Martian Summer Read online

  Mark Lemmon puts an end to the celebration. He kicks everyone out. He wants his SSI team to prepare the images in time for the midpoint meeting.

  WITH SOMETHING TO CELEBRATE, THE MOOD INSIDE THE SOC IS buoyed. At the midpoint meeting, everyone is in good spirits. The SSI IDE shows the sprinkle test as series of photos. It’s a flip-book sprinkle movie. Mike Hecht claps; he’s the only one.

  The RA team representative makes the formal announcement.

  “There was a successful sprinkle. We are very content with this strategy. It really showed the wisdom of thought in doing this,” Ashitey says. Because it went so well, they’re going to make their first precision delivery tomorrow. This time MECA gets a turn—no wonder Mike Hecht wants to applaud—they’re going to sprinkle a few grains of Mars dirt onto the OM (optical microscope). Microscopic images of mysterious dirt on another planet; that should count for something.

  “That’s a beautiful sprinkle,” Doug says, taking a minute to enjoy the moment.

  “Can we clap now?” Mike Hecht asks. There is applause. The mission is back on track. There is new hope for getting dirt into the instruments and having a viable mission.

  SO, THIS IS THE END OF THE FIVE DAY TRIAL. I’M RELIEVED IT ENDED on a positive note. I take a deep breath and head over to Peter’s office. I poke my head into the open door.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Yes,” Peter replies, betraying no real emotion.

  “So, I guess this is the end of our five-day test.”

  Peter doesn’t really react. He shifts some papers, signaling that he’s running a goddamn Mars mission, not babysitting. Point taken.

  “Well, I haven’t heard any complaints. No problems. So I don’t see it being an issue for anyone.” And with that, Peter Smith makes the historic decision to let the world’s first outsider into the hallowed halls of Mission Control for a landed planetary mission.

  Huge alpine mountain horns blare, the sun shines in the window. It rains flowers.

  And then something really amazing happens: we just chat. And it almost feels natural. We’re talking about the clump and whether they will keep shaking the dirt on TEGA. Shooting the breeze like we’re two normal humans and it’s going great.

  This is it, I tell myself. Our big breakthrough. Peter will be spilling his guts and crying on my shoulder any minute now. Ask him about his father. No. Ask him about the nature of discovery.

  Soon I’ll understand what’s at the heart of man’s quest to conquer the solar system. Peter is not quizzing me and I’m not trying to sound like I know what I’m doing. I even tell him about an idea I have for a coffee table book, a little curatorial project where we ask everyone what their favorite images from Phoenix are, and then we turn it into a Mars coffee table book. It’s a project we could do together.

  “Interesting,” he says.

  I tell him I’ll get started right away. It’s going great. I’ve got some “dad” and “nature of discovery” questions all lined up and ready for the right moment.

  Peter looks over his shoulder at his computer. He shuffles more papers. Damn, I’ve lost him. There’s an awkward pause. It’s over.

  “Well, I have some things to attend to,” Peter says. The NASA chiefs are waiting for his daily report.

  It’s probably best I go. There won’t be any shoulder crying, but at least he didn’t say I have to leave.

  That evening, there’s one last TEGA shake. And it works! Bill Boynton plays disc jokey and selects K.C. and the Sunshine Band’s (Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty to mark this important moment. Everyone does indeed shake their booty and Mission Control is a place for celebrating. The science phase of the mission begins.

  PETER STARTED BUILDING CAMERAS AT THE LUNAR AND PLANETARY Lab here in Tucson as a research assistant thirty years ago. It was a good year for both of us. I was born; Peter’s career began to take shape. In the last thirty years he’s worked himself up to freelance Mars mission captain. Ah, the good old days, when you had to take a million exposures just to get a one-megapixel image and it only cost a nickel to see the funnies.

  There’s not really an obvious career path that takes you from hippie at UC-Berkeley to space captain, yet somehow the winding, chutes-and-ladders path Peter took got him there. For most of his tenure at the lab, he worked under Dr. Martin Tomasko. Marty, as Peter calls him, was his mentor. At the lab, Peter plied his trade as a young space photographer, capturing images and data on the composition of our universe. He hates when you call him a space photographer or try to romanticize his cameras.

  In 1989,Peter was helping Marty build a descent imager for the Cassini probe. The probe would be parachuted down to the surface of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. It was an ambitious and complicated project. Peter coordinated with researchers across the globe.

  “We needed to find international partners to help us pay for the thing. With European partners we got more bang for our buck. Their universities provided funds so they could built pieces of the camera,” Peter says. “Back then you’d just show up and knock on doors. There wasn’t email or Powerpoint. Marty and I would pull up the overhead projector slides and make a pitch.

  “That’s where we met Uwe Keller,” Peter says. “Uwe is a bullet-headed German. He’s bigger than I am and really in your face. He had no idea we were coming. But we got along great.” Keller built some detectors for the camera on the Giotto mission that captured pictures of Halley’s comet. Peter and Marty could use Uwe’s capabilities for Titan. And Keller held the key to getting low-cost detectors for the Titan camera. Keller said he would build the detectors.

  It was an exciting time for Peter at Marty’s lab, but there was the pull of something larger. Peter wasn’t content.

  With each new project he worked on with Marty, the feeling that he needed to strike out on his own grew stronger. At the same time, he was building the skills to make it possible to come up with his own original concepts for space cameras. Working on Cassini gave Peter confidence and international connections. All he needed was the right opportunity. The Cassini camera used a new type of sophisticated CCD chips—just like the ones found in today’s digital cameras. The instrument paper describes them as “the most sophisticated, highest resolution two-dimensional device ever carried into the outer solar system.” Peter realized he could use a CCD camera to pitch his space narrative to NASA. Pathfinder needed a camera to track a small rover called Sojourner. To get the commission, he would have to compete against some of the big, established names in space optics. He didn’t have any name recognition at NASA or even a Ph.D. So what?

  Peter went to see Marty.

  “I have an idea for the Mars camera,” he said, and Marty met him head on. “Great, let’s do it.”

  Peter clarified, he had an idea, and then Marty understood. It was time for Peter to take the helm.

  Peter called his camera IMP (Imager for Mars Pathfinder).

  “I wanted it to have a little personality,” Peter says. The camera would be the first to offer stereo resolution and create three-dimensional anaglyphs of the Martian terrain. That’s right, 3D space images more than two decades before Avatar. Take that, James Cameron!

  “Before you get too excited, the Viking I and II missions had 3D too. It wasn’t quite like ours,” Peter tells me. “But it could only see in 3D right in front of the lander. It wasn’t on a rotating mast like Pathfinder or Phoenix. And for that matter, you should really be careful when say ‘first’ in the context of space. You’ll almost always be wrong. Trust me,” Peter warns. The IMP camera would offer a whopping ¼ of a megapixel resolution. It would feature a fancy new CCD chip; Peter would send a digital camera to Mars! And most importantly for NASA, using parts from his foreign collaborators, he could build it cheaply. The IMP looked a lot like the SSI camera on Phoenix that Peter would build twenty years later. It was just a slightly more primitive version.

  The IMP would not only be a science tool but a marketing device. That’s what made it great:
the broader potential to tell a story. This multi-lens stereo imager was mounted at human height to offer a familiar perspective. Instead of cold scientific observations, the IMP’s pictures looked like they might be tourist snapshots. (Although the scientists hate when you suggest this. The official position is that these are not merely snapshots.) Peter and his imaging team stitched together photo mosaics to create brilliant large-format landscapes. It was like looking out at Mars with your own eyes. It’s hard to know if creating an emotional connection was part of the selection committee’s decision, but Peter was nevertheless awarded a chance to send his first camera to Mars.

  ON JULY 4TH, 1997, THE PATHFINDER SMASHED INTO MARS, BOUNCED around, and rolled to its final resting place nearly unscathed. Instead of expensive rockets for landing, the Pathfinder used an innovative (and cheaper) airbag design to get safely to the surface. Eric De Jong, the head of imaging at JPL, recalls the two engineers who built the Pathfinder airbags embracing wildly after landing. Both of them jumping up and down, saying over and over, “I can’t believe it worked!” Pathfinder was NASA’s triumphant return to Mars. It had been twenty-plus years since anyone had seen the place.

  Peter and Eric De Jong suspected space fans and pretty much anyone who had ever looked up in the night sky would go crazy for the IMP pictures. Instead of offering a few images to the press and holding on to the rest for publication in some obscure journal, they decided to offer the excitement of Mars online and in real time. They made a secret back-room handshake deal that no matter how upset anyone got, they would post the images on the Internet as soon as possible, bypassing the usual JPL and NASA channels for releasing images. They were going to give the images to the people. I mean, you don’t go to Berkeley in the sixties and not stick it to the man at some point in your career.

  Peter and Eric played with the idea that the space narrative was already an enthralling part of our national character. We already had it woven into our imaginations, and, with the right tools, they could unleash its captivating forces for a new generation. By giving anyone with a computer access to the raw images, Peter let fans create their own Mars story.

  “NASA wanted me to go first at the big press conference. We were announcing to the world that we captured the first images since Viking. They insisted we should lead with this story,” Peter tells me. “I was a bit terrified. Dan Goldin [the head of NASA] was going to go after me! But they really believed in the images. I diligently wrote down what I was going to say and practiced my lines. I suggested they play Brahms’ first symphony and raise a screen to reveal the images. It would be dramatic—a good story. They weren’t having it. Please just talk about the images, was the message I got back. Okay, fine. Goldin looked so intense when we sat down, I got worried that I’d made a big mistake in choosing my words.”

  Peter takes a breath and begins his press conference reenactment. It’s like he just gave it yesterday and not a decade ago.

  “Imagine that you’re the camera and you’re loaded on the rocket ship and you’re not flying first class. You’re going economy. Crouched down with a solar panel on your back and parachute. And for nine months you sit like this.” Peter crunches up to show me what it would look like. “And then WHAM, you hit the surface. Bam! Bam! Bam! Then you’re rolling around. Phsssssss. That’s the sound of the airbags deflating. And you pick your head up and what do you see?” Peter pauses at that point to tell me that’s when the screen was supposed to come up and reveal the images. “The talk was going great, I thought, but Goldin was sitting next to me looking at me like I was a freak. What a look he gave me! It sent shivers down my spine; I almost stopped. But if I went off my script, I wouldn’t know what to say. So I just went on. I explained it like I thought my mom would want to hear if she was in the audience.”

  The 14,000 images that Pathfinder took came down from Mars and instantly went out to the world. The downloads literally crippled the Internet, crashing servers and becoming headline news on broadcasts and papers around the globe. One year before the birth of Google and way before the “Star Wars Kid” or even “I can haz cheezbeeger?” Peter Smith and Co. registered almost 100 million hits on NASA’s site in a massive Mars picture grab.

  THE IMP PHOTOS WORKED. NASA RODE A WAVE OF SUPPORT FOR THE first time in decades. The people clamored for more missions and more photos. Space was popular again. Peter spent the next few years giving talks and getting commissions for new projects. His lab was one of the biggest on campus.

  Peter’s successes pleased the University of Arizona. They busied themselves with transforming and expanding their space group. They hoped to one day compete with JPL for big space contracts (and, so as not to be outdone, Caltech committed to upping its profile in Playboy’s party school rankings). And Peter wasn’t the only one doing big things. Bill Boynton, and his colleague Alfred McEwen, were working equally hard to put the U of A on the space map. Bill’s discovery of hydrogen at the top of Mars was the impetus for Peter’s mission to dig up permafrost.

  The Pathfinder was the first big success of a new kind of NASA: “Faster, Cheaper, Better.” It was an idealistic approach leavened with a dose of economic practicality. Dan Goldin, the NASA Chief Administrator, created the program. His noble idea was to launch loads of low-cost missions and do research across the solar system. When he started, he thought missions were too costly and risk-averse. This was the nineties, and new go-go information-age companies innovated without all the bureaucracy and bloat that plagued NASA. Goldin hit the reset button to return NASA to its bold, courageous, cowboy roots. Pathfinder showed it was possible. A highly motivated team could work together to get man’s robots to Mars with flying colors and great images to prove it.

  The FCB (Faster, Cheaper, Better) plan was to send up loads of high-risk, low-cost missions and accept the loss of a few. The idea was that an army of landers and orbiters would cover Mars and branch out into the solar system. We would start to understand, in a systematic way, what was happening out there, one lander at a time.

  For most engineers, the idea of “Faster, Cheaper, Better” is hard to accept. The slogan is a bastardized version of “Fast, cheap, or good. Pick two.” It’s an old cliché that engineers, designers, and admen all claim as part of their heritage. You hear it used when a client wants some miracle of innovation, in no time, and for half price. The thing about clichés is, they’re often cliché for a reason, and Goldin was part of the camp that thought if innovative new tech companies are doing it, why not NASA?

  The Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter were two FCB projects that followed Pathfinder in just such a fashion. They went from concept to design in record time and cost a fraction of the price. There were innovations and engineering short-cuts extraordinaire to deliver the project. It was grueling, and some say miserable, work. It was going better than everyone could have imagined. Then reality stepped in. The Mars Climate Orbiter rounded Mars and began an aerobraking maneuver (using the friction of the atmosphere to reduce its speed and properly position itself in a stable orbit). Unfortunately, it missed its mark. The Mars Climate Orbiter flew too low. Instead of skimming the Martian atmosphere to slow down, it plunged right into it. The spacecraft plummeted through the atmosphere. It crashed and burned. Well, technically it burned first and then crashed. What went wrong? One of the teams used English units instead of metric. Whoops.

  Then in quick succession, the Polar Lander met a heavy fate. It crashed.

  “I was sitting on a case of champagne waiting to celebrate. Then it felt like someone died, like we lost a family member,” said Eric De Jong, Peter’s old Pathfinder colleague. In the final moments of its life, one theory goes, the Mars Polar Lander’s radar failed to identify the surface of Mars. The crash review board suggested the Polar Lander swung wildly. Its radar, which was supposed to lock on the surface and tell the landing computer the distance to impact, locked onto something other than the ground below. Polar Lander got confused and turned off its rockets a bit too soon, ending its re
markable 200-million-mile journey a few hundred feet too soon. Without the stabilizing rockets to control its descent, it only took a few seconds before Polar Lander was a sad pile of parts somewhere on the southern plains of Mars. The crash review panel identified 22 other flaws, in addition to the radar problem, that might have caused an unsavory impact. The short-cuts had caught up with everyone.

  After Polar Lander and Climate Orbiter crashed, the Mars Surveyor 2001 missions that were supposed to be its successors were cancelled. The chassis of Surveyor (soon to be Phoenix), along with versions of the SSI, RAC, TEGA, and RA, was put into storage. It was probably just like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. That was the seeming end of Peter’s brilliant space run. His lab of 35 became a party of one.

  FIVE YEARS LATER. 6:00 A.M. TUCSON TIME. PETER STANDS IN HIS underpants at his home.

  “Who the hell would be calling at this hour?” Peter said. Then he nervously listened to a caller on the other end reading him a legal statement from NASA lawyers. It was all kinds of blah blah about the fairness of the process and integrity. It could only mean one thing: they were letting him down easy. The legal speech came to an end.

  “Your mission has been selected,” the man finally said. Leave it to NASA to take all the excitement out of a trip to Mars. After a fierce two-year competitive process, NASA had awarded Peter his shot to be the world’s first freelance Mars mission captain. The instruments were pulled from storage. (Well, most of them. NASA couldn’t find the engineering model of the RA. Debate swirled around who might have swiped it as a trophy for their mantel).

  After the two-year selection and scoping process to prove to NASA that Phoenix could work, things were just getting started. Next came four years of building and testing, relentless days and sleepless nights. Instruments were late, budgets overrun, marriages crumbled, new families formed, and a lot of nerves frayed. They even had to fudge a bit of the paperwork when they realized the molybdenum grease that lubricated a few of the parts would exceed its five-year lifespan before Phoenix arrived on Mars. The list of problems would fill a small library. Literally. There are about ten million pages of documents associated with the mission. These are reviews, certifications, plans, and more.