Martian Summer Read online

  At the big “Jedi” monitor, the water-cooler equivalent here in the downlink room, a crowd gathers. Everyone is a little perplexed.

  “Maybe we landed on tar sands. If we have a press release that says ‘Black stuff on Mars not necessarily oil,’ they just might give us permanent funding,” Mike Mellon says.

  I ask Ashitey to explain what he thinks is going to happen, now that there’s a new kind of material.

  “You’re still here!?” he says. “You know all the other media is gone. I guess this is gonna be a really big book.”

  “I’m staying until the bitter end,” I tell him.

  “Go talk to Joseph,” he says. “He’s working on the digging strategy.” I say okay and start to head out, but then he tells me anyway.

  “They want the white stuff,” Ashitey says. “This is a test dig to see if we can expose some of the various layers. Once the geologists can assess each layer, we can do some precise digging next to it,” he says. The various strata of the soil tell a different story about what the past was like on Mars. It could reveal the type of landscape and if water flowed. “The more precise layers they can take samples from, the more enlightening the results they can get with TEGA and MECA too,” Ashitey explains. Then he gives me a look that signals he’s got to get back to work.

  “Okay, so you think the black stuff is oil?” I ask. He doesn’t have time for jokes. He says maybe it’s black diamonds and walks away. More likely the black stuff is ice with dirt in it.

  AS SOON AS ASHITEY LEAVES, THERE’S AN ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE TEGA team. Good news: they completed another cycle of heating from the sample and the results are back. Bill Boynton shows a graph of temperature readings from the high-temperature run. TEGA’s latest experiment. They heated the Baby Bear sample to about 1000 Celsius, about 1800 Fahrenheit.

  “That’s the hottest it’s been on Mars in a very long time,” Vicky says. Still all the numbers don’t mean much to anyone outside this room. It’s up to the TEGAns to make sense of all this.

  “When will we have the happy news?” Vicky asks Bill in her most maternal of tones.

  “What we see is very subtle and we will need to do another bake and then subtract from tomorrow’s data to tell what we’ve got,” Bill Boynton replies without answering. She’s asking him to do a year’s worth of science in a few hours. He’s not okay with that. Everyone would love to see some organic material in this first sample but Bill won’t be pushed into making any overreaching statements without time to collect evidence.

  THE MIDPOINT MEETING IS STARTING. A BLURRY PICTURE OF THE NEW Wonderland trench is up on the projector screen. Everyone puts on 3D glasses to see it. These must have great scientific value, but it’s hard not to chuckle whenever the science team whips out their cardboard glasses and puts them on in unison. Ashitey is today’s RA representative at the midpoint meeting.

  “From our perspective, it’s a perfect trench. From the dig czar’s perspective it’s a near-perfect trench. We don’t have data yet on how hard the material is,” Ashitey says about the newly exposed area. This is what everyone waits for. They dug right down to the hard stuff. Getting there is the easy part. Acquiring some of whatever this stuff is will take more work.

  “We still would like better DEMs,” Ashitey says, lamenting the missing digital elevation maps (DEMs) for the bottom of the trench. Without these maps, it’s going to make getting the hard stuff really hard. Not that they won’t do it. It’ll just take longer and they’re more likely to make errors.

  “We will use the torque data to tell how hard, relatively speaking, the surface is. GSTG says it’s hard. But that’s why the geologists get paid the big bucks … to guess,” he says, taking a crack at Ray.

  “Anything dig czar wants to add?” Vicky asks, preempting any interruptions.

  “Failure is not an option,” Ray says, in a mock heroic tone. He points to Ashitey. “Give me white stuff tomorrow!”

  “Joseph Carsten is in charge of the block. He’s a fine engineer and I have the utmost confidence in his ability,” Ashitey says.

  The meeting is dismissed.

  TOM PIKE IS A SCIENTIST FROM IMPERIAL COLLEGE AND co-investigator for MECA. His group helped build the atomic force microscope on Phoenix. That’s not what he’s here to talk about today. Today, he signed up to give a lecture on the mounting evidence that Phoenix had already found ice. Pussy-footing around this light-toned or whitish material talk is silly. Today he’s going to present the evidence.

  The end of sol (EOS) science meeting is an open forum to present the new ideas on the state of Mars. Scientists sign up for ten-minute talks on a new finding or something new to consider. These are heady, science-rich, technical talks that are impossible for non-specialists to follow. But that’s okay. EOS is an opportunity to simultaneously flatter science team members while they explain the details of their work so a small child could understand.

  “Your talk was fascinating. Could you clarify what you meant in the part after you stood up and said the title of your presentation until the part where you said, ‘that’s all for today’? I had trouble understanding that section.” Without a forum like EOS, Peter and some of the other mission planners worried there would not be enough collaborative effort on Phoenix.

  “The risk is that they squirrel away their data,” Peter likes to say. It’s difficult to keep track of everything that’s going on in the SOC. There are so many aspects to the mission and its data, keeping tabs on them all is a full-time job.

  “It’s also difficult to force people to collaborate,” Peter says. EOS is a means to prevent the scientists who lead various groups, the co-investigators, from hiding the messy unclear results until they write up their formal papers on the matter. EOS should be the place where chemists find out about what the geologists think and the atmospheric guys can coordinate observations with the physicists. It’s all in the name of interdisciplinary science. All Peter asks is that everyone share what they’re up to with the group. Peter thinks it’s beneficial for everyone to understand the science thread pulling the whole mission. There will like be fewer conflicts later when resources get scarce and teams start to fight it out for their experiments.

  This idea of transparency isn’t universal and I’ve already seen small protests from those not in the same philosophical camp.

  “Getting credit is important if you’re in that business,” Nilton Renno says. How you get credit divides the Phoenix scientists into two ideological camps. The first group includes those who think sharing data and guessing is useful. The idea that information-sharing makes for better science is in line with the democratic spirit of a tax-funded mission. The second camp begs to differ.

  “Scientists get scooped all the time,” Mike Hecht says. Touchy-feely sharing sessions are anathema to these mission-hardened planetary academics—a recipe for embarrassing stories leaked to the press and your innovative ideas stolen. This second group thinks that since they’ve done the work, built the instruments and equipment, they should be rewarded with the time to look at the data and the results from their experiments without the fear that it’s going to be pilfered by science-scoundrels waiting in the wings. Although I’m inclined to agree with Peter and the first camp, mostly because I wouldn’t be here without his lofty notions of transparency, some of the scientists in the second group make a compelling argument.

  “There is almost no time on a mission like this, especially where everyone is doing double and triple duty, to do a lot of analysis. The work will take years,” Jim Whiteway, who leads the LIDAR team, tells me. “We spend a lot of time building these instruments. It’s only fair we get some time to do research in the lab. It’s generally bad science to put out random thoughts. These thoughts are better collected into a coherent story that you commit to and publish.”

  “Scientists aren’t used to being rushed,” Bill says. “It’s more a slow methodical approach.” But on Phoenix they only have a short window before the data goes public. That’s part o
f the contract NASA has with Peter Smith. Six months after the mission is declared over, the data sets become public domain. There’s limited time to get results before the competition comes wading in. Sharing results and data opens the pool to new thought, and new thought is good.

  The injustice that films like Armageddon or TV shows like CSI do is to convince us non-scientists that scientific discovery and problem solving happens on a tidy timeline. In the real world and on Mars, problems are not discovered, understood, and solved between the opening and ending credits. The “Eureka!” moments generally come after years of analytical work and following lots of false leads along the way. Since our time is short, EOS should lubricate the gears of discovery.

  When the sun sets on the lander, there will be no do-overs. Untested ideas or half-baked theories are encouraged. To avoid the inherent conflict baked into the process, these sessions are closed to everyone but the team and an occasional, announced guest. No one wants the media nosing around for crazy ideas about Mars at the EOS. I always sit at the back during EOS and never say a thing.

  “This should show that we already have enough evidence,” Tom Pike says, making his case that Phoenix has already discovered something wonderful and there’s no need to hide behind the coded language of “light-toned” material. “This is the trench on sols 20 and 21. We see two bits of the white material,” Tom says. The bits have little measurements on them. Tom shows how the two chunks shrunk over time. There aren’t many images in his flip book, so it’s a little shaky. To bolster his argument, Tom calculated the rate of shrinking.

  “They shrink by 2.5 mm a day, about 100 micrometers an hour,” he says. There is a lot of tricky math. When you get lost in these talks, it’s important to follow the inflection so you know when he’s getting close to making a conclusion.

  “This is the rate we would expect sublimation to occur: 1.6 cm to 1.1 cm,” Tom declares. He stands proud. The presentation makes it clear that Phoenix has observed ice on Mars. Case closed.

  “Ah, which ones are these?” Mark Lemmon asks, unconvinced. “It looks like there is an aspect ratio change. I think that one might be a left and the other a right image.”

  Lemmon suggests Tom did not prove there’s ice on Mars. Instead, he measured the “camera 1, camera 2 effect.” That’s not really a science term; it’s the Wayne’s World version of the parallax view. It’s when you look at the same thing from your left and right eye and it looks different. Try it. It’s fun. You can make the words jump around on the page. Camera 1 … camera 2. Anyway, the SSI is built the same way. That’s how it makes 3D images. But you can’t measure something on a picture if you use the left and then the right eye of the SSI camera on Phoenix. Mellon thinks that the melting that Pike sees is actually just different angles.

  “We need to be very careful about looking at the same time of day and image if we are to monitor over time,” Doug Ming says, shaking his head. He whispers something to a colleague seated next to him. Doug gets prickly in these meetings when he thinks someone is making a claim they can’t back.

  “Maybe there are some multi-spectral spots of these images?” Carol Stoker, who is a bit more understanding, asks. These images could provide evidence for or against the two-camera effect. Not that any of the comments matter. Luckily for Tom Pike, you don’t have to prove anything at the EOS meeting, just state your case for people to think about.

  “Thank you for listening,” he says and sits down. The grumbles persist for a bit.

  Sara Hammond stands up in the back of the room.

  “Can I make a short statement?” she asks. “Now I’m just the messenger, but there is a perception that the news is bad from Tucson … but we all know it’s not.” Sara says JPL is upset about the bad press Phoenix is getting. This probably has to do with the “First try finds no water” headlines that came out of yesterday’s press conference.

  “Please be more careful with statements that might be construed as negative,” she says. All the scientists underwent “media training” and Sara has helpfully tacked some of the key bullet points to her door. “There is no off-the-record” is right near the top.

  “We’re not just taking tourist photos!” Mike Hecht says in an outburst. He has a point. Even if he words it in a slightly misguided way. Tourist photos are one of the most important ways to connect people with the mission they’re funding. But that’s not his point. What he means is that good science takes time.

  “We need more time to make sense of what we have. The press conferences should be scheduled when we know more,” Heather Enos says in defense of the scientists.

  The situation is kind of confounding. It’s not the science team’s job to craft the story. They’re just supposed to do science and fight about results. Telling the group they’re mucking up their own story is certainly not much of a morale booster. Sara leaves. And the short-term planning session begins. There’s a long night of strategic planning if they’re going to get the hard stuff in TEGA any time soon.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE LOST DAY

  SOL 23

  CLIVE COOK SITS IN ASTG LOOKING ANNOYED. HIS COLLEAGUES twiddle their thumbs too. Seems as though something has gone wrong with Phoenix.

  “It didn’t work. You can quote me on that,” Clive says.

  Somehow yesterday’s plan failed. There was no TEGA high temperature run, no digging, and no atmospheric data collected. The details of the failure remain a mystery. Not just a mystery, but an international mystery. And since Clive is from the U.K. and works with the Canadians, he can’t say what exactly the mystery is. And no one is allowed to tell Clive, since his status as a foreigner puts him under the jurisdiction of the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), a federal law that restricts the export of military hardware. So even though he looks normal, Clive is an ITARd. Some people feel more comfortable saying “ITAR restricted.” Because of his ITAR status and the fact that no one will tell him what’s going on, we all infer that something is wrong with Phoenix’s “brain.”

  Clive works in Jim Whiteway’s lab in Toronto. Whiteway’s team at York University, along with the Canadian Space Agency, a company called OPTECH, and an engineering firm called MDA, built the LIDAR on the Phoenix weather station, MET. Since the MET team is mostly foreign nationals, they’re restricted in what they’re allowed to know about the spacecraft to protect national security. What does national security and military hardware have to do with our lovable little lander named Phoenix, you might ask? I could tell you, but I’ll have to see your passport first.

  To get to Mars or anywhere in space, you need to hitch a ride on a rocket and you need software to control things in space. The logic for creating ITAR goes something like this: since rockets carry thermonuclear weapons, robot arms, and general science junk equally well, the regulation lumps them together. Even if our intentions on Mars are peaceful, the “Man” doesn’t see it that way. The ITAR rules say that uncleared foreign nationals—“FN” is how they’re denoted on their security badges—are NOT allowed in flight hardware discussions. Specifically, the 1999 law transferred the regulation of harmless space activities from the Commerce Department to the State Department. It says no U.S. citizen can transmit any harmful information to non-U.S. citizens. “Heck to the FN scientists” is probably how they put it in the bill. It says all sorts of other stuff, too. The practical part for Phoenix is that every time you want to tell an FN a bit of information that might fall under ITAR, you need permission. Getting permission isn’t always easy. Some of the scientists have information-sharing agreements for some aspects of the mission, but these are narrow in scope. Since the ITAR regulators at JPL could face severe jail time if they violate the rule, they’re a cautious group. “Request not approved” is most likely the response you get when you ask if it’s okay to let the Canadians know what’s happening. Jail is a huge disincentive, eclipsing the spirit of cooperation by a long shot.

  It’s not just the social stigma of being an ITARd. This we
ll-intentioned rule leads to real problems. The ITAR rules even prevent the MET instrument—not just the scientists—from gaining access to parts of the spacecraft. The MET machinery isn’t allowed to turn itself on or off. It needs Phoenix to initiate the commands. The MET and its programmers don’t have access to commands like “MET on” or “MET off,” since that requires it to talk directly to the spacecraft. While building the MET, team members invested lots of time investigating strange results from a pressure sensor. Something was very wrong, but it didn’t make any logical sense.

  “They wouldn’t give us a layout of the lander deck,” Carlos Lange, a MET co-investigatory says. Although it’s not clear why that would need to be classified.

  “It’s a complicated rule,” Peter says. “They couldn’t tell them the interior contents of the electronics boxes without being in violation, and that caused some issues.” The result was the MET team didn’t know that there was a heater on the electronics board next to their sensor. Pressure and temperature are intimately connected, so any time the heater kicked on, their results went berserk. Luckily, they discovered the problem before launch, but the instrument was left with limited functionality.

  “I couldn’t take it anymore,” Carlos says. Instead of just drinking from the fire hose of frustration, Carlos devised a scheme to legally circumvent the regulation. Carlos is an outspoken and exuberant professor from the University of Alberta. He is tall and lanky with a heavy Brazilian accent. Every morning Carlos prepares his traditional mate tea from a giant sack of leaves and drinks from a carved wooden chalice and metal straw. Carlos discovered Phoenix after hitchhiking a ride from Nilton Renno at a science conference.

  “The rental cars were expensive and I heard Nilton speaking Portuguese, so I waited for him and asked for a ride,” Carlos says. His thrifty ways paid off. Nilton needed an enthusiastic and sharp scientist like Carlos to flesh out the team.