Martian Summer: My Ninety Days with Interplanetary Pioneers, Temperamental Robots, and NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission
356
Martian Summer: My Ninety Days with Interplanetary Pioneers, Temperamental Robots, and NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497641402 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 356 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Martian Summer
My Ninety Days with Interplanetary Pioneers, Temperamental Robots, and NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission
By Andrew Kessler
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2011 Andrew KesslerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-4140-2
CHAPTER 1
FIRST-DAY JITTERS
SOL 11
It's near quitting time after a long day of taking photos of new acquaintances—Lory and Mad Hatter—measuring atmospheric gases, and digging. The Phoenix Mars lander beeps and blips along. The sun never sets on these long Martian summer nights, but the Phoenix has strict orders to rest. The engineers want Phoenix asleep before 5:00 p.m., Mars time. Soon it will be time to put away its instruments and recharge its batteries. With the core plan nearly finished, Peter Smith and the engineers back home will be pleased.
There's just one more critical task before Phoenix can crank up its night-time heaters and initiate sleep.
"RA Acquire Sample with Rac Doc" is the instruction. This note and the corresponding lander code tells Phoenix to scrape up the first ever scoopful of Martian dirt. It's no ordinary scoop of Martian dirt. This scoop is a milestone in a long journey—one that took centuries to complete. It's the first human experiment ever done on the arctic plains of Mars. And a tiny step in the process of one day getting a man to Mars. A small camera mounted on the robot arm documents the moment for posterity.
Once this Martian dirt is safely tucked away, Phoenix will send home its daily report and then head off to bed—to dream of finding little green men and having its day delivering a lecture to the king of Norway when it accepts its Nobel Prize on a stage in Oslo. I know it's just a robot, but did I mention it's not coming back alive? Phoenix is a robot suicide mission.
Back on Earth, I imagine what it might be like on Mars as I swipe my security badge for the first time and walk into Mission Control.
IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T BEEN GLUED TO NASAWATCH.COM, THE PHOENIX MARS Lander is a robotic spacecraft built by NASA, the University of Arizona, the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), Lockheed Martin, the Canadian Space Agency, and a whole consortium of international universities and industry, all under the leadership of one intimidating scientist named Peter Smith. It carries six scientific instruments to complete its mission: find out what Mars used to be like and if anything can, or did, live there.
We don't really know all that much about what's going on down on the surface of Mars. "Is there life on Mars?" might feel like just a brilliant David Bowie lyric, but it's actually a legitimate and central question. It's worth a tiny digression to talk about the "life on Mars" issue before we get back to humanity's first interplanetary ground-breaking ceremony.
Sometimes aliens are the only things that make us care about Mars. They're the gateway drug to the hard science. There's no shame in dreaming about aliens. Even the most stone-faced scientists on the Phoenix Mars lander team imagine what might happen if they turn on the electron-scanning microscope and see tiny cells mucking about. Even better, if Phoenix found some wide-eyed E.T.s lounging on the ice, NASA would get a huge new budget, Martian Summer book sales would be through the roof, and Peter Smith and the Phoenix Lander would share a Nobel Prize. Win-win-win.
What's more likely is Phoenix might run into tiny bits or blobs of unrecognizables that would be hard to classify. How do you know when you have found "life" if it doesn't look like you or even anything you are even remotely familiar with that falls within your classification of "alive"? Even defining life on Earth is kind of a tricky thing. If you're too inclusive in your definition, then you end up allowing things like cars—that convert energy and move—as living. But if you're too restrictive you might designate things like mules— that convert energy and move but don't reproduce—as not living.
If it doesn't have eyes and use a ray-gun, and it's not a DNA or RNA or even carbon-based life form, how will you know it's alive? Finding new forms of life on another planet would send our idea of sentient supremacy into a tailspin. Since we only have one data point, life on earth, finding some strange form of life on Mars would certainly shake things up a bit. This mission does not have any sort of DNA detectors, but it's got some good tools for decoding whatever mysteries it encounters. So I'd like to quash those hopes and fears before you get too excited about this book revealing a giant Mars conspiracy of brain wave-reading Martians. But don't worry; there will be plenty of time for tinfoil hats, whether they be a fez, centurion, classic, or even a bonnet for the ladies. Read on but keep your Reynolds Wrap close at hand, because there will still be some unanswered questions at the end of the mission.
Mars was once similar to Earth. Then, a couple of billion years ago, it went from a soupy-warm planet to a cold desert. We don't know how that march toward doom happened. There are huge gaps in our knowledge: from simple things like the pH of the soil to big, earth-shatteringly revolutionary things, like is Mars habitable? Phoenix, the robot, is mandated to find the answers to these fundamental questions. If everything goes according to plan, we should have some answers in the next 90 days. (Or less, if you read quickly.)
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 RAD6000 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!?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Martian Summer by Andrew Kessler. Copyright © 2011 Andrew Kessler. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Author's Note,PART I: THE PHOENIX OF TUCSON,
CHAPTER 1: First-Day Jitters,
CHAPTER 2: The Clod,
CHAPTER 3: Control Room,
CHAPTER 4: Cloddy with a Chance of Sprinkles,
CHAPTER 5: Red Haze,
CHAPTER 6: Special Mars Pill,
CHAPTER 7: Wonderland,
CHAPTER 8: The Lost Day,
CHAPTER 9: Missing Pieces,
PART II: RED PLANET BLUES,
CHAPTER 10: I, for One, Welcome our NASA Overlords,
CHAPTER 11: Arm Up. Stand Down.,
CHAPTER 12: All the Landers, Independent,
CHAPTER 13: Down and Out in the SOC,
CHAPTER 14: In a Scrape,
CHAPTER 15: Powers of Ten,
CHAPTER 16: Nilton's Nodules,
CHAPTER 17: An Enemy Among Us,
CHAPTER 18: Nilton's Nodules (Round II),
CHAPTER 19: Feel My Rasp,
CHAPTER 20: Martian Colds,
CHAPTER 21: There is No Try,
CHAPTER 22: Don't Be a Rasp Hole,
CHAPTER 23: Ice Delivery, Take Two,
CHAPTER 24: Mars Man Forever,
CHAPTER 25: The Third Time,
CHAPTER 26: Press Conference,
PART III: IT'S DRY FREEZE,
CHAPTER 27: Tinfoil Hats,
CHAPTER 28: Oy Covault,
CHAPTER 29: Full Release,
CHAPTER 30: Shove the Regolith Back in the Lander,
CHAPTER 31: That's the Planet I Saw on TV,
CHAPTER 32: Forty Minutes Back,
CHAPTER 33: Scooped,
CHAPTER 34: Two Days Forward, One Sol Back,
CHAPTER 35: Paralyzed Ops,
CHAPTER 36: The Dude Abides,
CHAPTER 37: Stiff Joints,
CHAPTER 38: Salty Liquid Water Tears,
CHAPTER 39: Sol Searching,
Index,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,
Interviews
- Readers of irreverent science writers, including Mary Roach, Sam Kean, Bill Bryson, and George Pendel
- Readers of Wired and listeners of WNYC’s Radiolab