPL campus to re-join the team.

  In Tucson, we ate hot dogs and watched a live feed projected onto a massive screen just opposite the PIT. The education and public outreach team hosted a landing-day party for friends and family of the mission. Between pleading with Sara Hammond to let me in the secure area of the SOC, and feeling alone at an amazing party, I’d stuffed my face with wieners and watched the scientists’ husbands, wives, parents, kids, aunts, and uncles make nervous small talk.

  Then everything got quiet. “Atmospheric entry on my mark,” proclaimed the velvety man voice over the PA. Here we go.

  “Five—4—3—2—1. Mark,” Kornfeld counted down. With that, Phoenix dipped into the atmosphere and made its move. I imagined the spacecraft starting its fall: her heat shields deflecting the hot glowing plasma as she plummets through the hazy red atmosphere, beginning a seven-minute super-braking burnout to decelerate from 12,500 mph to zero without any splatter.

  “One minute past entry. Still a signal via Odyssey. Standing by for Odyssey data switch to 32K in 45 seconds,” Kornfeld updated his team. The bespectacled Kornfeld is officially the Chief Communication Engineer for entry, descent, and landing. He is responsible for how Phoenix communicates during landing. On previous Mars missions, communication had dropped out as the lander went into its seven-minute fall. These moments of silence are part of Mars landing legend. They’re called the “seven minutes of terror.” They make your mission or your mess. I tried to read an academic paper Kornfeld co-authored that described how it all works. I made it halfway through the synopsis. Kornfeld and his colleagues tried to engineer out the terror from the seven-minute landing sequence. They wanted to at least collect data so if the worst happened they could learn from it. From his wan pallor, you might deduce that terror reduction is a taxing process.

  “Standing by for telemetry acquisition … parachute deploy detected,” Kornfeld says.

  Everyone applauds. That’s a good sign. Phoenix must release its parachute and then blow off its heat shield. The timing has to be perfect for these events. The heat shield has to protect Phoenix from the friction of descent, but then fall far enough away from Phoenix so they don’t make contact at any point along the way.

  “Radar switch to altitude mode. Standing by for altitude conversion,” Kornfeld announces.

  This is a critical moment. We’re still waiting for the radar to lock. If it works, there should be an altitude reading to tell us how far Phoenix is from the surface. If it’s not working, well, you don’t want to know. The radar was a big headache. This is a Polar Lander inherited radar. Yes, the same one that likely caused the Polar Lander to crash. They had to find the problems and then engineer them out. It was a lot harder than they imagined and the radar was still flaky six weeks before launch, making this a particularly tense moment.

  “Heat shield trigger detected … ground velocity 90 meters per second … ground velocity 80 meters per second,” Kornfeld keeps making calls. No dropout yet.

  “Radar switch to altitude mode detected. Lander leg deployment detected. Radar reliable,” Kornfeld says.

  A small wave of excitement rushes through the crowd, touching everyone who knows what those steps mean. If they’re excited, I’m excited.

  “Radar acquisition 2000 meters.”

  I am a bundle of nerves, frozen with fear, hoping and willing with all my mental power for it to go right. I don’t care that this was all programed months ago. I’m nervous as hell. My fingernails are digging into my palms and even my bum is clenched. Peter’s ten-foot-tall head and wide-eyed, unblinking face is projected on the wall. Peter points his index finger in the air. At first I don’t know what he’s pointing at. But then I see it was the aftermath of a premature count-down. He started with five fingers at 5000 meters but after 2000 meters Kornfeld switches things up on us. We expect him to say 1000 meters. But he wants to draw out the drama and goes 1900 meters. Peter is left with his index finger extended. He’s just frozen. Desperately pointing at nothing, willing with all his will that the spacecraft lands softly.

  “1700 meters … 1600 meters … 1000 meters …”

  This is it.

  “Gravity turn detected.”

  Engineers applaud.

  “500 meters … 400 meters … 100 meters … 27 meters … 20 meters … 15 meters.”

  “Stand by for touchdown …”

  You can almost feel the pressure drop from the collective inhale.

  “Touchdown signal detected! Landing sequence initiated,” Kornfeld announces explosively. Peter picks up the small man next to him in a giant bear hug. They look so happy. We cheer, high-five, and some people even cry. Me? There was just something caught in both my eyes.

  From a technical perspective, the landing proved flawless. They maintained radio contact during the entire stretch of the “seven minutes of terror.” Much of that was due to Kornfeld’s communication package. But who cares about all that: WE MADE IT TO MARS!

  BACK IN THE SOC, 22 SOLS INTO THE MISSION, IT’S TIME FOR KICKOFF. Vicky Hipkin is sci-lead today. When the team quiets down, she begins.

  “This is a historical time in our plan. We should get our first look at a high-temperature ramp. We could even see some organics,” she says. Organic material is a kind of Mars Holy Grail. (Maybe aliens are the actual Holy Grail, but this is certainly Dead Sea Scroll territory. Far better than a Holy Tortilla.) Organics are a strong indication that there’s life. Finding ice and organics would earn the mission an “A” for sure.

  This is Vicky Hipkin’s second day as sci-lead. When Vicky arrived this morning, Kornfeld had some words of encouragement for her. He wanted to let her know how well she’s done.

  “You did a great job for your first sci-lead” Richard said, then correcting himself, “No … she did a great job, period.”

  Even though she’s doing great, Ray is antsy and stands next to her, waiting.

  “We are on a two-sol trenching excavation. We’re going to give the RA team two sols to get us some white stuff,” Ray says finally, interrupting. The white stuff is now the focus of the mission. It’s become a sort of joke that no one will say what the stuff is. This white-stuff/light-toned material Ray talked about in the press conference yesterday. Off the record, it’s likely ice. No one wants to be responsible for a leaked news story about finding ice on Mars, if the team isn’t damn certain and ready to announce. Retracting a statement like that is embarrassing for NASA and JPL. The outreach team and scientists are highly concerned about embarrassment.

  Now that the first TEGA results are in, the team would love to have a little bit of that white stuff to round out their understanding. They want whatever is in the scoop to go down TEGA’s gullet. There are eight TEGA ovens but only four wet chemistry cells in MECA. Each sample gives different information about the place they’ve landed. Ray wants to be sure that they get the best possible representation of the environment to sample.

  “We’ll look at the light-toned material to determine where we get our WCL sample. And we’ll also continue to monitor the Goldilocks trench,” Ray says, hijacking the meeting.

  “Also, an important note. On [sol] 19 we exposed a chunky bit [of white material] but we didn’t hear about it until 20,” Ray says. Then he pauses. “Now that chunky bit is buried. In retrospect, it would have been a great discovery to look at. I told the press yesterday we were going to watch it. Now we can’t watch it.” Ray is a little annoyed, but chalks it all up to a learning experience. Now we need to get some of that white stuff into our instruments and see what this planet is all about.

  “Please mention any discoveries early,” Vicky says in the same teachable moment tone.

  “You get us that white stuff and then we can scrape,” Ray says to Ashitey. He hopes that new white stuff will help the
media forget about the chunk of whitish stuff he described at yesterday’s press conference.

  Vicky calls for today’s weather report.

  “Clear Skies. Nothing new,” Palle says. He’s a man of few words.

  “It’s another beautiful day on Mars. See you at midpoint,” Vicky says, dismissing the team.

  THE FIRST IMAGES OF THE TRENCH COME BACK. A FEW FOLKS STAND around the front monitor looking closely at the images. We all expected more of the white stuff. But there’s no white stuff. There’s something stranger: black stuff. A new dark, almost shiny, material is unearthed—err—unmarsed.

  You want light stuff. Mars gives you dark stuff. No one is making any guesses. Just a lot of looking around and head-scratching. I can’t quite tell if it’s obvious to them what it is, or if no one has any clue.

  “It’s hard to be the dig czar,” Ray Arvidson says and sighs. Dick Morris comes over and pats him on the back.

  “Yes, I’m sure it’s tough being a dumpmeister,” he jokes.

  Bill Boynton, Bob Bonitz, Joel, and Ashitey have a little sidebar about how feasible it will be to get another TEGA delivery by sol 25. They discuss the matter with Dara Sabahi; he’s the chief engineer for the Phoenix project and he’s here on some kind of secret mission. Three sols isn’t a lot of time. The original trench Dodo-Goldilocks had white material. But they don’t want to take a sample from there. They want to go into the center of the polygon. That’s why they’re digging this new trench. Only, this doesn’t have white stuff; it has black stuff. Do they want black stuff? Heck, yeah. But they should probably take a moment to observe.

  Aaron Zent, one of the MECA co-investigators and a strategic science lead, eavesdrops, too. He comes over to protest.

  “They won’t be ready with those blocks until sol 28,” he says. Blocks are the units of code that make up lander activities. From his strategic work, he knows that there’s a bottleneck and they can’t just do another TEGA sample acquisition. The debate is tabled; more images come down from Mars. More dark shiny material.