Martian Summer Read online

  Standing at the front of the room for today’s sol kickoff is Joel Krajewski, the Surface Phase leader for the mission. Peter ambles into the room. He looks like he just woke up.

  “Good morning,” Joel says to Peter and the assembled team. Joel is in charge of systems engineering for the surface phase of the Mars mission. Let me tell you, he’s not your average Joel. He has a very engaging demeanor. When you’re one-on-one, it’s like you’re talking to the engineer version of a Hollywood producer. He’s got the salt and pepper hair, closely cropped beard, and height to match L.A.’s slickest. Just replace the Prada loafers with socks and sandals. He might have been awake for 30 hours and currently be thinking about how to save Phoenix from impending doom, but he makes you feel like what you’re saying is really important. It’s a good quality to have when you have to herd sleep-deprived scientists all day. He is part of the Jet Propulsion Lab’s senior mission management team. He developed the process that brought together and trained this consortium of brilliant scientific minds.

  Krajewski’s team must inspire the engineers on Phoenix to execute the science vision without destroying the lander. He’s the underwriter for scientific harmony. Getting team members from government, industry, and academia to play nice is crucial to the success of the mission. There is one overriding and constant source of tension: engineers who want to protect the spacecraft pitted against scientists who want to push the limits and see what the lander can do. This is a kamikaze robot mission. In training for the mission, Joel and his team had to figure out how they could get the team to eschew conflict and harness this creative tension to get the work done.

  Putting everyone under near-impossible conditions of stress so they bond over the common hardship is a staple Jet Propulsion Lab management technique. Why not try it at your next shareholder meeting? Krajewski’s team of systems engineers has spent years thinking about just these sorts of Martian planning problems. I won’t pop-psychologize at this point, but rest assured I’m making mental notes about the effectiveness of this exercise in promoting team chemistry (no pun intended).

  PLANNING COMPLICATED TASKS IS ALWAYS HARD. MARS PLANNING IS particularly complicated because Phoenix does not operate in real time.

  “The long delay complicates things,” Joel says. A sol-long feedback loop turns the simple act of digging some dirt into a daily drama. Scientists and engineers act out this epic in several acts over the course of 15-18 hour sols. It’s the weirdest reality series you will never see on TV—a bizarre mash-up of NOVA and The Office produced by an army of scientists and engineers.

  Mars is so far away that direct control of the lander is, for all practical purposes, impossible. Here’s why:

  It takes about 15 minutes for a message to reach Mars from Earth. Traveling at the speed of light (299,792,458 m/s), it goes to Mars, which, depending on where it is in orbit, is about 75,000,000 to 375,000,000 kilometers away. Now do some math: Divide, carry the one, convert to minutes, and voila! 15 minutes.

  “You can think about it taking eight light minutes for a message to 150,000,000 kilometers—that’s about the distance to the sun. Mars is about half as far again. Well, a little less. So that’s 15 minutes,” Peter says. The signal has to come back too; so multiply by two and you get 30 minutes round trip. That’s a long time to wait when you need to talk with your lander right now. Try playing Dig Dug on a thirty-minute delay and you’ll realize that it is impossible. Instead of trying this extreme Atari approach, Mission Control engineers rely on uploading an entire day’s sequence and then waiting for the lander to give it a go and report back. The lander sends reports and incremental status updates through a satellite relay.

  “Don’t forget that the satellite relay adds another one to two hours delay; that really kills us,” Peter says while he draws me a picture of Earth’s orbit and a message-relay diagram. “Phoenix can’t message the Earth directly.”

  Planning the lander’s whole day in advance is a tough pill to swallow for even the most mission-hardened engineers. Unending planning debates are often at the heart of mission dyspepsia. Since almost everything on Mars falls under the category of “First Time Ever,” you enter a lot of situations blind and grasp for something familiar to help you analyze the situation and create a plan for your waiting lander. The lander needs a steady diet of plans, one a day, day after day. Often there’s just not enough time to really understand the situation before moving on to the plan for the next day. That explains the current structure of planning and hoping. You plan for a sol. Wait. Hope you made good choices. Get results. Re-plan. Re-hope. Eventually you start to understand.

  The zig-zagging uneven nature of planning can make it hard to stay connected to what day it is when it takes so long to get results and then adjust your course. I would liken it to the dissociative effects of taking too much cough syrup. It seems like the right idea but it’s really disorienting (and not that much fun).

  You don’t just show up at a Mars mission and go to work. Organizing the personnel and procedures for conducting planetary expeditions requires years of training. There should probably be an entire Columbia Business School curriculum on Mars management. (And Joel K. should run it.) Joel and his team wrote the “How to Operate your New Mars Lander” Manual and then trained the scientists how best to use their new toy. What should be a two-year course was abbreviated for busy scientists. Still, the training missions they did provide in the year before launch were just enough to make it work. These training/test sessions were required by NASA to show that it was possible to operate Phoenix effectively.

  “When we first built the planning system, it took us about two months to execute a single sol’s worth of work,” Joel says. “By landing day, they shaved it down from about 200:1 to 1:1—well, on most days.”

  Getting brilliant and detail-oriented planetary scientists to work together and quickly is a constant challenge. Even with training sessions, the daily schedule requires an impossible amount of work. Joel resorted to tricks in order to keep pushing forward in spite of uncertainty and imperfect information. There’s no Kobayashi Maru, as fans of Captain James T. Kirk might imagine. Still there is some pretty brilliant stuff, like the 80% rule. This clever ruse offers the detail-oriented engineer a way to bypass his or her own perfection bias. If an engineer has a complicated task—digging to a precise depth or taking a difficult series of photos—and completing the task seems probable but not necessarily certain, they’re supposed to invoke the 80% rule. The rule lets engineers say they are willing to proceed with 80% certainty. They don’t have to put their credibility on the line, just be reasonably sure they can complete a task. Why would you need something like that? Because all these hyper-smart people tend to over-scrutinize. Achieving perfection in the face of confusing or conflicting results can take too long. When you don’t have a lot of time, but a lot of difficult operations, this is a problem. It can cripple your mission.

  “Whenever they ran into some uncertainty, they’d take too long before coming up with a new plan,” Joel says. With the 80% rule engineers give themselves permission to be wrong—even though they’re mostly right. “It was key in speeding up a timeline that got bogged down in the desire to do things perfectly.”

  ONCE HE WELCOMES EVERYONE BACK TO WORK ON MARS, JOEL HANDS things over to the engineer seated to his right. He’s tall and unshaven. He looks a little rumpled sitting in the too-small plastic folding chair. The chair is labeled “TDL, Tactical Downlink Lead.” There are 18 such folding chairs, all with labels like TDL, or MET, or CSTG. Acronyms are a Mission Control dialect. First, you despise them for their obfuscation, then they’re cute and funny. A tactical downlink lead (TDL) tracks the millions of data packets Phoenix sends to Earth each day. If something goes wrong, or data packets that carry Phoenix’s instructions are missing, it’s the TDL’s job to track them down.

  Today’s TDL, the tall guy, squished into his folding chair, is an engineer named Jim Chase.

  “All data was returned, al
though some non-critical data will need to be re-transmitted,” Chase says as part of his comprehensive and highly technical data report. He fumbles with his papers as he talks about what data goes where.

  Seated near Peter at the opposite end of the conference table in the downlink room of Mission Control is the representative from the spacecraft team. He gives his morning report. It’s a kind of nonsensical list of acronyms that I hurriedly look up in my acronym dictionary. (Yes, this exists, and I love it.) This is genuine space talk. No flim-flam. It’s the talk we came for.

  “Blah blah subsystems … channelized telemetry … something … block validation … ISAs … ISEs,” the spacecraft man says. Even if we can’t understand a thing, it’s perfect. At the end of the engineer’s report there’s one statement in plain English.

  “The spacecraft is healthy,” he says. Phew.

  “Is there a weather report?” Joel asks. Palle Gunnlaugsson, an Icelander on the atmospheric team, is today’s Mars weatherman. He hasn’t got any smiling suns or high and low pressure systems moving in from the north. That’s not really Palle’s style. He’s a young, corpulent Viking who hangs out in dive bars and chain-smokes. He also hand-wove the Kevlar strands on the Phoenix telltale, similar to the fluttering strings you might find on a sailboat, and used on Mars as a clever wind-measuring device. It’s comforting to know we’ve got Viking tradition with us on our trek. Palle reports that everything is the “same as yesterday.”

  “How was that?” asks Krajewski.

  “Same as the day before,” Palle says with a faint smile. Icelandic humor, like the Mars climate, is very dry.

  “Okay, let’s break. Data will flow shortly. I’ll see you all back at midpoint,” Joel says. Once dismissed from kickoff, it’s time to review tomorrow’s activities. There’s a little guesswork involved. The team works around the assumption that yestersol—that’s not a joke, that’s really how they say yesterday on Mars—Phoenix dug its first little trench and scooped up a sample. For all our scoop and sample talk, there is no hard evidence that “RA Acquire Sample with RAC Doc” actually worked. We must wait until the data downlink; this is when the process where we download data from Mars (and conveniently, the name of the room we stand in) begins. Any moment now the lander will call home and send its bits through the DSN (Deep Space Network) and into the SOC. Then images from the SSI and RAC will tell us if our dirt is safely tucked away in the back of the RA scoop.

  “Please look out for scoop images,” Joel says as the teams head off to their offices and desks. As if he has to remind them.

  Break time. Now I’m supposed to put on my fedora with a badge that says “cub reporter” and unlock the secrets of the mission.

  Unfortunately, everyone seems to disappear the minute the meeting ends. Or put their noses down at their desks, making it clear this isn’t question time. There doesn’t seem to be a hot scoop to be found anywhere, so I get some coffee and read some Martian literature in the kitchen.

  LIVING IN MISSION CONTROL IS EVEN MORE BIZARRE THAN YOU MIGHT think. Both the mechanics of Mars and the extreme delay communicating with the lander contribute to a wacky sol schedule. One of the quirks of the Mars planning schedule is that it means working on Mars time. Mars does not have an ordinary 24-hour day. It has an extraordinary 24 hour, 40 minute day. We work the Mars night shift coming into Mission Control just as the day ends on Mars. The scientists build a plan while the lander “sleeps” and then upload it before the new sol.

  What time does lunch start if you begin work at midnight? Today, I brought a cheese-and-mustard sandwich for lunch. But if I eat my sandwich now, it could be tough to find food at 3:00 a.m. if I have to—gasp—step out of Mission Control. The whole idea of living on Mars time is ludicrous. Working on Mars time isn’t like being in a different time zone. No, it’s much worse.

  First, a little background. A “day” is how long a planet takes to complete a rotation on its own axis. For the Earth, that’s 24 hours (by definition). Mars, however, spins a little slower, which means it takes slightly longer to complete the rotation. Consequently, Mars does not have “days.” You already knew that, though. Here we have our “sols,” short for solar day. The solar day is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds—about 39.5 minutes longer than an Earth day. This isn’t a concern for most Earthlings, unless you’re part of the .0000022% of the population who want to work nights on Mars.

  If you’re on Earth and you change time zones, it upsets your circadian rhythms and you feel miserable. Jet lag isn’t just an annoyance from sitting on a plane. There are physiological effects from monkeying with your circadian rhythms. These rhythms regulate hunger, sleepiness, hormone release, and body temperature. When out of synch with each other and the sun, you feel jet lag. When you fly across the Atlantic, your sleep is disrupted and you feel a little groggy while your body realigns itself. What if your body can’t readjust? Working on Mars time is essentially like changing time zones every day. You can never adjust; and you never get used to it. Instead you fall farther and farther into a sleep deficit. Your changing sleep cycle results in physiological changes; the hunger and hormone cycles go cockeyed and madness ensues. In the short term, you get cranky; after a month or so, your endocrine system starts to misfire, and, if you keep pressing past these stages, you go insane. It’s bad for you to live on Mars time. Thankfully, we’ll only subject ourselves to it for three months. Any longer and Martian Summer would end like The Shining.

  In order to keep track of the Mars day, you have to map a 24-hour, 39-minute clock to a 24-hour Earth clock. Feel free to use a calculator for this section. You need to shave 40 minutes off each day to keep in synch. Practically speaking, if today you’re operating on Mars time and go to work at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST), tomorrow you’ll go at 10:39:30 a.m. PST. Every 36 days, you’re back at 10:00 a.m. PST—but you’ve lost an entire day in the process.

  It’s like the old adage “Fall back, Mars ahead … 39.5 minutes.” You’re not familiar? To keep you on track, there are several clocks in the SOC that denote Mars time (Local Solar), Local time (Tucson Standard), and UTC (Coordinated Universal Time, like Greenwich Mean Time for Intergalactic Scientists).

  While you gain forty minutes to sleep in every day, you get to spend them feeling paradoxically sleep-deprived and alternately apathetic and/or anxious. One fun outcome occurs when your endocrine system starts to sputter from perpetual jet lag. The flow of adrenaline and other hormones is stunted and the world around you becomes gray and monotone. You care less and react slower. It’s a condition described to me by one of the psychologists from the counter-fatigue group as “flat affect.”

  “Oh … looks like my house is on fire,” Edna Fiedler drones in a monotone to show me what’s to come. There’s a whole group here studying us guinea pigs for these effects. They’ll monitor our descent into madness with the hope they can prevent future Mars scientists from succumbing to the same fate. For research purposes, many of the scientists opted to pee in a cup every day. So if you see lots of folks carrying their own urine around, don’t be alarmed. That’s not part of the madness, it’s just science.

  One of the NASA shrinks looking after us is Walter Sipes. He is responsible for the mental health of NASA astronauts on the International Space Station. Sipes and his wife, Edna Fiedler, a Harvard psychologist, help those working on Mars time not go nuts and destroy the spacecraft. I’m curious if this will cause any of us to drive cross-country in diaper-wearing revenge-fueled rage. (If you’re not familiar with that astronaut adventure, you might want to Google it.) In an effort to appear civil and professional, I don’t ask Walter or Edna about that particular incident, but I regret it.

  Apart from feeling crappy, it’s really annoying to keep track of time in Mission Control. If you want to perform anywhere close to normal, you have to delay the effects of Mars time by adhering to the Mars clock as best you can. Switching from Earth to Mars time will hasten your lunacy and is not recommended. To keep track of th
e Mars day requires a Mars clock. Your Mars clock will map Mars time from a 24 hour, 40 minute day to the standard 24-hour day. A Mars clock needs to lose 40 minutes every 24 hours. Unfortunately, these watches don’t come in your official NASA welcome basket. Sadly, there isn’t even an official NASA welcome basket.

  I was hoping Rolex would sponsor the mission and hand out Mars watches to the junior team, but no such luck. But there’s a master watchmaker in Montrose, California, who will make and stamp a genuine Mars watch just for you for $250 plus tax.

  “I only made 1,000 so it would be a collector’s item, but I wanted it to be reasonable,” he says. Could be worse. A few engineers at JPL asked the master, Garu Anselarian, a Lebanese man with a sweet round face, if he would make a watch that could keep track of a 24 hour, 40 minute day. They told him it would make their lives easier when they worked on a mission and that he’d also be able to sell them as souvenirs.

  “I ruined a lot of watches looking for a solution,” Garu says. “I tried adding gears, lengthening the hair string,” but it didn’t work. After a few months of tinkering he came up with a solution, a flash of genius.

  “I realized I could add weight to the balance wheel,” he says. He put a precisely measured dab of silver solder on the second hand spring to slow down the timepiece; a masterstroke in Mars time conversion. He built the originals from the innards of a regular old Citizen quartz watch and put a little picture of Mars on the face. (Unfortunately, sales of his masterpieces were, just like the Mars watches, a little slow.)