Martian Summer Read online

  “I think we got what we came for,” he says in conclusion.

  “nbc nightly news is coming,” one of the ssi camera engineers says. The next morning, Phoenix is the top national news story. Sara Hammond and her team schedule a press conference. “Phoenix finds ice” is the big Internet story from Gizmodo.com to MSN; it’s even number one on everyone’s favorite news aggregator/procrastination mecca, reddit.com.

  There’s a local news crew setting up an interview when I get into the SOC. One of the mission managers, Dave Spencer, says how excited he is about the findings. The NBC cameraman frames the shot with me in the background. I’m on TV typing this very sentence … and that makes me happy. Today feels like success.

  On Mars, Phoenix digs into Rosy Red to collect a sample for the next TEGA delivery. We won’t know the results until later.

  “Please cross your fingers,” Ray says. “Today, we de-lump and move ahead.” By this time next week, we might know what that mysterious dark material is. Great discovery is imminent.

  PART II

  RED PLANET

  BLUES

  DATE: JUNE 26, 2008

  “PHOENIX POISED TO DELIVER SAMPLE FOR WET CHEMISTRY,” reads the June 23rd press release. MECA works and it’s about to do its first experiment. Mike, Sam, Suzanne, and the rest of the MECA team are poised for amazing results. The follow-up press release on June 25th reports on MECA’s progress, “Phoenix Mars Lander Puts Soil in Chemistry Lab, Team Discusses Next Steps.” The MECA team gets their moment to shine. Buzzing in and out of the MECA office, they analyze and discuss how they might untangle the strange Martian chemistry. What new and amazing things have they found? They’re not saying just yet.

  The happy headlines hide an issue. Where’s TEGA? Weren’t we on the path to another delivery just a few sols ago? These scant and lumpy press releases makes it tough for the average Phoenix fan to know what’s happening in the mission. Buried in the second-to-last paragraph, there are a few troubling lines. Something’s wrong with our beloved TEGA.

  “Four days of vibration eventually succeeded at getting the soil through the screen. However, engineers believe the use of a motor to create the vibration may also have caused a short circuit in wiring near that oven. Concern about triggering other short circuits has prompted the Phoenix team to be cautious about the use of other TEGA cells,” the press release says.

  Other short circuits? Cautious? That sounds like a big deal. “Concern” over using the other TEGA cells should cause some worry. The official updates come in fits and starts. The mission schedules a teleconference to clarify things. We’ve finished nearly a third of the Phoenix mission. There’s lots to talk about. Let’s dial in.

  “Thank you very much. Hello, everybody,” Jane Platt, the head of PR for JPL, says. “Welcome to a Phoenix Mars Lander media telecom for Thursday, June 26th… . And, today, we have some really intriguing science results that we’ll get to in just a moment when we switch to the scientists at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I do want to also let you know that we have Phoenix project manager Barry Goldstein of JPL here with us today. And, he’ll be available to answer any engineering questions about the mission. We’re going to switch right now to the scientists at the University of Arizona. And Sara Hammond is going to introduce them. Sara?”

  “Hello from Tucson, everyone,” Sara says. She introduces Bill but she uses the more formal William Boynton and spells his name for the reporters B-O-Y-N-T-O-N. And says he’s co-investigator and lead for the Evolved Gas Analyzer from the University of Arizona. She introduces Sam Kounaves, the wet chemistry lab lead from Tufts University; then Mike Hecht, the lead for the MECA instrument, the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Connectivity Analyzer from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And finally Leslie Tamppari, the Phoenix project scientist from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Bill goes first.

  “Okay. Thank you, Sara,” Bill says. “The data coming out of the instrument is just spectacular,” he says. Bill describes how they’re seeing carbon dioxide and water vapor but no ice in the first sample they analyzed. This is expected, since the sample sat around for a while and any ice would sublimate—turn to vapor—before it had a chance to get into TEGA.

  Bill says it’ll be a few weeks before they can say anything more, but that there are lots of interesting things.

  “What we can say now is that this soil clearly has interacted with water in the past,” Bill says. Bill finishes his short statement without any mention of the TEGA issues in the press release.

  Mike and Sam describe MECA’s first chemistry results. With all kinds of caveats and “This is very preliminary” type statements, they describe what they found. The first soluble chemistry experiments on Mars are a big success.

  “Over time, I’ve come to the conclusion that the amazing thing about Mars is not that it’s an alien world, but that in many aspects, like mineralogy, it’s very much like Earth,” Sam says. Then in a humorous and potentially career-defining move, Sam tells the press that the Martian regolith is similar to what you might find in your back yard.

  “You might be able to grow asparagus very well, but probably not strawberries,” he says, as the Martian soil has lots of nutrient-rich minerals and is slightly alkaline. Everyone loves this. Even the conspiracy-theory bloggers hail it as a great quote. The next day’s Times of London headline reads, “Ground Control to Farmer Tom.” Sam will now be known as the asparagus guy. I wonder if he has regrets.

  Leslie explains there are two trenches so far. The focus of the mission will turn to the second trench in the Wonderland area, “which is in a polygon center,” she says. Leslie gives a brief summation of the samples and the work that been done so far.

  “To date, in our first 30 sols, we’ve not only accomplished these first samples. But we’ve also completed 55 percent of our true color panorama of the landing site.” That’s more than nine hundred images. And there are a lot more to come.

  Of course, they also gathered lots of atmospheric data.

  “We take data almost every day. So we’re learning a lot about the atmospheric science.”

  Thanks, Leslie.

  There’s a little more summarizing; then Jane Platt opens the phone lines to questions.

  “Hi, thanks. Can you hear me this time okay?” Craig Covault from Aviation Week asks.

  Yes, we can.

  “All right. This is for Bill Boynton and perhaps Barry as well there at JPL,” he says.

  Okay, go ahead.

  “Yesterday’s release discussed additional factors relative to the doors on TEGA. And I’d like you to take just a moment, to discuss that a little bit and whether there’s—I got the impression there was more than one door involved—possibly involved. It’s the same kind of problem. And, if so, how did you manage to launch with that kind of latent situation?” he asks.

  Craig wants to know why the doors aren’t opening all the way. But what I want to know about is the electrical short. Bill says he’s going to let Barry handle the questions.

  “Okay. Hi, Craig. How are you?” Barry asks. Barry and Craig are on a first-name basis. Craig is a veteran reporter; one of the most respected according to his colleagues at Aviation Week & Space Technology. Av Week, as insiders call it, is an important aerospace trade publication—more important than Engineer Aficionado or Vogue Avionics. The Phoenix team was proud as peacocks—err—phoenixes to get their mission on the cover after landing. It was a very tasteful full-color spread.

  “Okay. Yeah, let me clarify this a little bit,” Barry says. “We have been working—ever since the first door opening—to try to find out what the problem was. If you recall, the first cell that we opened had one side open perfectly, and the other side was hung up at approximately 30 degrees.

  “When we opened door number five, the next one, we noticed that the phenomena of one of the doors was actually on both of the doors on door number five. So recent investigation has shown that there’s a mechanical interference that affects the inner doors
of the TEGA. So if you think of the four cells on either side, there is one door on each side. Each of the doors on the end will be fine. The other doors will be hung up at approximately 30 degrees.” This is technical language for “the doors are stuck.” The protective door that covers TEGA was supposed roll back like an old-timey sardine can once Phoenix landed safely on the ground. This protective barrier would retract and the TEGA doors would be free to open. But the last roll didn’t wind back all the way and there’s a little piece of metal that’s preventing the TEGA from opening all the way. And it’s going to be much harder to put dirt in the ovens.

  Not to worry. Barry says the RA team developed a technique to deliver to the partially opened doors and they worked through the problem.

  “And, a quick follow-up there,” Craig says. “How actually did you launch with a situation like this, that was not discovered on the ground?”

  “Craig, we’re still looking into that,” Barry says. To some of the engineers who sit a bit lower down on great engineering totem, there’s no need to look any further: a machining error caused the problem. It’s a kind of embarrassing oops, a consequence of limited time and money. It was another design flaw inherited from the Polar Lander. They tried to fix the problem, but the contractor used the wrong blueprint to fabricate a steel guide rail that opens the TEGA doors. It ended up being one-hundredth of an inch too long. When it happened, they discovered the problem and sent the part to be fixed. Unfortunately, the shop used the same faulty blueprint to re-machine the part. And since TEGA was already behind schedule—it was the last instrument to be bolted on the lander—there was a risk of missing the delivery. Because of the time crunch, no one measured it before it was attached. It looked fine on visual inspection but now that it’s been retracted on Mars, there’s just a tiny scoonch, one-hundredth an inch, blocking the port doors from opening. It’s a tough story to explain to the press. No one wants to be responsible for a mistake like that. Still it’s a bit annoying that they don’t address it head-on. Face the risk. But I digress. We want to know about the short first and foremost.

  Bruce Moomaw from Astronomy Magazine asks the next question.

  “On last night’s release, there was a reference to some problems associated with the vibrating screen on oven number five,” he finally says. Could you give us any more details on that?”

  “What we found was when we opened the doors to cell number five,” Barry says, “the current draw was indicating that we probably had a short circuit—generated by heat. So that was the theory that the team went on to investigate. And we ran a diagnostic check on the vehicle that fairly certainly can, uh, confirm that.”

  There are few follow-ups and Barry describes the short discovery in a bit more detail and how they are on top of it. So not to worry. That’s not too enlightening. But for the moment, I guess it puts our fragile minds at ease regarding the future of the mission.

  Then we shift away from the engineering issues. A reporter asks Bill if they’re “definitely excluding organics?” He’d like him to confirm that “You did not find any organic material and any carbonates?” I think it’s the same negative guy from the “No water on the first try” episode back in those heady drug-fueled days early in the mission.

  “Actually at this point, we can’t really either include or exclude organics,” Bill says. There’s still a lot of work to do before then. But stay tuned because they’ll get there. The first third of the mission is over, and we’re on our way to discovering more great things.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I, FOR ONE, WELCOME OUR NASA OVERLORDS

  SOL 36

  IT’S JULY 1ST. CARLOS LANGE STANDS ON A DESK AND TACKS A Canadian flag to the atmospheric science theme group’s work space.

  “It’s Canada day!” he says in his Brazilian accent. Carlos selected a sol quote:

  God bless America, but God help

  Canada put up with them.

  —ANON

  Everyone seems to be in a good mood. Data analysis and discovery keep the MECA team busy. They hide out in their little lab or sit in their office and argue. Mike Hecht and Sam Kounaves, usually quite stoic, look almost giddy when they walk through the halls. Since the press conference, they haven’t said much more. They’re not divulging what exactly gives them the giggles—they’re a tight-lipped bunch. Still, the initial measurements of pH and a surprisingly Earth-like chemistry of the regolith puts smiles on our faces. A little oxidation-reduction is all a scientist needs to feel new.

  The MECA team is not the only group making progress. There’s good stuff happening everywhere. The LIDAR team on MET finally gets some data to crunch. LIDAR, if you recall, shoots a powerful laser beam into the sky—Pew! Pew! Pew!—and then measures the light scatter that bounces off the atmosphere. They use a technique similar to RADAR to chart what is happening in the arctic atmosphere. Yestersol, the Met and LIDAR did an experiment where they fired their laser at the relay orbiters to conduct simultaneous measurements of the atmosphere. The atmospheric team worked with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Odyssey satellites currently orbiting Mars in order to conduct simultaneous measurements from the ground and space. These coordinated efforts sharpen the climate modeling capabilities of the scientists. This is a key part of the mission: understand climate change on Mars. Because Mars doesn’t have an ocean, which would create all kinds of complicated whether phenomena that are unpredictable, it’s easier to build climate models. We already know that several million years ago Mars experienced dramatic climate change. But we don’t know a lot about what things were like before that. So maybe, just maybe, understanding Mars’s climate might one day—hopefully, maybe, possibly—keep our blue wet planet from looking like this red dry one.

  It’s time for TEGA to get back in the swing of things and shake off the sticky-soil and tented-door problems. The RA team thinks they’ve just acquired a nearly perfect sample for TEGA. They practically glow with pride.

  The sample from the Wonderland site is in a trench just called Snow White—not to be confused with Snow Queen, which is under the lander. The sample comes from the ice-soil boundary that the geologists, chemists, and nearly everyone else believe is the most dynamic.

  “When we wrote the proposal, this was the sample we had in mind,” Mike Mellon says. It’s the mostly likely to have organic material and other interesting mysteries that aren’t as obvious from the surface samples. Mars conventional wisdom says that the harsh UV rays from the sun alter the chemistry and make everything kind of boring. At the ice-soil boundary, the dirt is insulated from these harmful effects, and can possibly yield some amazing results.

  Rosy Red is the name of the sample the RA team just acquired. After a painstakingly long night of writing robot arm code, the RA team is wearing big smiles.

  “It’s perfect,” Ashitey tells me. “Exactly what they asked for.”

  Vicky Hipkin takes us through a breezy kickoff. The flash-memory anomaly is nearly solved. They’re making progress and they’re at about 80% capacity. The RA team mastered dirt acquisition obtaining the Rosy Red sample for TEGA, and the instruments are all performing well.

  “How about a weather report from Palle?” Vicky asks.

  “No major changes. No storms,” Palle replies.

  “You’re going to surprise us one of these days, Palle,” Vicky says.

  “I doubt it,” Palle says.

  “CAN EVERYONE PLEASE GET TOGETHER FOR AN ANNOUNCEMENT?” Peter asks. It’s really a statement. He isn’t smiling or looking too enthusiastic. He waits for the SSI, RA, RAC, and mission management offices to empty. He wants everyone to hear this.

  “Mike Griffin had a discussion with Ed Weiler,” Peter says. Mike Griffin is the head of NASA, appointed by the President, and Ed Weiler leads NASA’s science program.

  Peter pauses for a moment.

  “So now we have a directive from NASA. We can’t take another sample until we get a sample with ice in it. Now this probably came all the way down from [Pr
esident G. W.] Bush,” Peter says sarcastically. The President wants in on the Mars action? Doug Ming frowns. Mike Mellon folds his arms. Confused and angry looks ping-pong around the SOC.

  Why would the head of NASA tell Peter what to do? This is a direct order to stop the mission and not proceed until they put ice in TEGA. Peter says they are not interested in debate.

  The short circuit on TEGA is not a minor problem. A JPL team of experts—a special group known as a tiger team—looked at the electrical current flowing and decided the entire instrument was at risk of failing. The team determined that the next sample could be the last: total instrument failure. A failed instrument would reflect the whole Mars program poorly in the press, and NASA administrators have made an executive decision. NASA wants Phoenix to do everything possible to ensure that this sample, possibly the last, has ice in it. That way, they can declare success even if the instrument fails.

  “Headquarters says ‘follow the water’ is the number one strategy. So even though we have a great sample, there’s probably no water in it, or at least, a very low probability. I think it’s unprecedented that a head of NASA would tell a P.I. which sample he should take. I was going to resign over this. But I can’t give up on everyone that easily,” Peter says.

  The SOC audience starts to grumble. I thought we’d just proved there was ice last week. Why do we need to do it again?

  “We did discover ice, lots of people have discovered ice,” Bill Boynton tells me, making it all the more confusing. The images taken with the filters of the SSI camera offer one kind of proof. The scientists use these filtered images to measure the spectral properties of the material they’re looking at. This means that the light coming off the material indicates that it’s ice. Still, that’s not enough. They brought along their TEGA and they want ice inside TEGA. Using all the fun hardware they brought is how you prove it’s all working like you expected.