Don’t expect to see these anytime soon on eBay. Members of the MER mission commissioned these specially designed timepieces—which run 40 minutes slower than a day on Earth—to help them get accustomed to a pattern of working and sleeping on Mars time.

FLIGHTS! CAMERAS! MARS!

By Michael Rogers

Forget the Oscars. If you were looking for gripping performances and spellbinding drama, it was all there at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the night of January 24, in the mission control room for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. One craft, Spirit, was already on Mars but temporarily crippled. The second, Opportunity, was speeding to the Red Planet at 12,000 miles per hour.

Peter Theisinger ’67, manager of the MER project, paced the control room like Russell Crowe on the deck of H.M.S. Surprise in Master and Commander. Rob Manning ’82, manager of entry, descent, and landing (EDL) development, stared anxiously at his computer screen, following the data stream flowing into Pasadena, California, across 100 million miles of space. Wayne Lee, EDL chief engineer, wearing a shirt in a blinding stars and stripes pattern, provided the play-by-play for his colleagues in the room and the thousands more watching on NASA television. At last came the critical moment when Opportunity cut loose from the main craft, deployed its parachute, and, cushioned in its cocoon of airbags, bounced several times over the surface of the Red Planet before coming to rest in a crater on the Meridiani Planum. “We’re on Mars, everybody,” announced Manning, who then broke into tears.

And then the assembled scientists and engineers erupted in an overflow of jubilation that’s usually reserved for Super Bowl victories. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger muscled his way through the packed control room, congratulating the mission team and receiving a broom, symbolizing a clean sweep, from EDL engineer Lee. Former Vice President Al Gore, NASA chief administrator Sean O’Keefe, JPL director Charles Elachi, and Caltech president David Baltimore were also on hand to hail, high-five, and bear-hug the ecstatic MER team members. Four hours later, the cheering would begin anew when Opportunity sent back its first pictures of a Martian vista hauntingly unlike any ever seen before, capped by an exposed bedrock that even surprised scientists who have been studying the planet for years.

“We’ve never seen a landscape like this,” gushed Steven Squyres, the science payload principal investigator, adding, perhaps unnecessarily, “That outcropping is out of this world. I can’t wait to get there.”

Squyres and his colleagues can look forward to investigating two out-of-this-world venues. Halfway around Mars, albeit grounded at the time Opportunity landed, sits its identical twin, Spirit, which had touched down amid similar celebration three weeks earlier. Within two hours, Spirit had relayed home its first pictures of desolate Gusev Crater, a basin the size of Connecticut, which features plenty of intriguing rocks and depressions, and possibly an ancient, now dry, river bed.

Spirit performed flawlessly for nearly three weeks, when “like a child that’s left home for the first time,” as O’Keefe put it, it unaccountably stopped communicating with its JPL handlers. After two anxious days and nearly sleepless nights of troubleshooting, MER staffers were pretty sure that they had traced the snafu to a software glitch. The rover’s condition was upgraded “from critical to serious,” and in the hours before Opportunity landed, a much-happier-looking Theisinger said he was optimistic that the problem would be resolved, allowing Spirit to resume its scientific mission within weeks.

With both Spirit and Opportunity on Mars, JPL staffers were overjoyed to be part of history. It’s the first time that two spacecraft have safely landed there at roughly the same time. “We’re two for two,” says Theisinger. “This is clearly an E-ticket ride, that’s for sure.”

The two rovers are expected to spend at least three months sifting through rocks and soil on the planet, looking for evidence that once upon a time Mars had liquid water and was therefore able to sustain life. While the technology that sent this dual mission to Mars largely mimicked the methods used successfully by Pathfinder in 1997, the rovers this time are much more sophisticated than Pathfinder’s rover, Sojourner.

Spirt and Opportunity each weighs over 16 times more than their predecessor, and with their solar panels deployed, they are each about the size of a picnic table. Sojourner was no bigger than an end table. Sojourner’s pictures captivated the world, and those from Spirit and Opportunity are even better, thanks to panoramic cameras whose resolution is more than three times higher than that of the cameras on the Pathfinder mission. And while Sojourner gripped the public’s imagination with its ability to trundle down the length of a football field, the twin rovers are expected to travel six to ten times that distance.

In truth, Spirit and Opportunity are much more than shutterbugs on wheels. They have been described as robotic geologists that are actually able to conduct complex science. Each is home to five scientific instruments, including a panoramic camera, an abrasion tool to grind away the surfaces of rocks, a thermal-emission spectrometer, a Mössbauer spectrometer, an alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer, and a microscopic imager. Operated by controllers at JPL, the spectrometers are designed to analyze minerals, searching for those that might have been formed by the action of water, while the imager looks at the fine-scale features of rocks and soils to determine how they were transported and deposited. The rovers will either find evidence of water or they won’t, but in either case, our current notions about Mars are sure to be challenged.

As a boy, Florida native Mark Adler, PhD ’90, watched spacecraft launches from Cape Canaveral. Last summer as JPL’s mission manager for Spirit, he headed back to the Cape for the launch of Spirit’s twin craft, Opportunity, perched here atop the Delta II rocket that ultimately carried it into space.

“I guarantee that our knowledge of Mars will grow by leaps and bounds as a result of this mission,” says Mark Adler, PhD ’90, mission manager for Spirit. “We know a lot less than we think we know about Mars, and anytime we mount a mission like this, we find that many of our previous ideas get trashed. We may or may not find evidence of water, but just finding
the answer to that question will be important.”

Even before the rovers had started cozying up to selected rocks, Adler and his peers were crowing over the success of the Spirit and Opportunity landings. Spirit dropped down exactly where the rover team had hoped it would, and although Opportunity was about 15 miles off its mark, it landed in a small crater, offering up unusual geological features ripe for scientific analysis. The landers unfolded in a maneuver described as “reverse origami” to reveal the rovers, which busily began snapping pictures. “Hard work prevailed, but luck helped too,” says Adler.

While the MER mission once again put JPL in the international spotlight, Caltech, which administers the lab for NASA, certainly had its own reasons to be proud. Of the 10 managers on MER, half are Caltech graduates. They include Adler, Manning, Theisinger, Albert Haldemann, PhD ’97 (the mission’s deputy project scientist), and Matt Wallace, MS ’91, deputy surface development manager. In addition, at least a dozen more MER scientists and engineers have Caltech degrees.

The Caltech connection with Mars is hardly surprising, according to one alum who should know. “Many Caltech students get engaged with JPL during their student days and see the excitement of being part of the team exploring the future, and then decide to be part of that future,” says JPL director Elachi, PhD ’71. “I am one such example.”

MER project manager Theisinger is another. For the past three and a half years, he has been overseeing an $800 million budget and about 1,000 scientists, engineers, and technicians all working to get NASA’s two spacecraft to Mars. Even in the thick of the landings, he appeared to be unfazed by the pressures of the job.

“I’m the one responsible for the mission and accountable for the mission’s success,” he says. “But the reality is that I have a great team of people working for me. My job is to get out of their way.”

Says Elachi, “Pete is the embodiment of a superb project manager and leader. He lays out the framework, hires the best, gives them top-level guidance, trusts them, and helps them excel. Very few people I know could have achieved what he has done.”

Pathfinder veteran Rob Manning ’82 (left) is one of many Caltech graduates who joined forces with fellow alum and Mars Expedition Rover (MER) project manager Peter Theisinger ’67 (right) to get Spirit and Opportunity to Mars. Manning, who designed much of the innovative landing technology for Pathfinder, played a similar role six years later as entry, descent, and landing development manager for MER.

Aside from three years as a NASA contractor, Theisinger has spent his entire career at JPL. After graduating from Caltech, he took a summer job at the lab, planning to start a PhD program in high-energy physics at the University of Michigan the following fall. But as fate would have it, his job involved analyzing data from a Mariner mission, and Theisinger changed his mind. “It was interesting work. I was learning things. I liked it, asked to stay, and they let me stay,” he says. He was quickly put on a supervisory track. From 1969 to 1978 he worked on the Voyager mission to the outer planets, managing three scientific instruments. In addition to several managerial positions, he has been power system engineer for the Galileo mission and project engineer for Mars Global Surveyor.

Unlike many of his MER colleagues, Theisinger claims that he has never been mad about Mars. “I couldn’t spell Mars until I worked on the Mars Global Surveyor project,” he says. “I don’t look at my work in terms of the destination of the mission. I look at it in terms of what’s the job and what will I learn. That’s just me.”

Still, when Theisinger was asked to manage the rover project—at noon on Thursday, May 4, 2000, according to his precise recollection—he didn’t hesitate.

“I felt like a guy who had spent his entire life in baseball being told that he could pitch the seventh game of the World Series,” says Theisinger, who is built more like a catcher than a pitcher. “You work your entire life to make this kind of contribution. Of course you do it if they ask you. I’ve had the best job in engineering for quite a while.”

And if he was once dispassionate about Mars, the pictures streaming back to Earth courtesy of Spirit and Opportunity seem to have lit a fire in him. Showing off the 3-D, 360-degree pan of the Red Planet in a special observation room at JPL, Theisinger admits that he has been sneaking down from his eighth-floor corner office in Building 264 to take a peek a couple of times a day.

“It’s an amazing place,” he says, donning 3-D goggles and scanning the rust-colored landscape. “It’s hard to believe we’re there. This is exciting stuff, and it’s hard.”

While Adler’s tenure at JPL has been brief compared to Theisinger’s, he has spent much of his 12 years there focused on Mars. Before being tapped to manage the Spirit mission, he was the Mars Exploration Program architect, working with teams of scientists and engineers to develop a long-range strategy for Mars missions. Adler says that he has been captivated by space exploration since he was a kid growing up in south Florida, where he was able to watch the first 10 shuttle launches. An applicant to NASA’s astronaut-training program, Adler says that after nurturing Spirit along for nearly four years, it’s easy to imagine that he’s up there with the rover when he looks at the pictures.

“We look at the terrain, and stare at it for a long time,” he says, speaking for himself and his colleagues. “It may look barren and desolate, but it’s beautiful to us. It captivates us. We feel like we’re there.

“My only frustration is that if I really was there, I feel like I could move things along a lot faster,” says Adler, who oversees engineers and technicians, led the landing-site selection team, and is now working with the mission scientists to make sure that Spirit is steered to the rocks and other geological features that interest them. (A separate team operates Opportunity.) There’s a tendency to want to hurry things along, because the rovers are projected to have only three to six months of life before operational funding dries up or the rovers succumb to the harsh Martian conditions, where temperatures can dip to minus 105 degrees Celsius (minus 157 degrees Fahrenheit). “We know the mission will end soon. The rovers land with a terminal disease, so we have to make the most of it.”

For the rover teams, making the most of it means putting in long hours at JPL, following a schedule now tuned to Martian time. Since a day on Mars is about 40 minutes longer than one on Earth, and since the solar-powered rovers only operate in sunlight, the folks at JPL responsible for operating the craft report to work each day 40 minutes later than on the previous day. To help stay in synch with Mars time, many are wearing a watch especially fabricated by a local jeweler to run 40 minutes slow every 24 hours. But even this Martian answer to a Rolex, coupled with a four-day work week, can’t entirely alleviate a sense of ongoing jet lag among staffers who must report to work just as the sun is rising on the Gusev Crater but setting in California.

“It’s hard to adjust to the schedule,” Adler says. “The other day I went to bed at 8 a.m., hoping to sleep until 4 p.m., but I woke up at 2:30. So I figured I’d go in to work.” He can’t afford to be late, since one of his tasks is to choose the musical selection—“I Can See Clearly Now” and “Get Up, Stand Up” are two picks—that “wakes up” Spirit every morning, but which mostly serves to psych up the staff for the day ahead, since Spirit and Opportunity—smart as they are—can’t actually hear anything. Not that anyone really needs an extra boost these days.

“In theory, we’re supposed to work four days and then take three days off,” Adler says. “But no one wants to stay away. It’s too exciting.”