mars rover

What We Learned from the Perseverance Rover’s First Year on Mars

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Despite some unexpected challenges, team members are setting lofty goals for the rover in 2022

What We Learned from the Perseverance Rover's First Year on Mars
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover snapped this selfie on September 10, 2021—the 198th Martian day of the mission.

One year ago NASA’s Perseverance rover plunged through the Martian atmosphere and safely landed in Jezero Crater, a 45-kilometer-wide gouge that scientists suspect once hosted a deep, long-lived lake. The rover’s ultimate target is near Jezero’s western edge: a large, fan-shaped pile of sediments that washed into the basin through a notch in the crater rim about 3.5 billion years ago. In other words, the target is a river delta—the exact type of environment that could preserve signs of ancient Martian life-forms.

Perseverance is the tip of the spear in humanity’s grand quest to find traces of a relict Martian biosphere. The $2.7-billion mission’s overarching objective is to collect dozens of Martian rock samples, many of them from the delta. Then, sometime in the early 2030s, a sequence of spacecraft should return those samples to Earth for up-close scrutiny, possibly allowing scientists to at last answer the question of whether the solar system was ever home to more than one life-bearing world.

“Perhaps past microbial life could have existed on Mars when it was a little warmer and a little wetter,” says Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division. “The surface of Mars—the geology, the geologic history—is preserved. We can see back 4.3 billion years on the surface…. You can’t do that other places.”ADVERTISEMENT

Stitched together from 16 images captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover, this video pans across a panoramic view of a portion of Jezero Crater, revealing brown hills in the middle distance that are part of the crater’s ancient river delta.

Perseverance’s early observations are already revealing that Jezero’s geologic history is richer than previously imagined, with dramatic shifts in environmental conditions. Now, as the rover ramps up its sample-collection campaign, scientists back home are eager to send it west, toward the alluring river delta and its potential biological treasure. Mars, however, does not always play by the rules. Already the planet has thrown a few unanticipated challenges into the rover’s first Earth year on the Martian surface.

“Every time we’ve sent a mission to Mars, we’ve had to learn more about how Mars actually is going to treat our spacecraft, and we have to learn how to operate in that environment,” Glaze says. But Perseverance is doing well, she adds. “Things are moving along at a really good clip. [The team is] making pretty great progress.”

EARLY SCIENCE OUTSIDE THE LANDING STRIP

Perseverance is not alone in celebrating its first Martian anniversary. It was one of three space missions to reach Mars last February. The United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter is still circling the planet. And China’s multicomponent Tianwen-1 mission—composed of an orbiter, a lander and a rover—is there, too. That mission’s rover, Zhurong, is currently exploring a Martian plain called Utopia Planitia, some 1,800 kilometers northeast of Perseverance’s location.ADVERTISEMENT

Back in Jezero Crater, however, Perseverance’s Martian adventures took an unexpected turn almost right away, starting with where the rover touched down on February 18, 2021.

“In all of the simulations that were done beforehand, the most likely place to land was a big, flat area that we started calling ‘the landing strip’ right in front of the delta—I mean, literally within 100 meters of the front of the delta,” says the California Institute of Technology’s Ken Farley, the mission’s project scientist. “So we were joking around that on February 19 we were going to wake up looking at a wall in front of us. And, um, we didn’t.”

An annotated satellite image of Jezero Crater.
Annotated satellite image of Jezero Crater dated to December 15, 2021, shows the route Perseverance (light blue dot) had taken (white line) into the crater’s Séítah region since touching down on February 18, 2021. The rover would retrace its path back to the landing site before following a new route (blue line) to Jezero’s river delta.

As the rover descended to the surface, an onboard navigation system autonomously guided Perseverance to an area the software had deemed “safe”—which it was. But instead of landing within an Earth day’s drive of the delta, the rover ended up about 2.5 kilometers away, on the other side of a treacherous, sandy, rock-strewn terrain called Séítah, which is Navajo for “amid the sand.” Circumnavigating that patch would more than double the length of the rover’s path to its primary exploration target. Yet as Perseverance scouted its immediate surroundings, mission controllers chose to let it linger on the crater floor and explore Séítah before doubling back and heading to the delta.

“I worked on Curiosity ever since it landed in Gale Crater,” says Perseverance’s deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “And [with] that very first image that we got down from Perseverance, I looked at that landscape and thought, ‘Wow, we are not in Gale Crater anymore.’ This is nothing like [what] I have ever seen in Gale.”

Instead of landing in lake sediments, the rover found itself on fractured bedrock littered with bizarre, sometimes dusty rocks. Many of those rocks are covered in an intriguing purplish coating that resembles desert varnishes on Earth—patinas associated with hardy, radiation-resistant types of terrestrial microbes. Initially, the rock textures and geochemistry defied classification. But once the rover had ground through the weathered surface of a Jezero rock, scientists, saw exactly what they would have expected in a lava flow—not a lake bottom.ADVERTISEMENT

“All of the rocks that we have confidently identified are igneous,” Farley says. “They have nothing to do with the lake.”

Produced volcanically, the igneous rocks on Jezero’s floor contain large olivine crystals that typically form near the bottoms of thick lava lakes and flows. Scientists still do not know how or when the rocks ended up in Jezero, but it is now clear that the surface Perseverance is rolling across is not the original crater floor. Further investigations revealed that the rocks have been altered by water, which excavated small tunnels and pockets in their interiors that are now filled with salty minerals. At least on Earth, such minerals are perfect for preserving signs of life. Their presence, plus the mysterious purple varnishes, makes these volcanic rocks unexpectedly tantalizing targets.

”Igneous rocks are typically not where you look to find signs of life because they come from really hot magmas that life doesn’t necessarily favor,” Stack Morgan says. “But when you have these rocks sitting on the surface or in the subsurface interacting with water, then you’re creating small niches within the rock itself that could be habitable. You’ve got chemical ingredients in there; you’ve got water in there; you’ve got precipitation of salt minerals.”

As Perseverance cast its gaze farther afield, it spied Jezero’s mountainous crater rim and the wall of the delta. (“We confirmed we do a have a delta, so check that box,” Stack Morgan says.) It also spotted a curious rocky outcrop called Kodiak, which team members have used to gauge the depth of Jezero’s ancient waters. Patterns on the rock suggest that on at least one occasion, water levels dipped surprisingly low, falling to more than 100 meters below an outflow channel to the east. Other observations provide hints of a deluge that gushed into the crater with enough power to carry along the large boulders now haphazardly strewn in some areas. In other words, Jezero’s lake was occasionally stable and placid and at other times flushed by periods of intense runoff.

The rock layers of Kodiak.
Rock layers of Kodiak, a flat-topped hill near the center of this image, reveal ancient chapters of Jezero Crater’s history marked by gradual sediment deposition followed by massive flooding. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

And oddly, Jezero appears to be much windier than anticipated. Fortunately, that has not bothered Perseverance’s robot friend, the helicopter named Ingenuity. Since April 2021 Ingenuity has been performing well—so well, in fact, that after its initial tests, the team began using it to help guide the rover through tricky terrains such as Séítah. “It aced those tests,” Farley says. “Now it is our companion, and it is continuing to fly and do recon for us.”ADVERTISEMENT

GO WEST, YOUNG ROVER

Collecting and storing samples has also turned out to be trickier than anticipated. Last August, when Perseverance took its first shot at collecting a rock core, mission personnel were optimistic. They had tested the machinery on terrestrial rocks and performed extensive troubleshooting on the software guiding the process. The target rock showed no obvious challenging quirks. The task should have been easy.

But the first coring tube was devastatingly empty. “To come up with a zero-volume empty tube was just mind-blowing, unfortunately,” says JPL’s Jessica Samuels, sample caching system lead for the mission. “That was never something we were worried about—not acquiring the sample. We were worried about so many other things.”

The rock, it turned out, had been so altered by water that it crumbled under the pressure of Perseverance’s drill—not an ideal result but one that left the team with a useful tube full of Martian atmosphere. That first sample failure was stressful, however, and if the problems continued, they could have scuttled the once-in-a-lifetime chance to gather and return pristine material from Mars.

A view of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter mid-flight,
View of NASA’s Martian helicopter Ingenuity in flight, as seen by the Perseverance rover on April 25, 2021. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Since then the team has regrouped and successfully collected six rock cores, which Samuels says is validation that the system actually works as planned. “It’s not us. It’s Mars,” she says. Indeed, Mars served up another episode of sample-collecting shenanigans when pebbles recently wedged themselves into the rover’s sample-caching hardware and Perseverance had to do a bit of a shimmy to shake them loose.

“There’s never a dull moment in sampling,” Samuels says. “It’s keeping us on our toes. And it’s keeping us continuing to think about the different environmental conditions.”ADVERTISEMENT

Overall retrieving a small cache of samples from Mars is an audacious task that is just barely within our technological grasp, even if each of the mission’s moving parts performs perfectly. “We’re pushing the limits of the technology we have today to land and launch a rocket from Mars that is essentially just big enough to get a basketball into orbit,” says Albert Haldemann, chief Mars engineer at the European Space Agency, a partner in the overall sample-return effort.

Perseverance’s already-collected igneous rock cores can be used to measure the strength of Mars’s ancient magnetic field and to precisely pin ages on the crater’s epochs. For now, scientists guess that water sloshed around in Jezero around 3.5 billion years ago, but Farley says there are half a billion years of uncertainty in that estimate. Soon, team members say, they will begin deciding when and where Perseverance should deposit a preliminary cache of materials—just in case the rover is no longer functioning by the time the next spacecraft arrives to retrieve its bounty.

“If everything is onboard Perseverance, and Perseverance dies unexpectedly, we’ve got nothing,” Haldemann says. “So a safety cache will be put down at a potential landing spot—sooner rather than later.”

Before it leaves the crater floor, Perseverance will fill two more of its 43 onboard, ultraclean sample tubes. Then it will turn west and make haste: “We’re gonna gun it for the delta,” Stack Morgan says.

Do Mars Rover Photos Show Potential Signs of Ancient Life?

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A careful study of images taken by the NASA rover Curiosity has revealed intriguing similarities between ancient sedimentary rocks on Mars and structures shaped by microbes on Earth. The findings suggest, but do not prove, that life may have existed earlier on the Red Planet.

Sketch Overlay on Mars Photograph
The photos were taken as the Mars rover Curiosity drove through the Gillespie Lake outcrop in Yellowknife Bay, a dry lakebed that underwent seasonal flooding billions of years ago. Mars and Earth shared a similar early history. The Red Planet was a much warmer and wetter world back then.
On Earth, carpet-like colonies of microbes trap and rearrange sediments in shallow bodies of water such as lakes and coastal areas, forming distinctive features that fossilize over time. These structures, known as microbially-induced sedimentary structures (or MISS), are found in shallow water settings all over the world and in ancient rocks spanning Earth’s history.

Nora Noffke, a geobiologist at Old Dominion University in Virginia, has spent the past 20 years studying these microbial structures. Last year, she reported the discovery of MISS that are 3.48 billion years old in the Western Australia’s Dresser Formation, making them potentially the oldest signs of life on Earth.
In a paper published online last month in the journal Astrobiology (the print version comes out this week), Noffke details the striking morphological similarities between Martian sedimentary structures in the Gillespie Lake outcrop (which is at most 3.7 billion years old) and microbial structures on Earth.

An overlay of sketch on a Mars photograph from above to assist in the identification of the structures on the rock bed surface used in a study by geobiologist Nora Noffke in the journal Astrobiology. The study suggests, but does not prove, potential signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.

The distinctive shapes include erosional remnants, pockets, domes, roll-ups, pits, chips and cracks, which on Earth can extend from a few centimeters to many kilometers.
Although Noffke makes a tantalizing case for possible signs of ancient life on Mars, her report is not a definitive proof that these structures were shaped by biology. Getting such confirmation would involve returning rock samples to Earth and conducting additional microscopic analyses, a mission that isn’t scheduled anytime in the near future.
“All I can say is, here’s my hypothesis and here’s all the evidence that I have,” Noffke says, “although I do think that this evidence is a lot.”
“The fact that she pointed out these structures is a great contribution to the field,” says Penelope Boston, a geomicrobiologist at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. “Along with the recent reports of methane and organics on Mars, her findings add an intriguing piece to the puzzle of a possible history for life on our neighboring planet.”
A careful analysis
Potential signs of microbially-induced sedimentary structures (MISS) erosional remnant on Mars (top); edge of a microbial mat–overgrown erosional remnant on Portsmouth Island, USA (middle); erosional remnant of a modern MISS on Mellum Island, Germany
“I’ve seen many papers that say ‘Look, here’s a pile of dirt on Mars, and here’s a pile of dirt on Earth,'” says Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center and an associate editor of the journal Astrobiology. “And because they look the same, the same mechanism must have made each pile on the two planets.'” [Life on Mars? The Exploration and Evidence]
McKay adds: “That’s an easy argument to make, and it’s typically not very convincing. However, Noffke’s paper is the most carefully done analysis of the sort that I’ve seen, which is why it’s the first of its kind published in Astrobiology.”
The images on which Noffke drew are publicly available on the Mars Science Laboratory page on NASA’s website.
“In one image, I saw something that looked very familiar,” Noffke recalls. “So I took a closer look, meaning I spent several weeks investigating certain images centimeter by centimeter, drawing sketches, and comparing them to data from terrestrial structures. And I’ve worked on these for 20 years, so I knew what to look for.”
Noffke compared the rover pictures to images taken at several sites on Earth, including modern sediment surfaces in Mellum Island, Germany; Portsmouth Island, USA; and Carbla Point, Western Australia; as well as older fossils of microbial mats in Bahar Alouane, Tunisia; the Pongola Supergroup in Africa; and the Dresser Formation in Western Australia.
The photos showed striking morphological similarities between the terrestrial and Martian sedimentary structures. [Poll: Do You Think Life Exists on Mars Now?]
The distribution patterns of the microbial structures on Earth vary depending on where they are found. Different types of structures are found together in different types of environments. For instance, microbial mats that grow in rivers will create a different set of associations than those that grow in seasonally flooded environments.
A comparison of cracks in Gillespie Lake outcrop on Mars and in a modern microbial mat in Bahar Alouane, Tunisia.

The patterns found in the Gillespie Lake outcrop are consistent with the microbial structures found in similar environments on Earth.
What’s more, the terrestrial structures change in a specific way over time. As the microbial mats form, grow, dry up, crack and re-grow, specific structures become associated with them. Here again, Noffke found that the distribution pattern in Martian rocks correspond with microbial structures on Earth that have changed over time. Taken together, these clues strengthen her argument beyond simply pointing out the similarities in shape.
In her paper, she also describes alternative processes through which these could have formed. For instance, the chips, pits and cracks could be the product of erosion by salt, water, or wind.
“But if the Martian structures aren’t of biological origin,” Noffke says, “then the similarities in morphology, but also in distribution patterns with regards to MISS on Earth would be an extraordinary coincidence.”
“At this point, all I’d like to do is point out these similarities,” she adds. “Further evidence must be provided to verify this hypothesis.”
Confirmation pending
Knob-shaped structures on Mars compared to similar structures caused by erosion of microbial mats at Carbla Point, Western Australia.

At the end of her report, Noffke outlines a detailed strategy for confirming the potential biological nature of the Martian structures. Unfortunately, one important step — returning samples to Earth for further analyses — is just not feasible yet.
Noffke also lists a series of measurements Curiosity could potentially do to strengthen the case if it came across such structures again, including looking for organic or chemical signatures using its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument.
But McKay says this likely would not work. “In principle, that instrument could tell us something about the nature of these materials biologically, if there were still large amounts of biological organics in the samples,” he explains. “But these are just ancient sedimentary structures, and biology has long since left.”
“What’s more, in practice this instrument is restricted,” he adds. “There was a contamination spill in the instrument presumably during landing. So it has a very high background contamination level.”

On Earth, scientists typically confirm the biological nature of microbial sediment structures by searching for specific microscopic textures, which involves cutting rocks into thin slices and studying them under a microscope.
On Mars, this would be very difficult do from an engineering perspective, although McKay doesn’t rule out the possibility for future missions. “I don’t know if it can be done, but engineers are pretty smart,” he says. “If you give them a challenge, they usually find a solution.”
He adds: “A sample-return mission would be the gold standard. But that’s just unlikely to happen anytime soon.”

10 years of “Opportunity” in Mars.

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http://m.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/10-years-of-opportunity-in-mars/article4328845.ece/

The Politics of Life on Mars.

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Speculation about life on Mars has been rampant this fall. Rumors that the Mars Curiosity Rover may have found evidence of life on Mars have surfaced twice in the past few weeks. The most recent rumor started when a member of the Curiosity team was quoted as saying that they had collected data that was “Earthshaking” and “one for the history books.” This led to a barrage of rumors that Curiosity may have found organic material on Mars and some people even speculated that life had been found. The reality gave no confirmation of life, but the NASA press conference on December 3, 2012 did reveal that some simple organics were found. They were not sure if they were indigenous to Mars, if they may have been residual organics from Earth, or if they had been deposited from other space objects (meteorites) impacting Mars.

Curiosity’s mission should give us the answer to this eventually as it is scheduled to continue for at least another 18 months and was recently “officially” extended indefinitely. This gives Curiosity ample time to sample soil and rocks in some highly promising locations within Gale Crater on Mars. If organics exist there, Curiosity should know within the next few months.

Although Curiosity is not designed to verify life, we are left to wonder — if Curiosity did discover life on Mars, what would be the impact of that discovery to the general public and to the future of human and robotic exploration of Mars?

One thing is certain, it would have a substantial impact, but the nature of that impact could move in many different directions. A popular belief is that if we found life on Mars this would accelerate our goals of sending humans to Mars as well as our robotic efforts, and also might transform our religious and societal beliefs. This isn’t necessarily the case.

Our Place in the Universe

In fact, we have already had a test run for this hypothesis. Back in 1996, scientists announced findings that indicated that they had found fossil evidence of microbial life forms on a Martian meteorite (ALH 84001) that had been found in Antarctica a decade earlier. The story became a media sensation and President Clinton conducted a press conference to discuss the discovery. The announcement certainly did impact our robotic missions planning, but it did little to advance human space flight (we didn’t change directions in human space flight until after the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated in the skies over Texas.) The public enthusiasm to the announcement was also very short lived and there is little evidence that it transformed anyone’s religious or societal viewpoint. Would the confirmation of current microbial life be different? Probably not. The public would be engaged for a while (and probably enthusiastically), but the enthusiasm would be relatively short lived. It would likely take the discovery of a higher life form to ignite the type of passionate debate and emotion that was seen in the movie Contact.

Save the Microbes!

Perhaps the greatest impact would be within the mission planning community and among policy makers. Life on Mars will almost certainly make human missions to Mars far more complicated to plan. Planetary protection protocols would be very strict as we planned human missions to Mars. We would have to assure that there would be no forward, nor backward, contamination. This would become a VERY serious issue.

We should expect potential lawsuits from “Mars environmentalists” trying to block ANY human missions to Mars, claiming that we threaten the existence of indigenous Martian life. We would almost certainly hear protestors yelling slogans like “We’ve ruined our own planet, what right do we have to ruin Mars.” This process would probably be similar to the reaction in advance of the launch of the Cassini mission to Saturn back in 1997. This mission was carrying 72 pounds of plutonium dioxide (not the more dangerous plutonium 239 used in nuclear weapons) to power the mission.

The mere fact that there was a form of plutonium on board sparked fears that if the rocket exploded, plutonium would rain down on central Florida. There were numerous protests outside NASA and there even was a legal challenge in the Federal Court of Hawaii challenging the mission’s Environmental Impact Statement. Only after this challenge was rejected in Hawaii and in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was the mission able to launch. Like Cassini, the legal challenges to a Mars mission would be likely to fail. Depending on when the discovery of life was made (is a human mission ten years in the future or one year in the future from the discovery), it could slow down a human mission to Mars. Discovery of life might also serve as a catalyst for various nations to propose contamination protocols in the United Nations – protocols that the US would probably not sign. Again, this would not be enough to stop a human mission to Mars.

That said, the discovery of even microbial life on Mars will be one of the most significant events in human history. And when we do send humans to Mars, we will absolutely need to take precautions and make sure we have solid protocols in place to protect Martian life and protect the crew and Earth from Martian life.

The Human Factor

Still, discovery of life on Mars should not stop a human mission to the Red Planet. On the contrary, it should be a strong case in favor of such a mission. After all, it will be far easier for us to understand the nature of this interplanetary strain of life if we have human scientists there to analyze it. There is also the strong possibility that we will not be able to provide 100 percent verification of Martian life until we send humans to Mars. At least for the foreseeable future, human explorers are the most accurate and efficient method of not only determining the nature of Martian life, but also determining long-term protocols for the protection of both indigenous life forms on other planets and for humanity.

Let’s hope that if such a discovery is made in the next few years, we are able to proceed in as rationale and productive a manner as possible.

Source:http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Nasa’s Curiosity Mars rover to scoop sand sample.

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The Curiosity rover is preparing to scoop its first sample of Martian soil.

The vehicle, which landed on the Red Planet in August, has driven up to a pile of sandy material that mission scientists have dubbed “Rocknest”.

This weekend, the robot will dig into the ground with its clamshell-shaped trowel, with the aim first of cleaning the mechanism of earthly contamination.

Later, it will repeat the task and deliver an aspirin-sized measure of sand to onboard labs for analysis.

Nasa engineers have cautioned that the whole process will be long and drawn out. The machinery involved is complex and the team says it needs time to learn how best to operate it.

Curiosity, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), will very likely be stationary at Rocknest for a couple of weeks while the scoop tests are carried out.

And, as with some of the earlier science experiments conducted by the rover, the scoop results – when they come – are expected to be fairly mundane. The sand is very probably just the product of weathered basalt, the ubiquitous volcanic rock on Mars’ surface.

The team is more concerned about getting its sample handling procedures right than making significant new discoveries.

A key objective of the first excavations will be to thoroughly clean the internal mechanisms of the robotic arm tool that does the digging.

It is called Chimra, or Collection and Handling for Interior Martian Rock Analysis.

Although assembled in ultra-sterile conditions at Nasa, this tool will still have acquired an oily film deposit in Earth air that would contaminate the rover’s lab analysis results if left in place. By running several scoops through the handling system, Curiosity can scrub the film from Chimra.

“We effectively use it to rinse our mouth three times and then spit out,” explained Daniel Limonadi, the Curiosity surface sampling phase lead at the US space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

“We will take a scoop bite, we will vibrate that sand on all the different surfaces inside Chimra to effectively sand blast those surfaces, and then we dump all that material out; and we rinse and repeat three times to finish cleaning everything out.”

Once this procedure is complete, a tiny sample will be delivered to the onboard labs, Sam and CheMin, to run chemical and mineralogical analyses.

The sand will be severely shaken and sieved to make sure only fine-grained material, less than the width of a human hair in diameter, reaches the instruments.

Source:BBC

 

 

 

His other car is on Mars.

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On Earth, ImageImageImageImageImage drives his red Prius without paying much attention to the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance. He’s lived in the same neighborhood of Pasadena for 18 years, after all.

When he’s driving on Mars, though, every rock he encounters is a new discovery, a step toward humanity’s knowledge of the planet he hopes to visit some day.

Maxwell has the dream job of driving rovers on Mars, and he’s gearing up to take control of the biggest and most sophisticated one yet: Curiosity. He’s one of about a dozen people at NASA tasked with steering the $2.6 billion vehicle from more than 100 million miles away.

“It’s a priceless national asset that happens to be sitting on the surface of another planet,” Maxwell says of the rover, which is set to land on Mars at 1:31 a.m. ET Monday. “You better take that damn seriously.”

 

As a child, Scott Maxwell dreamed of visiting other planets; now he gets to drive rovers on Mars.

Maxwell loves to talk about how much he loves his job, and his effervescence is infectious, say colleagues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, home to Curiosity’s mission control.

“The thing that always impressed me about Scott was just the passion that he has for what we’re doing. He just loves being a rover driver,” says Steve Squyers, a Mars expert who’s worked closely with Maxwell. “He thinks he’s got the coolest job on the planet, and he’s right, I think.”

The names of the rovers Maxwell has driven so far — Spirit and Opportunity — speak to his upbeat attitude and thirst for immersing himself in what he enjoys doing.

Through his blog and Twitter account @marsroverdriver, Maxwell interacts with all sorts of self-professed “rover-huggers” — people who really love rovers.

Earlier this week Maxwell tweeted, “VIP seats for opening night of @IndyShakes‘s Comedy of Errors! Last chance to see a play before the baby comes Sunday.”

The baby, of course, is the SUV-sized Curiosity, coming to Mars after years of planning and preparation. It’s been more than eight months since it left Earth, and no one can be sure exactly how it will behave, says Maxwell.

Over dinner in Old Pasadena this week, Maxwell and his girlfriend, Kim Lichtenberg — a planetary scientist also working on the rover mission — playfully compared it to having a child, though neither has had children.

“We’re all going to be kind of like new parents,” Lichtenberg says.

“Watch it take its first steps,” Maxwell adds.

Landing Curiosity will be such an amazing feat of engineering that NASA is billing the process “seven minutes of terror.”

Like anxious parents, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena are eager to see the rover arrive safely, and so are the reporters who have flooded the NASA campus.

Maxwell says he has confidence in the JPL team responsible for the entry, descent and landing of the spacecraft. But if the amazing maneuver goes wrong, the whole effort will have been “all for nothing” for the many people who’ve sacrificing family time and vacations to pour their hearts into it.

“That seven minutes tells you whether the last seven years of your life had a point,” Maxwell says.

A voyage to break down the wall

Maxwell’s eyes widen with joy when he talks about the parts of life he thinks are “awesome”: His girlfriend. His other NASA team members. The Independent Shakespeare Company (@IndyShakes). His first lemon drop cocktail. The Cotswolds.

Something about Maxwell’s thin frame, boyish features and the way he gets giddy over esoteric things resembles Jim Parsons’ character on “The Big Bang Theory,” although Maxwell is more jovial and socially gracious than Sheldon Cooper. His arms seem almost impossibly long as they move about while he explains the rover driving process.

With a youthful complexion and hair that finishes in a short tail on the back of his neck, it’s impossible to guess Maxwell is 41. The first time he ever had lunch with Lichtenberg, she thought, “Aw man, he’s way too young for me. Way too young for me.” Later she found out she’s about six years his junior.

Lichtenberg, fair and blond, grew up with the space program close at hand: Her father is astronaut Byron Lichtenberg, a NASA payload specialist who’s flown on two shuttle missions. She has a Ph.D. in planetary spectroscopy, which deals with the interaction of matter and radiation in planetary environments.

Maxwell, on the other hand, had long assumed that a career in space was out of reach.

He was raised in an economically depressed rural area of eastern North Carolina, although his accent could just as well place him from the Midwest. His parents divorced when he was 7; after his mother moved to Florida, he spent time bouncing between the two states until college.

His father was a railroad engineer for most of his career, although he previously worked as a dean at various colleges.

Carl Sagan was Maxwell’s childhood hero. He adored watching the 13-part TV series Sagan hosted called “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” first broadcast in 1980 on PBS.

In one episode, the scientist talked about what it would be like to go to Mars. Only last year, Maxwell watched the episode again and remembered it mentioned a prototype Mars rover, which at that time seemed a futuristic idea.

“I realized in that moment that that’s where I get this sense that I’ve grown up and stepped into this fantasy world that I had when I was a kid, because I have,” he says with excited emphasis.

As a child, Maxwell loved imagining what it would be like to go to other planets. But as an older teen, he assumed he would study hard and end up in a career that seemed more common and attainable than space exploration, such as banking.

“This kind of thing always seemed to me like the kind of thing other people do,” he said. “There’s me. And there’s this big invisible glass wall. And there are people who are doing stuff like that.”

Maxwell believed he could never cross over to the other side of glass wall.

 

Mission Control for Curiosity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

It wasn’t until he got hired by NASA, after completing his master’s degree in computer science, that he realized the wall never existed.

Maxwell is living his fantasy now, but he hasn’t always had such luck. At age 20, while double-majoring in English and computer science at East Carolina University, he learned that his swollen lymph nodes were a symptom of stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The cancer had spread in his neck and chest. He went through nine weeks of radiation treatments and has been cancer-free ever since.

Just days after the treatments ended, he left for graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Going from a state school to a prestigious engineering institution, he was floored on the first day when a professor expected everyone to have already learned the material in the first six chapters of an algorithms textbook. Maxwell had to quickly catch up on his own but says he loved learning so much at once.

And though he feared he couldn’t afford his master’s degree, he found work with the research and development arm of the U.S. Army and left school debt-free.

He had intended to go to Illinois to work toward a Ph.D., but ultimately the cancer changed his priorities.

“I was interested in going out and making tools for people to use,” he says.

JPL came to recruit at his school in fall 1993, and he remembers telling the recruiter how he was fascinated by NASA’s Voyager mission — twin spacecraft that had photographed Jupiter in unprecedented detail. His excitement apparently made an impression: He landed an interview at JPL in January 1994, and started his job that June.

Today, he lives on a quiet Pasadena street, in a cozy house that boasts some of his nerdy treasures, including an extensive collection of science fiction books. “But then my life became science fiction,” he said, explaining why he’s reading more Shakespeare and Dickens these days. As he shows off his collection, his cat Molly purrs, demanding his attention. The brown and black marbling on her otherwise white fur looks somewhat like the Martian landscape, although that’s not why he adopted her.

A glass-paneled cabinet hosts metallic “Star Wars” and Mars rover lunch boxes. There’s a vial of a substance he calls KimSim, a material his girlfriend helped create to figure out how to rescue the Spirit rover after it got stuck in a “sand trap” of alien soil on Mars in 2009.

And there are stones from the Cotswolds, an area in England he bubbles with excitement over. He says, “Wait, wait,” like a child about to demonstrate a new toy, and runs to get a book filled with images of the region. He likes the views from the ground better than the aerial shots — ground-level is more like what a rover would see, he explains.

The wider, well-manicured street perpendicular to his own, with larger houses and roses growing on front lawns, is the sort of place where he’d always wanted to live, but he says the houses are “wicked, ridiculous, crazy expensive.” Still, he loves the house he bought, with the added bonus of a lemon tree growing at its side.

It’s a bit like how he loves his job driving a vehicle on Mars, even though he dreamed of becoming an astronaut.

“Things in my life aren’t quite how I pictured them,” he said, “but they rhyme.”

At NASA, not just a sojourner

It’s been 18 years, but Maxwell still occasionally interrupts himself to say things like “I can’t get over that I work at a place called the Spacecraft Assembly Facility” when he mentions that building at JPL.

 

James Wang, test conductor for Curiosity, with the test model of the rover used for experiments on Earth.

For the first couple of months there, Maxwell felt like he was in a foreign country where he didn’t speak the language. He says it was fun to be clueless about the acronyms his colleagues were throwing around. “Now, I’ll use 10 acronyms in a sentence and won’t think twice about it,” he says, “but you kind of have to pick up the culture.”

He started out working on software to decode data from spacecraft. He also wrote software to help coordinate various teams working around the world to get commands to spacecraft.

In the mid-1990s, Maxwell was asked if he wanted to work on a mission called Mars Pathfinder. Maxwell had no idea what that was, and working on the team didn’t appeal to him.

What he didn’t know was that Mars Pathfinder would mark the first time NASA had sent an untethered robotic device to another planet. The 90-day mission was carried out by a rover named Sojourner.

“I just thought that was super cool, that really just captured my imagination, that you could go for a walk on another planet,” he says. “Not with your squishy, frail, human body, but you could design a robot body that would go to Mars for you.”

Although he passed up that opportunity, another chance came in 1999 when Brian Cooper, who’d driven Sojourner, approached Maxwell about developing rover-driving software for the next Mars mission.

“More or less before the words were out of his mouth — like, ‘Do you want to come work on this project?’ — I was like, “YES! Yes! I’d like to come work on this project, that’d be the coolest thing in the world, yes!”

That mission was eventually scrapped, but their efforts were put toward a different endeavor that did take off: Spirit and Opportunity, the twin Mars exploration rovers that launched in the summer of 2003.

Maxwell helped write the software that rover drivers would use for the pair, as well as for Curiosity. He would soon move from writing software to using it to command — and ultimately drive — the rovers.

His first time commanding a rover was on his 33rd birthday, in 2004. Spirit hadn’t started moving across the Mars surface yet, but Maxwell and his colleague were checking out the instruments. Maxwell told the rover to ignore the state of a switch on one of the instruments — not exactly driving, he said, “but by golly, I commanded a Mars rover that day.”

The real drama came about three weeks later when he got behind the wheel, so to speak. He remembers obsessing over what he had to do, checking everything multiple times, before sending the driving instructions.

He remembers going home afterwards: “I’m lying there, looking at the ceiling, realizing there’s a robot on another planet doing what I told it to. And that notion of, ‘I’m getting to do this. I’m not dreaming about this anymore. It’s real for me now.’

“I reach out across 100 million miles of emptiness and move something on the surface of another planet. That feeling has never left me.”

The opportunity to drive

You might think a rover driver would control the vehicle using a joystick and virtual reality interface, much like a video game. That’s not how it works. The reason for that: Signals take at least four minutes to travel from Earth to Mars (it could take up to 20 minutes, depending on where the planets are in their orbits), and then the same amount of time for confirmation data to come back.

So rover drivers don’t tell the vehicle to move forward and then wait several minutes for confirmation that it happened before sending the next command. Instead, drivers spend their days writing directions for what the rover will do the next day, sometimes even a few days if it’s a holiday weekend.

Maxwell and colleagues spend the Martian night generating a single batch of commands, which they send to the rover after the vehicle sees sunrise. Drivers work in overlapping 8- to 10-hour shifts preparing the rover for the day ahead. “It’s as if we’re e-mailing the rover its to-do list for the entire day,” Maxwell explains. And at the end of its day, the rover sends information back saying what it did. During the Martian night, the rover goes to sleep.

That might sound risky, letting a vehicle roam around on a planet for several hours without someone guiding its every move in real time. But safety checks are built in. Curiosity will know how far its wheels are moving up and down, so it will stop if it heads into something deeper or higher than the drivers had planned. In that sense, the rover is more like a boat than a plane — stopping is a fine course of action if additional direction is needed, Maxwell explains.

Curiosity can travel up to about 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) per minute, says rover driver John Wright, but in practice it will go a lot slower because the science team will want it to stop and examine its surroundings. A rover may stop and take photos, or — as will be the case with Curiosity — the scientists will want it to stop to perform chemical analyses.

 

Scott Maxwell wears 3-D glasses to simulate driving a Mars rover at JPL’s Mission Operations area.

Photos the rover takes of its surroundings help the drivers determine where to send it next. The drivers use a 3-D simulation created from the photos to visualize what the rover is seeing. The virtual model of Mars lets drivers work out which commands to transmit each day. Video games have helped several rover drivers hone their skills, including Maxwell, since driving on Mars requires planning and multidimensional thinking.

Any game that shows a large open world, such as “World of Warcraft,” can hone these skills, says Cooper, the first rover driver and the only person to have driven all three rovers NASA has landed on Mars.

“You’re essentially driving a robot with a keyboard 100 million miles away,” says Maxwell. “You can’t always believe what the simulator tells you. If anything does go wrong, there’s no one there to hit the panic switch.”

Besides being manually controlled, the rover also has the capability to drive by itself, detecting hazards through cameras and driving around them. This autonomous mode takes more time, however, so it’s employed less often.

Curiosity is landing in Gale Crater, where it may find evidence the area once was a lake. It will take at least a year to drive Curiosity to its ultimate destination, Mount Sharp, where the rover will examine layers of sediment for organic molecules, which would be signs — but still not proof — that life may have existed on the planet.

Where the rover is going

Maxwell will see some of the images Curiosity takes before anyone else does, but he loves that the public will get to view them soon after on NASA’s website. “I get to take everybody in the world along in the backseat,” he said.

Beyond rover driving, Maxwell genuinely loves the science of Mars. The rover science team has its own busy agenda, but during the mission involving Spirit and Opportunity, Maxwell would point out rocks that might be interesting to examine further, or suggest photographing the sunset on a given day. Sometimes the science team would take him up on his ideas.

“He’s always looking to try to get as much out of the vehicles as possible,” says Squyers, lead scientist of the Mars Exploration Rover mission, which involved Spirit and Opportunity. “Scott is, within the bounds of safety, one of the most enthusiastic rover drivers there is.”

The spirit of his first car

There’s a special love that Maxwell has for Spirit, the first rover he ever drove. Spirit was only supposed to last about 90 days, but the rover kept operating for more than five years.

When Spirit got stuck in May 2009, Maxwell felt like he was in an Indiana Jones movie, trying to rescue the vehicle. The rover’s wheels broke through a crust and the vehicle fell into a sandy trap called Troy, like a car driving into a pool of flour. Even before the accident, one of its six wheels had quit working.

 

Scott Maxwell, top, Kim Lichtenberg, left, and Pauline Hwang test how to get Spirit out of a Martian “sand trap.”

Maxwell and his colleagues were almost able to pull Spirit out, but not quite. They had figured out a technique, but with the Martian winter coming, the solar panels were tilted away from the sun. Plus a second wheel malfunctioned during escape tactics. Over the winter, something broke — Maxwell says humanity may never know what.

The Opportunity rover, which Maxwell has also had a hand in driving, is still operating. Still, he is nostalgic about the Spirit.

“It’s very much the way you feel about your first car,” Maxwell says. “Spirit was my first car. She was just on Mars. That was the emotional closeness that I felt to her.”

Even after it stopped moving, Spirit was able to continue scientific operations until March 2010, when NASA lost communication with it. The place it got stuck turned out to be extremely interesting — while trying to escape, the rover found soil rich in minerals called sulfates, a component of steam, suggesting that there may have once been conditions on Mars able to support life.

It — or rather “she,” says Maxwell — accomplished this with an attitude of “persistence and determination and never say die.”

Scientists kept trying to communicate until May 2011, when they gave up.

“Spirit will be there for a million years, but I sure hope that there are Martian cities surrounding her,” Maxwell says. He envisions trails commemorating the rovers’ paths and hopes people someday will be “walking the Spirit trail.”

Loving to be curious

Given the busy schedule and odd hours, it helps to be in love with someone who works on Mars, too.

Maxwell and Lichtenberg had been hearing each other as disembodied voices on NASA conference calls for years, while Lichtenberg was a graduate student at the University of Washington in St. Louis. She visited JPL with her adviser on the five-year anniversary of the Spirit and Opportunity mission.

They met in person at a group lunch; each thought the other was attractive. Maxwell spent a couple days working up the nerve to ask her out and finally did on the day beloved science fiction author Ray Bradbury gave a surprise speech at NASA. Maxwell began by asking her, “Is anybody doing anything tonight?” She said a group was going out; he replied that he wanted to go out with a cute girl he’d just met. After she realized he meant her, she said yes — much to Maxwell’s astonishment.

This week, just days before the Curiosity landing, the couple had dinner with me at a quaint Mediterranean restaurant in Pasadena’s Old Town. When they weren’t holding hands, Maxwell was putting his arm around the back of her chair. As they said goodnight for the evening, they kissed three times — and both said they planned to stay up late and sleep in to practice shifting to Mars time.

Part of the fun of working on Curiosity will be living on Mars time for about the first 90 days, Maxwell says. The days on Mars are 40 minutes longer than on Earth. That means Maxwell might start at 8 a.m. Monday, 8:40 a.m. Tuesday, 9:20 a.m. Wednesday and so on. Before long, he’ll be working overnights.

“I like to say I sleep 40 minutes more, I actually work 40 minutes [more],” he said.

Lichtenberg is the co-lead on the science planning team for the Curiosity mission. That means she helps other scientists decide what they will do with the rover every day, given how much power and time the tasks will take and how much data will be required.

On their first date about three and half years ago, Lichtenberg was sold when Maxwell told her that while healing from a martial arts-induced shoulder injury, he decided he would read all of Shakespeare’s plays. And he did.

“He really sticks to his convictions, and I really, really like that about him,” Lichtenberg says. “Being around him makes me want to be a better person.”

Maxwell insists that Lichtenberg did not move to Southern California for him. She agrees that she wanted to work at JPL anyway, but Maxwell was at least “a small bit” of the decision. These days they work down the hall from each other, and although they are on the same operations team, they are assigned to different shifts.

 

Scott Maxwell and Kim Lichtenberg have been dating for more than three years; both work on Mars rover missions.

The affectionate, happy partners share a love of Mars and, if possible, would both like to go some day.

“If NASA set up a flight tomorrow, I’d be the first one. They wouldn’t have to bring me back,” Maxwell says.

He’d be gone in a snap, even if there were just one seat. Lichtenberg, although she likes the idea of visiting Mars, is not sure she’d just pack up and go by herself.

“I totally understand that you would,” she tells him. “It’s OK, I accept that. Totally.”

“It’s not that I like Mars better than I like you,” he assures her. They peck each other on the lips.

But there is something powerful that draws Maxwell to Mars. It’s partly the idea of being on the surface of another world. There’s also his own mortality. He believes the radiation treatments he had in his 20s will ultimately lead to a different form of cancer (he actually had a possible thyroid cancer a few years ago, which turned out to be benign). Maxwell estimates — without a hint of regret in his voice — that he has about 20 years left to live.

“I’ve only got so long anyway, you might as well make it something really good. Right? You might as well make it count,” he tells me and Lichtenberg. “And what am I going to do that’s going to be better than actually going to Mars? Go on, name three things I’m going to do that are better than that.”

“Drive a Mars rover,” says Lichtenberg.

Maxwell agrees his job is “awesome” but says going to Mars would be “even better.”

With that level of passion and spirit, Maxwell may one day indeed follow his Curiosity.

Mars rover captures Martian panorama

Complete coverage: Mars

Source: CNN