Curiosity: An Inside Look at the Mars Rover Mission and the People Who Made It Happen - Softcover

Pyle, Rod

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616149337 ISBN 13: 9781616149338

Publisher: Prometheus, 2014

Synopsis

The story of the people who designed, built, launched, landed, and are now operating the Mars rover CuriosityAward-winning science writer Rod Pyle provides a behind-the-scenes look into the recent space mission to Mars of Curiosity--the unmanned rover that is now providing researchers with unprecedented information about the red planet. Pyle follows the team of dedicated scientists whose job it is to explore new vistas on Mars. Readers will also join Curiosity, the most advanced machine ever sent to another planet, on its journey of discovery. Drawing on his contacts at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the author provides stunning insights into how this enthusiastic team of diverse individuals uses a revolutionary onboard laboratory of chemistry, geology, and physics instruments to unravel the profound secrets of the Red Planet.Readers will meet: Robert Manning, chief engineer for every rover mission since Pathfinder; John Grotzinger, the chief scientist of the entire mission; Vandi Tompkins, the software designer who keeps the rover on track; Bobak Ferdowsi, famed "Mohawk Guy" from Mission Control; Adam Steltzner, the Elvis-like Entry, Descent and Landing Lead; Al Chen, chief of flight dynamics and the voice of JPL during Curiosity's treacherous landing; and many others.And of course, Pyle describes the adventures of the Curiosity rover itself, from landing through the first samples, drilling, and discovering a habitable past on the planet, to reaching the ultimate target: Mount Sharp, in the center of Gale Crater.America is once again at the forefront of a new space age and Curiosity is just the beginning of many exciting new discoveries to come.

About this title

About the Author

Rod Pyle is the author of the widely acclaimed book Destination Mars--called "the best recent overview of Mars missions" by the Washington Post--and also Destination Moon, Missions to the Moon, and a popular audiobook called The Space Race. He has produced numerous documentaries for the History Channel and Discovery Communications, including the widely praised Modern Marvels: Apollo 11. He has been an assistant professor at the University of La Verne and a lecturer with NASA's Johnson Space Center.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Curiosity

An Inside Look at the Mars Rover Mission and the People Who Made it Happen

By Rod Pyle

Prometheus Books

Copyright © 2014 Rod Pyle
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61614-933-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, 9, 
Author's Note, 13, 
1. Death Valley Days, 15, 
2. Tango Delta: Touchdown, 23, 
3. A Long Road to a Red Planet, 29, 
4. Setting the Stage, 36, 
5. The Scarecrow, 47, 
6. Laying the Foundation: Mars Pathfinder, 53, 
7. Curiosity's Cousins: Spirit and Opportunity, 63, 
8. A Whole New Ball Game, 75, 
9. Where to Go?, 82, 
10. The Science Platform, 89, 
11. Rocks, Rocks, Rocks!, 98, 
12. Earth Attacks!, 109, 
13. Delays, Delays ..., 118, 
14. My Mars, 127, 
15. Hurtling to Mars, 131, 
16. Sky Crane, 137, 
17. Arriving, 149, 
18. Weird Watches: Living on Mars Time, 160, 
19. The Orbiters: Help from Above, 165, 
20. First Moves, 173, 
21. Meetings, 180, 
22. Place Names and Paranoia, 191, 
23. On to Glenelg, 198, 
24. "One for the History Books ...", 208, 
25. Interlude: Post AGU Conference, 217, 
26. The Yellow Brick Road, 220, 
27. The Drill, 231, 
28. Calling John Klein, 239, 
29. Red Mars, Gray Mars, 246, 
30. Go Southwest, Young Rover, 255, 
31. Discoveries!, 260, 
32. A Drive to Mount Sharp, 268, 
Epilogue: You Gotta Have Curiosity, 273, 
Select Bibliography, 279, 
Index, 285, 

CHAPTER 1

DEATH VALLEY DAYS

Vultures cut lazy circles in the sky above me, patiently awaiting my certain demise. Dropping my gaze, I could see the heat shimmering off the mountainside. It was well over one hundred degrees and the last of the water was long gone. I was close to forty miles from the nearest road and the situation looked bleaker than the late dinner seating on the Titanic.

What did this potentially life-threatening situation have to do with Curiosity on Mars?

Then the image of Lawren Markle, the dapper (and sweatless, in stark contrast to my drenched shirt) PR rep from Caltech, swam into focus before my parched and crispy eyes.

"You doing OK?" he said with a look of genuine and entirely reasonable concern, given my condition. "Sure," I croaked. "I'm ... good...." It was then that the death fantasy evaporated and I was back in an equally grim state—atop a barren, rocky peak in Death Valley with a group of science journalists and our Edmund Hillary—esque geological guide, Caltech's Dr. John Grotzinger.

I looked from Grotzinger, who was holding forth on a geological premise that was not quite soaking in, to Lawren, who had refocused his attention to Grotzinger, where it belonged. Having Grotzinger as our tour guide in this garden spot of Death Valley was a true privilege. If I survived it, I would be very grateful in a week or so, once I was able to rehydrate.

Reality hit: we were probably a mile from the road, it was about eighty-four degrees, and we had been hiking for about twenty minutes. I was wiped out. This was not promising to be my best day.

The invitation I received in my e-mail a week before had sounded exciting and bore the return address of Caltech. I was invited to join Dr. John Grotzinger, mission scientist (a.k.a. Big Kahuna) for the Mars Science Laboratory, as he hosted a two-day press junket into Death Valley to discuss some of the formations that informed earthbound geologists about what they might find on parts of Mars. It all looked like good fun, and there would be only a handful of us, maybe twelve science writers. I would be the sole outside video guy; JPL's John Beck-Hoffman would shoot for their media operation.

At the end of the note was added, "Wear sturdy shoes, as we will do a bit of walking." Oddly, I missed the hidden meaning even though I had taken a string of geology classes in college. I should have remembered that this was geologist's code for "wear steel-toed boots, as we are likely to run into rattlers and possibly even desert snarks as we hike over hill and dale looking for the perfect Precambrian outcrop" ... or in this case, as we hike about twelve miles, mostly vertical, in the hottest and driest place in the continental United States.

What may have thrown me off was that Grotzinger is not the old-breed of geologist I knew from my increasingly distant college days. He wore no suspenders, no plaid flannel shirt, and did not smoke a pipe. He had no gold-miner's belly hanging over a turquoise-buckled beltline. He is, in fact, tall, slim, irritatingly fit, and tan. His weathered good looks would be welcomed into the Explorer's Club. While his explanations can be challenging to follow, he is patient and graceful with the laypeople. He can be folksy and technical in the same sentence, so clearly the geologist's pedigree was there.

We traversed many roads and junctions on our way into the high desert, and the map showed many nearby avenues with such charming (and informative) names like Talc Road, Sulfate Road, and Cactus Flats Road. A few hours out of LA, we reached our destination: Shoshone, California, with a population of thirty-one. Our group almost doubled it.

As we checked in at the cinder-block penitentiary that was to serve as our motel for the night, an optimistically named "inn," Grotzinger wandered over to one of the hulking, chalk-white Caltech SUVs that had transported us there. By the time I got my camera equipment and other packings stowed in the room, he was completing elaborate dry-marker murals on the rear passenger-side door of one of these overwrought grocery haulers. Big murals. Murals of complicated rock bedding, uplift, and other geological delights. And on the front door, he had drawn surprisingly artistic renderings of very steep Alpine-looking mountains, which I hoped were metaphorical. As I watched, and thought back to my own college geology field trips, I wondered if any of his compatriots had ever swapped out a permanent marker in the SUV drawing kit just for laughs. I know I would have. "Ha ha, that was funny. Here's the turpentine ... oh, that takes off the car's paint too, now doesn't it ..."

As we waited for the formal talk to begin, a three-foot-long and very red snake worked its way across the roadway and for some reason (probably seeking the same relieving shade that I would soon pine for) decided to work its way through the spokes of the truck's wheel. Our group tittered nervously. Most of us were now regretting the light athletic shoes we had chosen to wear.

We moved to a fire ring nearby (why a fire ring in Death Valley, you might ask? To keep the sidewinders and rabid coyotes away at night, of course), and Grotzinger began discussing the day ahead. I missed most of it because I don't shoot video out on location all that often and was fiddling with my camera gear and cleaning the sand off the parts I had already dropped twice. But I had it running by the time he got to the most immediately relevant part of the talk, moving back to the mural on the Suburban. "Then well end up at this formation, here in the foothills. It's the Glimmenshorp Finkleheimer formation of preglandular hermphratite ..." (this was not exactly what was said, but it's how it registered in my overheated brain).

I was still rolling video, so I meekly asked, "John, for my audience would you mind giving me the eighth-grade, Weekly Reader version of the story?" He paused for a moment, looking at the ground. I thought perhaps I had committed some kind of faux pas, but I think he was merely gathering his thoughts. At least I hope so.

"Um, OK. So what these structures represent is a feature called stromatolites, that we interpret on Earth to represent the interplay between microbial mats that are living on the seafloor and sediment that comes in and interacts with the mat. The sediment is ultimately why it becomes a rock. If it's just left as a microbial mat, the organics will decay and there will be no record of that, but by having the sediment come in, it can get cemented and turn into a rock. Then we see these features in the rock record and infer that there were once microbes living on the seafloor that were forming these structures."

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.

"Were 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.

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.

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 doctorate 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.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Curiosity by Rod Pyle. Copyright © 2014 Rod Pyle. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1616149337
• ISBN 13: 9781616149338
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300