Martian Summer Read online

  Before Phoenix, remotely directed robotic spacecraft successfully reached Mars on five occasions. Viking I and II in the late 1970s, the Pathfinder in 1996, then the never-say-die rovers—still in operation—since 2003. No mission had yet ventured to the Martian arctic or brought a long shovel for digging into the surface. For a long time, planetary folk thought it was a big block of frozen carbon dioxide that rained out of the atmosphere and froze on the poles of the planet. Over time, it created huge scarps and ice sheets. Then at the University of Arizona, Bill Boynton, a smooth-headed, white-bearded scientist who races Porsches and leaves the top buttons on his collared shirts undone, discovered the north pole of Mars was loaded with hydrogen. That hydrogen was likely tangled up with oxygen in the familiar H2O configuration (hint: it’s water), suggesting that instead of tons of dry ice, there might be a giant frozen ocean below the surface of Mars. A giant ocean on Mars? That’s worth looking into. Soon after, NASA selected Peter’s lander project and Phoenix was born.

  THERE’S A SCHEDULE POSTED FOR THE START OF SOL 11, SHIFT 1. THAT’S today: sol 11. Sols are how you count days on Mars. We’ll get to why a day isn’t really a sol soon but, for now, a sol is a day and a day is a sol. Today, sol 11 is not the first day of the mission (hence the reason I’m starting on sol 11 and not sol 1.) It took a week to get my security badge, so I could not get into Mission Control until sol 11. First, Peter had to decide if I was up to the task of being the official chronicler of what is essentially his entire life’s work. Then they had to make my badge, and apparently that takes a bit of time as well

  It’s a big day for Phoenix. After ten sols of engineering check-outs, everything looks good. Phoenix is fully operational.

  There won’t be a ribbon cutting ceremony for the science phase of the mission (or my arrival), but hopefully there will be some ground breaking. Sadly, most of the media went home. Yesterday’s televised press conference will be the last one for a while. Still, this sol is momentous.

  The science phase of the mission doesn’t officially start until the first experiment. Bob Bonitz from the robot arm team drops his load in Bill Boynton’s TA. That’s science jargon for the RA putting dirt into TEGA’s thermal analyzer (TA). The TEGA oven then begins to decode Mars by sniffing out the various compounds that make up Martian dirt. In order for us to get to this one moment, a lot had to come together just so. Dr. Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun had to successfully invent modern rocketry. Einstein had to discover relativity. And the parents of Peter Hollingsworth Smith had to inspire him with some fantastic tales about reaching for the stars. The rest is details.

  ON MAY 25TH, 2008, TEN MONTHS AFTER LAUNCH, THE PHOENIX MARS Lander touched down on the arctic plains of the Martian north pole. The University of Arizona-Tucson is the host of this mission. It’s all happening at a big warehouse facility called the Science Operation Center. The SOC is Mission Control.

  The SOC is not a typical Mission Control. Since the first rocket launch back in 1950, Mission Control has been in Houston, Cape Canaveral or Pasadena—one of the NASA satellites. Luckily for Tucson (the city), Phoenix (the robot), and me (the human), this is not a typical mission. NASA tried something new. Peter Smith won a competitive bid after pitching the idea for this mission to NASA administrators. The University of Arizona, where Peter works, decided they would champion the cause and build Peter his own Mission Control once NASA gave the okay. Over the last few decades, the university developed its own mini space program. Hosting a Mars mission is a big break, a chance at real space legitimacy and the opportunity to become one of the leading space research facilities in the world.

  Peter was born and raised in Tucson. His father held a position at the UA—which he took after inventing the Yellow Fever Vaccine in Brazil and saving more than 100 million lives. Try living up to those expectations. The university took an old Archaeology building and outfitted it with state-of-the-art communications gear and built a little Mars sound stage. The University of Arizona-Tucson wants to make its mark as world-class ultra-premium space university while their native son leads the first successful freelance Mars mission. The SOC sits on the edge of an old Tucson neighborhood among the tall saguaro cacti, adobe homes, and some impressively seedy bars.

  LOOKING AT THE MOSTLY EMPTY DESKS AND GLOWING MONITORS GIVES me a chance to think about how crazy it is that I’m here. I’m about to spend my summer (almost) living on Mars. As a point of journalistic integrity, you should know that I don’t understand most of what’s happening around me here in Mission Control. I spent the last year learning everything possible, and that proved the bare minimum needed to not embarrass myself—at least not like the journalist who made the unfortunate mistake of asking Peter—during a press conference—what would happen to the astronauts at the end of the mission. (There are no astronauts, everyone is safe.)

  TODAY, IN MISSION CONTROL WE ARE 11 SOLS INTO A 90-SOL MISSION. Prints taken from the lander’s stereo camera are tacked to the walls. There are hints of possibility hidden in those images. Flashes of Mars porn titillating the minds of the bio-curious. These are the first ever images of Mars’ northern plains.

  They tell a story equally fascinating to the one that follows. Maybe instead of sneaking me into Mission Control, Peter Smith should have hired a famous curator to do a Metropolitan Museum of Art show about abstract Mars landscape photography. Fortunately for me, he chose a different path for his Martian story. To those unaccustomed to looking at Mars images, one thing is striking: they look just like deserts on Earth. These images are from the arctic regions of Mars and the parallels are amazing.

  Peter took his team on a Mars analogue expedition to Antarctica last summer. Mars scientists are always looking for places on Earth where they can camp out and play Mars for a few weeks. The dry valleys of Antarctica are some of their favorite playgrounds. The data can help calculate how difficult it might be to acquire soil or what strange and extreme forms of life can survive in these harsh climes.

  THE PHOENIX TEAM EXAMINED MARS-LIKE ENVIRONMENTS ON EARTH to improve the choices they would make during their Mars experiments—a dress rehearsal of sorts. Not perfect, but better than nothing. For instance, if you stroll through Mission Control and look closely at the images of the landscape tacked to the wall, you might notice row after row of gently rolling polygons crisscrossing through the otherwise bleak, rock-strewn vista.

  These polygons are, collectively, a signal that this mission just struck gold: Martian ice. Was Bill Boynton right about a giant frozen ocean trapped just a few centimeters below the surface? If his deduction proves true, Phoenix will scrape up this million-year-old permafrost with its robot arm and start to decode the planet’s history. The polygons we see on the wall seem just like the ones Peter studied on his trip to Antarctica.

  “We have to be patient for results, but I just can’t believe we landed on such a perfect spot,” Peter says after touchdown.

  The polygons on Earth form when the ice beneath them expands and contracts. It’s a warping effect from dust falling into the spaces created by the retreating ice. When the ice shrinks, cracks start to form. Bits of dirt are blown into the cracks and then temperatures drop and the ice refreezes and expands. When temperatures drop and the ice expands, there’s no room for the ice and warping occurs. Repeat over a couple hundred million years, and you get lovely rolling hummocks and troughs. Not as pretty as the rolling hills of Tuscany, but nicer than the pavement at the abandoned drive-in over on Roscoe Boulevard.

  THE PHOENIX MARS LANDER IS NOT GOING TO WIN ANY ROBOT BEAUTY pageants. Phoenix looks like a bloated, stationary Johnny 5 with a touch of Fetal Robot Alcohol Syndrome. Her scientific guts are all exposed on a bare three-legged scaffold of a body, yet her chunky metal cylinder of a head is where most of her magic happens. But it’s what’s on the inside that counts. And yet, the computer inside Phoenix isn’t even all that sophisticated. The smartphone in your pocket can do far more FLOPS (floating point operations per second) than the RA
D6000 chip that runs Phoenix. Not that this machine isn’t a wonder of modern engineering; it is. When Lockheed Martin and JPL built the original incarnation of the Phoenix body in the late 1990s, this was top-quality space hardware. It’s just more difficult than you think to upgrade space-certified hardware. Space certification requires more than the stamp of a Notary Public—and it costs millions of dollars. When you add new parts to a lander there are loads of hidden costs. Since Team Peter already blew through its cost-cap by about $30 million just to make this puppy fly, there was no room for bells or whistles. Imagine Peter’s embarrassment at the Explorer’s club when he had to explain why there wasn’t going to be an anemometer on board and the flash memory was limited to 100MB. Oh, dear. I hear they couldn’t even afford touch sensors for the robot arm!?

  Phoenix is a “green” lander. Sorta. Its body is recycled from the unused twin of Mars Polar Lander that crashed in 1999. That’s why it’s called Phoenix. It’s rising from the ashes; rebirth out of the ruins (not because we’re in Arizona). Peter liked the poetry of it all, “From ye ashes thy spacecraft shall riseth and seeketh thine Martian truth, and we shall call you Phoenix.” It’s what I imagine Peter said when he got the call from NASA telling him his mission had been accepted. But that might give you the wrong impression that Peter speaks like Jesus. He rarely does. His voice is more of a halting swagger with a hint of gravel and some avuncular overtones that are particularly notable when Peter explains some bit of science that’s captured his—and inevitably your—imagination.

  The imagineering done on Phoenix comes courtesy of the science payload—the scientific machinery it carries. This payload consists of six instruments designed to characterize the properties and makeup of the Martian environment. The Phoenix will use its robotic arm to dig up soil samples and run experiments to determine what’s in the ground and how it got there. The instruments range in complexity from a simple wind-measuring telltale to an extremely sensitive atomic force microscope. Some of the friendly scientists you’re about to meet described their instruments to help you better understand the little friend you will follow throughout these pages. The glazed-over mind-wandering feeling you get from reading about these instruments is just your brain making the leap to hyper speed. Don’t be alarmed.

  Robotic Arm (RA)

  The Phoenix Mars Lander is a dig and eat mission. In order to be a success, the lander has to break ground and scoop up some dirt. So they need a long digging arm for the task. The robot arm (RA) is just under eight feet long with an elbow joint in the middle and a bucket scoop on the end. Sticking out from the backside of the scoop is a circular rasp. Its job will be to acquire icy-soil samples if the team is lucky enough to find them.

  The arm reaches out over the lander, scoops up Mars dirt and then dumps it into the other science instruments. Needless to say, the RA engineers are all really good at that game where you try to pick up the stuffed animal with the claw. I suspect this talent was a critical factor in how they got their jobs in the first place.

  If you want to dig into the permafrost on Mars, why not bring an ice-coring machine instead of a digging arm? Funny I should ask. It is a good idea, a planetary scientist’s dream to be exact. The problem with bringing something like a huge coring device is, simply, weight. It’s simply difficult and expensive to get heavy things to Mars. We can estimate about five figures per pound of weight we bring along. You think the airlines baggage fees are excessive until you pay NASA an extra couple hundred grand for your carryon. Shovels and drills are far too heavy to bring on a budget-conscious mission like Phoenix, and so a delicate robot arm must be precisely engineered to perform a wide array of tasks with its little (and light) claw.

  Robotic Arm Camera (RAC)

  The RAC is attached to the RA just above the scoop. The instrument provides close-up, full-frontal color images of the Martian surface close to the ground, under the lander, or anywhere the RA can go. Its got all kinds of filters and scientific attachments to capture and make sense of extreme close-ups of dirt or whatever else Phoenix can dig up. I for one am hopeful for a secret decoder ring.

  Surface Stereo Imager (SSI)

  The SSI functions as the eyes of Phoenix. It takes the pretty postcard pictures you might see on the Internet. The design is based on Peter’s famous stereo-imager built for the Pathfinder mission. That was the first Mars camera to use a Charge Coupled Device (CCD) like you’d find on your digital camera at home. Since then, it’s had a few upgrades but it’s still your classic Mars imager. For eight to ten million space bucks, Peter will build you one too. The SSI has precisely manufactured glass lenses and flawless resolution. Situated atop a large mast, SSI will provide images at a height of up to two meters above the ground, roughly the height of a “tall” person. The two lenses on SSI simulate the human eye, creating three-dimensional stereo vision. It’s loaded with all kinds of filters to create images in various regions of the light spectrum. These filters will help the team figure out what they’re looking at, whether the reflective object they see might be ice or just some shiny bits of rock.

  Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA)

  MECA is made up of four instruments: a wet chemistry lab, two microscopes, and a conductivity probe. The first real chemistry work done on Mars involves dissolving small amounts of Mars dirt in water—brought from Earth—with the unironically-named wet chemistry lab (WCL) to determine the pH, what types of minerals are present, and their conductivity. MECA contains four single-use WCL beakers, each of which accepts one sample of Martian mud. Phoenix’s RA will deliver a small sample to a beaker, then a pre-warmed and calibrated soaking solution is added. The optical and atomic-force microscopes complement MECA’s wet chemistry experiments. With images from these microscopes, scientists will examine the fine detail structure of soil and water ice samples. Who knows what else they might see? MECA’s thermal and electrical conductivity probe is attached at the scoop joint, where the scoop meets the arm of the RA. The probe has four small spikes that can be pressed directly into the ground. And this probe can read temperature and humidity of the air and measure the temperature and conductivity of the soil.

  Thermal Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA)

  TEGA is a combination high-temperature furnace and mass spectrometer instrument used to analyze Martian ice and soil samples. Basically, it’s a robotic nose. The instrument drives off gas that the sensors inside can “sniff” at various temperatures. Magic happens. It works like this: the robotic arm delivers samples to a hopper designed to feed a small amount of dirt and ice into eight tiny ovens, each one intended for a single use. Once received and sealed in an oven, the sample cooking begins. The engineers carefully increase the temperature at a constant rate, and closely monitor the power needed to heat the sample. This process, called “scanning calorimetry,” shows the transition of the sample as it decomposes into its gassy components. The gas that’s released is passed on to the mass spectrometer for analysis. This is information is vital to understanding the chemical makeup of the soil and ice.

  Meteorological Station (MET)

  MET will record the daily weather of the Martian northern plains. Using temperature and pressure sensors and a crazy first-time-on-Mars laser beam light detection and ranging (LIDAR) instrument, MET watches the weather. Every lander worth its salt should have a laser beam. The MET’s LIDAR works sort of like RADAR, using powerful laser light pulses rather than radio waves. The LIDAR transmits light vertically into the atmosphere. This light is then reflected off dust and ice particles. The instrument collects and analyzes the light to reveal information about the size of atmospheric particles and their location. MET provides information on the current state of the polar atmosphere as well as how water is cycled between the solid and gas phases in the Martian arctic.

  These aren’t the most sophisticated instruments technology has to offer. They are simply some of the most sophisticated instruments you can safely get to Mars for under a billion dollars. They we
re carefully designed and tested to squeeze stellar results from a meager space budget and countless restrictions. Constructing instruments for Mars presents all kinds of challenges that terrestrial technology simply doesn’t have to deal with. It’s a challenge that’s hard to appreciate until highly calibrated sensors give odd readings or valves freeze open 200 million miles from home. Sensitive lab gear is never meant to be strapped on the cone of a missile, irradiated for months on end, and then slammed onto the surface of a dusty cold place. It’s meant for a sterile, temperature-controlled lab and gentlemen who wear white coats.

  THE CLOCK ON THE WALL IN THE SOC READS 13:56 LOCAL SOLAR TIME, Mars. It’s 22:30 Local Tucson Time, Earth. This is it! My first day on Mars. I hope the kids are nice and no one steals my milk money. Each sol starts with a kickoff meeting, a short assessment of what’s happening with Phoenix that given day. There are quick updates from key team members on the lander’s status. The team reviews the plan the Phoenix just finished on Mars and looks for issues with the instruments, data transfers, the weather, and any general health or safety concerns. Today, it’s time to talk about our very first experiment. The scoop.

  Scientists file in, wish each other “Good morning,” “Good afternoon,” or “Good evening.” Basically no one has any clue what the proper office banter should be. All bets are off at the water cooler, too. It’s innocuous social norm chaos. Even though it’s night on Earth, it’s early afternoon on Mars. And for those of us still getting used to Mars time, we’re just starting our days. It’s confusing and disorienting. Still it’s charming to see people eat ice cream—as many are today—and offer perfunctory greetings. (Free ice cream—and not the dry chalky astronaut variety kiddies whine for at space museums and then kick to the curb when they realize that freeze drying actually removes all the great things about ice cream, namely ice and cream—is one of the perks of life in Mission Control. Truth be told, ice cream practically fuels the mission. And has done so on past Mars explorations. Why? The tradition remains one of the true Mars mysteries.) Chit-chat turns quickly to “the scoop.” Not the ice cream variety. It’s time to get on my eavesdropping ears.