On August 6th, 2012, hundreds of scientists stormed the mission operations center at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, eager to take control of the Curiosity rover. Moments before, the blue-shirted engineering team had stuck the most improbable of landings, and the JPL campus was abuzz with celebrity guests and news crews. Over the coming weeks, members of the science team would jockey for position at overflowing work stations, scurry around hallways from meeting to meeting, and plot the course for the instruments they had worked for decades to bring to the surface of Mars. It was a dynamic – if occasionally slightly chaotic – time at mission control. The buoyant mood was contagious, and hardened scientists would often stop and stare at Curiosity’s latest images, awestruck wonder trumping procedural expediency.
On August 6th, 2013, the scene at Curiosity’s mission control will be markedly different. The engineering contingent that manages uplinks and downlinks continues its regimen, but the science team will be relatively invisible. The geologists, mineralogists, and geochemists are as engaged as ever, of course, but they’re connected remotely, tethered to the mission operations center by a sophisticated architecture of network-based software and teleconferences.
MSL has been a grand undertaking with several flashy achievements. The fire and brimstone of launch, the ridiculous SkyCrane landing, the laser-zapping chemical analyses – all demonstrably difficult tasks. Coordinating mission operations is less glamorous, but ensuring that a car-sized rover on another planet is operated securely, efficiently, and creatively with input from around the world is no small task. Even the smallest slip-up could cripple the rover for days or irreparably damage mission hardware. And despite NASA’s experience with similar challenges posed by earlier rovers, MSL’s complexity adds a new degree of difficulty.
So Ashwin Vasavada, the mission’s Deputy Project Scientist who helped oversee the shift to distributed operations, was understandably nervous about the transition. “Planning it on paper in the abstract before landing is one thing,” he says, “but you don’t really know how to do something until you actually do it.” Vasavada points to the teleconference-based meetings and proprietary websharing platform as the technological glue holding the enterprise together. “These tools are proving to be pretty robust,” he notes, “but we’re living at the edge of what this technology can do.”
Meanwhile, individual team members have effectively self-sorted into various working groups and strategic units, finding niches that may or may not have been the roles they originally had in mind. “On Mars time, when the whole team was at JPL, it was a little easier,” Vasavada explains, “since we had the ability to quickly run around the corner and ask someone a question.” Things may be running a little bit slower, but deliberation breeds attentiveness, and the strict slate of meetings and checklists keeps everything on schedule.
On the strategic side of the equation, Vasavada notes the opportunity cost of Curiosity’s unexpectedly lengthy investigations at Yellowknife Bay. What initially began as a jaunt to “check out the high thermal inertia unit” snowballed into an extended drilling engagement that lasted several months longer than anticipated. Vasavada attributes the ballooning timeline to two factors: “The science was so good, it caused us to linger,” he says, “and the things we did explore took longer than expected due to technical reasons.” Curiosity’s time at Yellowknife did produce some remarkable findings of past habitable conditions, but much of the team believes more distant targets hold even richer scientific paydirt.
So now, already halfway through its nominal two year mission, Curiosity is finally heading for the hills of the Gale Crater central mound – a putative geological wonderland that lured the rover to this particular corner of Mars in the first place. “Yellowknife dominated our first year and ended up being a really positive story in the end, but it’s not what we were expecting to do,” says Vasavada.
“That’s the cost of doing something no one’s ever done before.”
