Curiosity Read online

  He paused for a moment to make sure I was getting it. At least the camera was. He continued: “What it has to do with the MSL [Mars Science Laboratory] mission is that it represents an end member of a feature that, if we saw it on Mars, we would stop and definitely study the outcrop. Immediately there would be a lot of discussion, because even on Earth we cannot take this rock and bring it back to the lab and prove to you unequivocally that this feature represents evidence of life on the early Earth.” As we will learn later, and I promise it will be simpler, on Earth these stromatolite-like features can be caused by living things, or they can mimicked by processes having nothing to do with life. On Mars it would be (a) a wonderful shock and (b) a guaranteed conundrum. “[On Earth] if you put in the context of other features that occur along with it, it's a perfectly reasonable suggestion that these were microbial mats on a seafloor. But independent of that, in rocks of this age, we often see microfossils. I would say that if we ever found something like this with MSL, we would stop and study it, and it might be a really good place to come back to someday in the future and do a sample return to Earth.” Not to mention a press sensation and a tenfold increase in planetary-exploration budgets. But I digress.

  He stopped, flashed what felt like a sympathetic smile, and it was time to move on with the adult portion of our program. I envied the grad-student assistants present that they could understand the version that was to come.

  Soon we headed out to the first stop on the side of the scenic Western Talc Mine Road. Once disembarked, Grotzinger began with a sweeping gesture toward some distant hills. “See those white areas over there? They are due to this rock,” He gestured to a chart he had prepared, “which is shown to have a cross-cutting relationship where it comes up and goes into the Crystal Springs formation there…” Pointing to a specific spot (that looked to this layman like more gray hillside), “It's a basaltic composition rock, and that's a Mars kind of rock. It's not a granite; it's got olivine and pyroxene in it, or once had it, and it intruded into the Crystal Spring adjacent to some carbonate rocks…and it has altered the rock. You'll hear that from the Mars guys, especially the mineralogists, talking about alteration. Well, that white rock is a result of alteration, it's a mineral called talc.”

  I felt a moment of pride, for I knew what talc was. It comes as a powder in bottles and lives in bathrooms.

  “We're going to go right up there to see the talc and the carbonates that it's intruding into, so you will see the source of the heat which is the basaltic rock. It intruded in, and then it heated up the sediments which were wet, and it made talc, which is a hydrated magnesium silicate mineral, kind of like a clay.”

  Aha! Understanding crept into my brain. If Curiosity found clays on Mars, that would be evidence of water, and there were many complex processes under which this alteration into clays might take place. This one had involved intense heating.

  Fig. 1.1. STROMATOLITES: This is one form (of many) that stromatolites can take. They can be caused by either biological or nonliving activities, and it can be difficult to discern one from the other. Still, were something like this found on Mars, it would grab the attention of the geologists. Image from Mark A. Wilson (Wilson44691).

  Overall, this was a dense subject, somewhat above my pay grade, but clearly Grotzinger loved the topic and while it may have been a challenge to talk at our level, his enthusiasm was highly infectious.

  We loaded up the trucks and headed out to some barren, rocky mountains in the lowest, hottest place of America.

  Less than an hour later, we were in the foothills heading to the first hike of the day. Leading up to this, the sights had been within a few dozen yards of the highway. This had suited me fine, what with my twelve-pound camera and eighteen-pound aluminum tripod (the lighter, carbon-fiber ones are expensive…I pride myself on equipment frugality and never understood those guys who spent thousands on carbon-fiber tripods—I soon would). It was early and I had already sweated out a few quarts into my designer tropical shirt, vented at the back as a fashion statement.

  As we unpacked for the hike, I took stock of my companions. There were about a dozen of us, including Mike Wall, my compatriot from Space.com. He was writing a story and I was shooting one. I would soon admire his choice of a pen as an instrument of communication over my camera. Others were from the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, New York Times, Washington Post, New Scientist, and the LA Times. And then there was Beck-Hoffman, the JPL camera guy who was annoyingly fit and nimble (and who would soon be known as the auteur behind the “7 Minutes of Terror” video that was downloaded millions of times). He was carrying a large, shoulder-mounted camcorder. It would slow him down far less than my smaller rig would me.

  We parked on a mesa and headed off, following Grotzinger toward a series of hills. They didn't look like much from the starting point. But by the time we got to the bottom of them, they were impressive indeed. Funny how these things magnify in intimidation when you get closer—the desert compresses everything from a distance. The group made its way up, each at his or her own pace but in little clots of people—and then there was me. To be fair, I was carrying the camera in one hand and the tripod over the opposite shoulder, trying to balance myself as we climbed the rough, bouldery hillside. At least that's the excuse I was using. Within moments, I was out of breath, panting like a dying asthmatic, and falling behind. I looked from side to side—there were mounds here, surely shallow graves of journalists who had gone before me. But I stuck with the program.

  When I reached the top, the lecture had begun and the other journalists were taking copious notes. I set up my camera with slippery, sweaty hands, and once the ringing in my ears abated, which for a moment I thought might be the signs of a mild stroke, I listened to Grotzinger speak on the formations at hand.

  No sooner had I caught my breath than we were on our way farther up the hill. To the top. Which looked very far away. I shouldered the camera rig and followed at an ever-increasing distance, Lawren shooting worried (and deservedly so) glances my way from time to time. It's nice to be cared about when you're in extremis. On the other hand, I guess it would have been bad publicity for Caltech to host the death of overweight, out-of-shape, late-middle-aged journalist.

  For the rest of the day we climbed, descended, and climbed again. The rocks were sharp and nasty. Grotzinger literally scampered hither and yon and most of the journalists were keeping pace, albeit with an increasing gap between themselves and Grotzinger. And then there was the gap between them and me. Leave me, save yourselves.

  Fig. 1.2. WHY THEY CALL IT DEATH VALLEY: This was not the region we visited, but it's close enough to give you an idea of how the place got its name. Fascinating, lovely…and on the wrong day, deadly. Summer temperatures can top 130°F. Image from iofoto.

  We came to another mountaintop (OK, it was a hilltop but give me some dignity), and Grotzinger waited for the group to settle. I approached as he began his talk. He was not even sweating. “If you look carefully enough, you will see that these things all go in the same direction. So if you walk up a bit you'll see more of them, then we'll go around the corner where you can see a really big one, about a meter in diameter. Have a look, then we can talk some more about it.” He walked off to chat with another husky, bearded fellow (he could pass as a younger version of me, without the cardiac issues), Ken Edgett. Ken is a geologist who works for Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS), makers of the main imaging cameras on Curiosity (and imaging systems of other spacecraft that have orbited Mars). He wasn't sweating either.

  The landscape was pretty in a bleak way, but I had missed the actual subject of the stop. I resolved to be more prompt to the next one, even if it meant an early demise.

  The remainder of that day and the next followed in a similar pattern, and a night of deep sleep did little to lessen the impact of the second day's calisthenics. It was informative but challenging. At the end of the second afternoon, I pigeonholed Mike Wall and asked him to summarize the trip. He has a doctora
te after all (though in an unrelated field) and is the senior writer for Space.com.

  He summarized the excursion succinctly: “John walked us through what field geologists do, how you can make sense of all the different rock layers, what they mean, how they were deposited, and so forth. It was a great exercise. Couched in this is what Curiosity will be doing on Mars and how we can try to make sense of the sort of rocks and formations that we may find in Gale Crater.”

  He thought for a moment and continued: “It's a process, it's all context and getting to know the environment. We learned that it's harder than you think it is, that you really need to know the rocks. It's going to be hard for a robot to do that on a different planet, but MSL has a great support team, over four hundred scientists who are working on the project. They will interpret all this incredible data that the rover will gather. They are very smart people and will figure it out.”

  Looking at my sweat-soaked shirt, he smirked and added, “It's windy, but not even one hundred yet, maybe ninety-five degrees. Easy.”

  I thanked him and returned to the air-conditioned Suburban. We headed back to civilization to witness the beginning of the most ambitious and incredible mission to the surface of another world ever attempted.

  As you have probably surmised, John Grotzinger is not normally a nervous man. A career geologist and professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), he seems equally at home running a huge spaceflight project as he is in front of a class of anxious undergraduates. He jokes easily, and his explanations can be disarmingly folksy but can also turn deadly serious when explaining the relevance of contact metamorphism in a rock. Both are useful traits in his area of endeavor.

  But tonight is different. Tonight the stakes are high indeed. Tonight, $2.5 billion of Mars rover, the aptly named Curiosity, will either land in Gale Crater to begin its twenty-four-month (one Martian year) primary mission, or pinwheel into costly wreckage across a couple hundred acres of Martian desert. Tonight will be either a validation of a decade of planning, designing, building, and launching of a wonderful era of exploration, or the likely end of America's Mars exploration program.

  So tonight, Grotzinger seems as nervous as a cat on the freeway.

  You would never guess it just by looking, of course; geologists don't roll like that. It can be easier to gauge the feelings of his associates in mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dozens of engineers, controllers, scientists, and other highly proficient people surround him in the final moments of the flying phase of Curiosity's mission, and some display their feelings a bit more directly. Perhaps it is because each of them has been intensely focused on a smaller part of the mission—parachute deployment, entry and guidance, pyrotechnics, software design, or one of a dozen other specialized areas. Grotzinger, as the principal scientist of the mission, must be conversant in each specialization of MSL yet also possess a more global perspective, that is, to oversee the mission once on the ground. Tonight there is not much that he can do except wait and hope.

  A few consoles forward sits a man whose face is known to Mars enthusiasts worldwide but whose name may not be. Middle-aged and graying, he is nonetheless clearly still the smiling, ever-cheerful man we saw flashed so memorably across the Internet, fist-pumping the air when Mars Pathfinder landed successfully in 1997. He was thinner and darker-haired then, but the effervescent energy is still there. Rob Manning may have matured, but he is once again the chief engineer in charge of a Mars machine, and there is nowhere he would rather be. It shows.

  Rob is not a professor, nor does he hold any official positions outside JPL. He has been the main machine guy for every Mars rover to date—that is his raison d’être. He is also father to two precocious daughters and plays jazz trumpet gigs in his scant spare time. Back at work, after sweating out the pioneering Pathfinder mission in 1997 and the design and landings of both Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, in 2004, he is at the crescendo of his career with Curiosity. It's been a long haul, though, and the endless hours of meetings and checkouts and visits to the cape have taken a toll. He will rest when the rover is on the ground—in one piece or in hundreds. For now his normally cheerful face shows intense concentration as he follows the data coming back from Mars. So far, Curiosity, as much a third child to him as any machine could be, is doing fine.

  Down near the front sits a man whose face—or, to be more precise, whose hair—will soon be iconic. Bobak Ferdowsi sports a wild, multicolored Mohawk hairstyle, a personal statement of celebration for this momentous mission. It's like nothing we have ever seen in mission control, and within hours the Internet is alive with tweets and posts about this new phenomenon. Bobak, in his late thirties, is a handsome young man who has worked for almost a decade on MSL's launch, cruise, and approach phases. His role in these final moments of landing is largely one of quiet observation, watching data he knows are already fourteen minutes old, delayed by the huge distance between Earth and Mars. He summarized it well: “It's like taking the SAT [college entrance exam]—you've taken the test, you are done. Nobody will tell you the score right then, so you have to wait. You're nervous…something happening now could change the outcome of your life.” And he couldn't be more correct, except that his life will change in ways far different than he expects, including a couple of hundred marriage proposals via Twitter and a future visit to the White House to meet the president and First Lady. But that is some time off, and at the moment he is fixated on the screen in front of him.

  But not everyone involved with the mission can fit in mission control. A building away, Ashwin Vasavada sits, also intently eyeing a computer screen. He is, along with Joy Crisp, a deputy project scientist on MSL. He is also a spectator at this point. Curiosity carries experiments that he and Joy have helped to shepherd through the process of construction, testing, installation, and launch, as they oversee the larger science team behind the MSL mission. “I feel like I'm enabling almost 480 scientists and a spectacularly good mission with a lot of scientific integrity,” he comments. “I like to put my heart and soul into making sure we do good science.” Now, like Grotzinger, all he can do is watch, a helpless captive to events far away, above another world, as the much-anticipated entry, descent, and landing (or EDL) sequence begins.

  Vandi Tompkins, slated to be one of a small group of rover drivers and programmers for Curiosity, is also waiting out the landing as an observer. As an engineer, she has ultimate faith in the machine and her comrades who designed it. As a PhD in advanced robotics, she also has a deep attachment to the machine in a way that few would understand. And as a woman who came to the United States from India to make her way into the stratified world of planetary exploration, she can sometimes scarcely believe her good fortune to be here, on this program, at this moment. The next few minutes may well determine her fate for the next decade.

  And this is it—the by now well-known seven minutes of terror, made famous by the video of the same name that went viral a couple of months earlier. On cue, MSL spacecraft plunges into the thin Martian atmosphere after a largely uneventful journey lasting nine months. Much like war, robotic spaceflight is often characterized as long stretches of boredom followed by moments of intense terror. The spacecraft will automatically go through the intricate ballet of landing in a small target area on a planet far, far away. When it is over, the signals describing success or failure will still be making their way back to Earth at the speed of light; during landing, MSL (and the Curiosity rover ensconced within) is completely on its own. Grotzinger, Manning, Ferdowsi, Vasavada, Tompkins, and thousands of others will still be staring at computer screens, continuing to count the seconds and ticking off the milestones as if events were still unfolding. In short, regardless of Curiosity's fate, people in Pasadena and all over the world will continue watching and waiting for the signal that will free them to breathe again.

  High in the skies of Mars, following a roughly equatorial trajectory, MSL hurtles toward the Martian surface. The onboard comp
uter, a radiation-hardened version of an early-2000s Macintosh PowerPC chip, is processing incoming data like mad and adjusting flight parameters to match. A firing of a thruster here, a guidance adjustment there. There's not much time left to correct anything, though, for the guided portion of entry—where MSL glides across the skies on its heat shield, adjusting course continuously—is just about over.

  On cue, the huge parachute deploys, unfurling spectacularly above the spacecraft while it is still traveling at supersonic speed. The craft begins to slow and angle toward the ground. High above, in Martian orbit, one of JPL's other robotic explorers, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, snaps a photo of a tiny spacecraft dangling from a parachute. That it captures the lander at all is a near miracle, for it was being aimed in advance purely by sophisticated calculations performed by JPL flight engineers. The resulting image was a remarkable bit of space-age orchestration.

  Down, down Curiosity drops, until—while still high in the air and in an apparent contravention of logic—it separates from the parachute. But seconds later, powerful onboard rockets fire, further slowing the spacecraft.

  At JPL, a room full of men and women, mostly in their twenties and thirties, monitor the hundreds of systems and subsystems critical to a successful landing. The old folks—the ones over fifty—are mostly in the back row. This is a young person's mission.

  Adam Steltzner, the forty-nine-year old rock ’n’ roller primarily responsible for getting Curiosity onto the surface of Mars safely, paces like a lion on the hunt behind a row of intent controllers. He's been likened to Elvis with a doctorate in engineering, and now he monitors the consoles and the big picture. His pace quickens as the displays show MSL getting closer to Mars.