Destination Mars (14 page)

While the mission had flown under the radar for some time, when the landing was nigh, there was a ripple of delayed excitement—and concern—from NASA headquarters in Washington, DC: “We realized that Pathfinder was not going to be a little project. It might be little to us, but it was big to the outside world. We had so we lived [in the shadow of] of another mission, and much of NASA was just ignoring us. It wasn't until just before we landed that NASA upper management said, ‘We better check this project out…’ They knew about it of course, as they were funding us, but they were keeping their eyes away toward other challenges. They visited us just before we landed, and people like me told them why we thought this might work because they were not necessarily expecting success. They were
hoping
for success, but their confidence level was not very high.”

It was no coincidence that, while the pressure from NASA and JPL might have been lighter than other missions, the pressure from the outside world was immense—for Mars Pathfinder was the first mission that was truly
live.

“The good news is that we had a talented webmaster. Recall that at that time, 1997, the web was still fairly new. So he figured out how to use mirroring, so that the public could go to different websites, depending on where you lived, and you'd be redirected to a different server that had the Pathfinder website mirrored. This webmaster went around and actually talked to all these other
companies about hosting us for free, and he was successful at it. As a consequence, when people actually went to the web to find out how the thing was going, not to just CNN, we had a huge spike in activity. We were astounded by how many were people were there. It was a different era in terms of bandwidth, we basically produced a huge spike in Internet traffic, which clogged things up for awhile. At that time it was completely unprecedented, but it gave people a taste of what might happen in the future. Our webmaster single-handedly figured out how to connect all these people, to make our website a success, and make it cool. He's one of the unsung heroes of Pathfinder.”

And so is Rob Manning, along with hundreds of others at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

A
fter the failure of the Mars 96 mission, Russia must have felt “Mars Fatigue.” Virtually every mission the Russians had sent off to the Red Planet had met with failure, from outright launch failure to trajectories askew (missing the planet entirely) to landers that failed upon touchdown. In any case, their record could be seen as one of failure perfected.
¹

However, this is too simplistic. Much has been learned along the way, and one only need look at their successes with the hellhole that is Venus to see that the Soviet/Russian unmanned program has great merit. And, as the old Russian proverb says, “One beaten person is worth two unbeaten ones.”

It is perhaps in this spirit that the Russian Federation approached its cooperation with the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission. Launched in 2003 atop a Russian rocket, the mission included many components of its own failed Mars 96 project. In a bit of technological cross-pollination, some of the technology on Mars 96 had come from Western Europe, so this was not as much an admission of need on the Russian part as a chance for continued cooperation. In addition to the European Space Agency's role, NASA joined the effort, bringing expertise in tracking and control to the table.
²

Mars Express derived its name in part due to the extremely short distance the spacecraft had to cover at that particular launch opportunity: in 2003, Mars and Earth were closer than
they had been in sixty thousand years. It would not do to wait for the next one. It should be noted that at under $200 million (US), it was also one of the cheapest Mars missions on record.

The probe consisted of two major components: the Euro-Russian Mars Express Orbiter and the British Beagle 2 lander. The lander was a small and fairly simple craft, designed to assess the usual components of the Martian environment—weather, landing-site geology and geochemistry—and even search for indicators of life. Unique to this craft were its origins: rather than the usual government-industry collaboration, Beagle 2 was born in academia. A professor at the United Kingdom's Open University, in association with the University of Leicester, promoted the idea, eventually drawing in two other universities and four industry partners. The final result was a worthy craft, a small “clamshell” probe with a manipulator arm, designed to land via parachute and airbags, not unlike the Mars Pathfinder before it.

The successful orbiter followed traditional concepts, with a central body flanked by solar panels. The instruments onboard were designed to meet an increasingly familiar set of goals:

A spectrometer working in both visible and infrared wavelengths called OMEGA would determine surface mineral composition.

Another spectrometer in the ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths, called SPICAM, was specifically designed for sensing the composition of the atmosphere.

A radar altimeter called MARSIS would seek subsurface water.

A Fourier Spectrometer to measure atmospheric temperature and pressure.

A high-resolution stereo camera could photograph surface features.

And various radio and energy-sensing experiments were also onboard.

Mars Express was also equipped, as were Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to be a relay for NASA's other Mars landers and rovers.

As the craft neared Mars, the Beagle 2 separated to continue along its own path, bound for the planet's surface. It eventually made it, but not alive. So far as can be gleaned from the data, some part of the landing system failed and Beagle crashed.

The Mars Express orbiter was luckier, attaining orbit around the planet in late December 2003. This mission eschewed aero-braking; a small rocket engine was used for slowing and to allow orbital capture. As a result, the craft went into a highly elliptical orbit, 185 miles from the surface at its lowest point and 6,280 miles at its highest. Not ideal for orbital work, but far simpler (and safer) than pursuing a circular orbit.

Notable accomplishments of Mars Express are many. The poles were studied, resulting in a measurement of 15 percent water ice and 85 percent carbon dioxide there. Methane and ammonia were sensed in the atmosphere; this is noteworthy because neither would last very long in the Martian air, so a source of continual replenishment must exist. And that source could be active volcanoes, hydrothermal vents or…
living things.
³

Of course, water was again spotted, both as current ice deposits and as areas indicative of a wet past. Intensive atmospheric investigations were made, helping to identify the rate at which the air is thinning on Mars. Hydrated (water-altered) minerals were observed at the poles, and similar rocks were spotted in Valles Marineris, which continues to narrow down the time scale of the aqueous episodes of Mars. The idea of a wetter Mars in the distant past, followed by a drier, harsher planet in more recent epochs, as seen in the geological record, was strengthened. Auroral displays were observed above areas of strong magnetic activity. Finally, the lumpy gravitational field was observed and recorded.

The MARSIS instrument allowed for a more direct look beneath the surface of the planet, revealing yet more indications
of subsurface water. MARSIS was further able to probe the intricacies of the polar caps, giving a better idea of the total mass of water ice there. The southern ice cap alone has a maximum depth of over two miles, and if melted, it could cover the entire globe to a depth of about thirty-five feet! Finally, a fascinating frozen mass of water was found in the Elysium region near the Martian equator—a place it really had no right to be. And it is young by geological standards—only about five million years old.

Not bad for a seemingly dry, dead world.

The mission of Mars Express has been extended numerous times and continues to this day. The probe returns a continuing stream of images and data from Mars and serves as a valued complement to NASA's own orbiters as well as an outpost of European scientific endeavors. Results from this mission have added greatly to the ever-growing knowledge of the Martian environment and its processes. In particular, the puzzling observations of stray methane in the Martian atmosphere have many researchers intrigued.

Europe and its partners will return to Mars with the ExoMars probe soon, possibly as early as 2016. With good planning and a dash of luck, some of these questions may be resolved.
⁴

I
t came from nowhere, hid in the darkness, attacked things earthly and then retreated once again.

It was the Great Galactic Ghoul, the monster that hides somewhere between the orbits of Earth and Mars in our solar system, whose sole purpose is to devour unwary spacecraft and plunge earthbound scientists into despair. And the ghoul is good at its job.

Almost forty spacecraft have headed off to Mars. Nineteen have arrived intact and functional. NASA's score: thirteen out of twenty. Better than the unfortunate whole (which is heavily weighted toward Soviet-era failures), but grim nonetheless. Had the Apollo program suffered such losses, few astronauts would have stepped up for future missions.

But Mars is not the moon, and traveling to the Red Planet (even ignoring the added complication of taking human beings) is far more difficult and time-consuming. Mars is a killer of probes, a consumer of human capital. And this is perhaps fitting for the God of War.

The origins of the ghoul's name are uncertain; some credit it to a
Time
magazine reporter from the 1960s, others to various personnel within JPL and NASA. However, one recent mention occurred in 1997 referring to the partial blockage of the Mars Pathfinder's rover ramp by the deflated airbags (the problem was later resolved, and the ghoul was cheated out of lunch).
¹

Over the years, the ghoul has gobbled up many machines,
primarily but not exclusively from the early days of space exploration. A partial list includes:

1960

Mars 1960 A, USSR—Launch failure

Mars 1960 B, USSR—Launch failure

1962

Sputnik 22 (Mars 1962 A), USSR—Broke up shortly after launch

Mars 1, USSR—Lost contact before Mars flyby

Sputnik 24 (Mars 1962 B), USSR—Failed to leave Earth orbit

1964

Mariner 3, US (Mariner 4 succeeded)—Launch shroud failed to deploy properly

Zond 2, USSR—Lost communication ninety days before reaching Mars

1969

Mars 1969 A, USSR—Launch failure

Mars 1969 B, USSR—Launch failure

1971

Cosmos 419 (Mars 1971 A), USSR—Launch failure

Mariner 8, US (Mariner 9 succeeded)—Launch failure

Mars 2, USSR—Orbiter succeeded, lander crashed on Mars

Mars 3, USSR—Successful landing on Mars, then operated fifteen seconds on the surface before failure

1973

Mars 4, USSR—Missed Martian orbit, flew by into deep space

Mars 5, USSR—Lasted nine days in Martian orbit before failure

Mars 6, USSR—Some data returned before crashing on Mars

Mars 7, USSR—Lander separated early and missed Mars entirely

1988

Phobos 1, USSR—Lost contact in space

Phobos 2, USSR—Lost contact in space

1992

Mars Observer, US—Lost contact in space

1996

Mars 96, Russia—Launch failure

1998

Nozomi (Planet-B), Japan—Failed to orbit Mars

Mars Climate Orbiter, US—Erroneous aerobraking maneuver, broke up in Martian atmosphere

1999

Mars Polar Lander, US—Crashed on Martian surface

Deep Space 2 (affiliated with MPL), US—Crashed on Martian surface

…and so forth.
²
Surveying the list, one might wonder (a) why the Russians bother to continue trying at all and (b) what the heck they did wrong. Analysis of the once-competing US and USSR programs yields mixed conclusions, but it is apparent that Mars exploration has been largely an American game. And as noted, even JPL has its troubles.

December 11, 1998: many folks at work around the United States were just beginning to ponder Christmas vacation activities. But at JPL, most eyes were on the launch of the Mars Climate Orbiter, or MCO. A successful launch would result in Martian orbit late in the following year, and reams of new data about the weather and surface conditions on Mars. MCO was also to act as a relay for the next landers scheduled to set down on Mars. Anticipation was high.

Then, on January 3, 1999, the counterpart to MCO, the Mars Polar Lander, departed Cape Canaveral also bound for Mars. It
would descend to the surface of Mars shortly after MCO and begin tandem operations. Life was good.

The ghoul awoke, smelling opportunity, and in late September 1999 reached out and wrapped his taloned hand around the Mars Climate Orbiter. On the twenty-third, communication was lost between JPL and the spacecraft. This was at a critical time when the craft was to begin aerobraking maneuvers to slow it down and circularize its orbit, as the Mars Global Surveyor had successfully done before it. The probe entered the Martian atmosphere at an improper angle and, so far as is known, broke up upon encountering the denser-than-expected air.

The ghoul retreated into the darkness, its simple task complete. Hearts were broken on Earth, and a light rain of thin metal parts burned up high in the Martian sky.

JPL mourned the Mars Climate Orbiter…and looked forward to recovery with a successful Mars Polar Lander.

The ghoul smiled a knowing smile.

JPL and NASA scrambled, meanwhile, to determine the cause of the failure. The press releases were somewhat terse (but straightforward) at first, as there was not a lot of information available to the authors: “Early this morning at about 2 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time the orbiter fired its main engine to go into orbit around the planet. All the information coming from the spacecraft leading up to that point looked normal. The engine burn began five minutes before the spacecraft passed behind the planet as seen from Earth. Flight controllers did not detect a signal when the spacecraft was expected to come out from behind the planet.”
³

“We had planned to approach the planet at an altitude of about 150 kilometers [93 miles]” said Richard Cook, project manager for the Mars Surveyor Operations Project at JPL. “We thought we were doing that, but upon review of the last six to eight hours of data leading up to arrival, we saw indications that the actual approach altitude had been much lower: it appears that
the actual altitude was about 60 kilometers [37 miles]. We are still trying to figure out why that happened.”
⁴

Huh? The probe went into a low and fatal orbit, in this day and age? After all the Apollo flights, after the many successful Mars orbiters? After the complex Viking missions, for god's sake? After aiming spacecraft at planets throughout the solar system, swinging around four or five of them to reach Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus? Is this the same JPL that tracked Pioneer 10 all the way out of the solar system and into deep space beyond?

Lamentably, yes. And it was a simple human error that precipitated the deadly mistake.

A few days later, the painfully inward-looking announcement came out: “The root cause of the loss of the spacecraft was the failure of translation of English units into metric units in a segment of ground-based, navigation-related mission software…. [T]he failure review board has identified other significant factors that allowed the error to be born, and then let it linger and propagate to the point where it resulted in a major error in our understanding of the spacecraft's path as it approached Mars.”
⁵

The announcement went on to elaborate on a multilevel failure. Too few personnel, a new management design, the handoff of the spacecraft from the design, build, and launch team to a new, multi-mission operations team. In short, JPL was trying to do too much with too little. It had always been known for this ability, but had crossed a threshold. And a large part of this was, quietly, placed at the feet of NASA top leadership and the quest for “faster, better, cheaper.”

But there was one more Mars-bound mission currently en route. It was the Mars Polar Lander, and its success would redeem the lab's reputation. Perhaps the ghoul's appetite had been sated, for now.

On January 3, 1999, the lab tried again. Mars Polar Lander left the cape aboard a Delta II rocket to begin the long coast to Mars. All went well as the craft left the influence of Earth and headed
off on a complex trajectory toward Mars. The lander, which measured ten feet by four feet, would descend to the Martian polar area to search for water. Two parasitic craft were affixed, Deep Space A and Deep Space B. These were impactors, and they would descend ahead of the lander to hard-impact the surface and do science work of their own, penetrating up to a yard into the icy soil. The mission would be one for the record books, and could revolutionize our view of the Martian polar regions.

The probe carried the usual array of cameras, a laser-sounding instrument that could detect aerosols in the atmosphere, a robotic arm with digging scoop, a gas analyzer (with eight tiny ovens) to determine amounts of oxygen, water, carbon dioxide, and other life-bearing elements, and a microphone to send home the sounds of Mars. It was a wonderful package for exploring an exiting environment. And attached to it was abundant excitement, and that indefinable attribute of human endeavor, hope.

On December 3 of the same year, the craft entered the Martian atmosphere. All was going well. The lander plummeted into the thin veil of Mars, soon to deploy a large parachute to slow the fall. The usual communication blackout occurred as it screamed through the thickening air, headed for the planned soft landing…

And the controllers waited, and waited. And they waited some more. All too soon, it was apparent that something had gone wrong.

Increasingly anxious attempts were made to establish communication with the lander. The Mars Global Surveyor orbiter was pressed into service in an attempt to photograph the planned landing zone and find the craft, but to no avail.

Subsequent analysis by the Failure Review Board came up with a likely hypothesis. The vibrations emitted by the deployment of the landing legs may have caused the onboard computer to assume that the craft had landed, and then it did what it was supposed to do—shut down the descent engines. Unfortunately, the ship would still have been well over one hundred feet above the
frozen ground, and if the hypothesis is correct, would have slammed into the cold soil at deadly speed.
⁶

Whatever the actual events, the mission was concluded in a rude and depressing fashion. Repeated communication attempts failed to rouse the lander, and the mission was assumed to be lost. Coming on the heels of the loss of the ill-fated Mars Climate Orbiter, it was another black eye for unmanned space exploration, and the blame fell to JPL. Tears were shed, heads hung low, and the team members who had been so fastidiously assembled to operate this exciting mission were prematurely disbanded and sent off to other projects or back to their home institutions. The Mars Polar Lander joined the annals of lost spacecraft, and the ghoul licked its lips once more.

It would be irrational to feel cursed, but more than one “JPL'er” could not completely abandon the idea. But a more relevant assessment of the root cause of this failure, coming just under three months after the previous debacle, prompted Thomas Young, the chairman of the Mars Program Independent Assessment Team, to proclaim that the program “was underfunded by at least 30 percent.” Insufficient staffing, insufficient testing, and insufficient review had taken a fatal toll once again.
⁷

And, once again, “faster, better, cheaper” had proved to be anything but.

You don't hear the ghoul mentioned at JPL much anymore, though it can still incur a nervous chuckle when mentioned. More to the point, when discussing some of the failures from the past, are memories of poor decisions from the top and questionable implementation within the ranks. Like any large bureaucracy, NASA has angels and a few demons scattered throughout. But on the whole, the agency (and while managed by Caltech, JPL is a part of NASA) does amazing work with ever-tightening budgets. If the failure rate even began to approach that of the early days—the 1960s—public (and more to the point, the dreaded congressional) outcry would probably slam the lid closed on the entire operation.
As it is, funding is desperately hard to come by. But the men and women of JPL soldier on, driven not by stratospheric salaries or visions of corporate power and grandeur, but by the desire—no, the
need—to
investigate the great darkness beyond, to discover the mechanisms of the universe, to set foot—whether flesh or robotic—onto new worlds and find the microcosmos within. And so, despite the setbacks, JPL moves forward—with a revamped management structure and a revised rule book—to explore. And the ghoul will have poor hunting in the new millennium.

But he will be there…waiting.