One of the great things about working for the Moore Foundation is that other scientists want you to know what they are doing. This opens a lot of doors. Doors that say “Authorized Personnel Only.” Two weeks ago, one sunny afternoon, the doors were opened for me at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Caltech’s site for JPL originated in 1936 when experiments with rockets were vividly demonstrated (through explosions!) to be too dangerous for the main campus. The rocketeers were banished to the furthest reaches of Pasadena, up the dry canyon of the Arroyo Seco, past the Rose Bowl and up against the slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains. JPL grew at that site with the flowering of the space age, becoming one of NASA’s most capable research facilities, sending probes on behalf of all of us throughout the solar system. Viking to Mars, Voyager to Jupiter and then out past the edge of the solar system, Cassini to Saturn: all are JPL missions represented in the JPL museum.
But my vigorous walk up the JPL site revealed that this complex of 300 buildings was not carefully laid out in some visionary architect’s master plan. This place isn’t Brasilia. The physical plant has grown organically — budding off structures here and there as driven by the needs of the moment. Need a high bay assembly building for putting together something big? Build one! Need a control center to monitor spacecraft orbiting Saturn? Build one of those, too! Need an 85-foot high stainless steel tank to simulate the cold and vacuum of space? Put it right over there! Navigating the resulting maze of alleys and structures made me very glad I was with a reliable guide, David Seidel, deputy manager for education at JPL. The fact that my badge said “escort required” wasn’t just a security measure. Without an escort, I might still be wandering around the place.
David led me in through a nondescript doorway and down an anonymous hallway through an unmarked door to get a good look at the assembly of the actual space flight hardware for the Mars 2020 mission. This angular half-built aluminum spider is headed for the rusty surface of Mars to be launched in 2020. There didn’t seem to be any rush. Technicians in bunny-suits moved deliberately adjusting fasteners to build this custom gadget part by part. It was a strange combination: ordinary bolts and wrenches that wouldn’t be out of place in the Portola Valley Garage were assembling exquisitely engineered motorized systems to unfold the lander’s legs. Guys with tattoos on their forearms were creating, bit by bit, humanity’s ambassador to explore another planet. Going to Mars, but built in Pasadena by people working on day shift.
But the best was yet to come.
Toward the top of the campus, where the lab meets the chaparral, there’s a dusty corner called “The Mars Yard.” It looks like the bins and piles of gravel and stone out behind Home Depot. There’s an ordinary-looking garage, some sheds, and stones laid out like Fred Flintstone’s garden. As David and I approached this unpromising desert zone, we were in luck. The rover, a six-wheeled vehicle that will explore Mars in 2020, was being driven out into the California sun. It looked like the anorexic cousin of the stripped-down chassis in the Tesla showroom. No need for bodywork — because the rocket scientists are in charge there is nothing on this machine without a purpose. The purpose is to transport scientific instruments that can analyze rocks to spots that look interesting to scientists on Earth. My colleagues want to know the history of Mars, especially where all the water has gone and whether there are traces of life.
The Mars Yard is an obstacle course and proving ground for JPL’s Mars-bound creations. Two serious-looking guys were using a remote control to drive the rover to test its ability to rove on level ground while encountering some flat and not-so-flat rocks with its six aluminum wheels. David opened a storage shed and showed me a rack of spare tires for this buggy. It was like being in a tire store in Redwood City, except each wheel was a thin cylinder exquisitely machined from a single piece of aluminum. The wheels had different tread patterns, some of which work better than others in sandy places or rocky places. I hefted one of the wheels — it was very light, just a couple of pounds here on Earth, and only 38 percent of that on Mars, whose small mass leads to lower gravity at the surface. Something like a giant Coke can. But mass is the enemy for space travel, so the idea is to make the wheels as thin as you can, but no thinner. Some of the designs had found that boundary and had suffered ragged punctures. No air rushes out when one of these wheels fails, but a broken wheel on a Mars rover not a good thing. There’s no auto club on Mars.
On Mars, there won’t be anybody paddling a joystick or dressing a power cable attached to the PG&E grid either. The rover will generate its own solar power and it will drive itself. For radio signals travelling at the speed of light, the time from Earth to Mars can be 20 minutes or more. Twenty minutes from turning the steering wheel to seeing what happens is a recipe for disaster. That’s too much lag to drive safely, even at the beetle-creeping speed of the rover. Scientists will choose the destination to explore, but this weird buggy will get there without tipping over or falling off a cliff through a combination of stereo video cameras, clever and cautious software, and those just-thick-enough wheels. By creating a bit of Mars on Earth, JPL is learning how to pull this off. The reward will come in 2020.
I visited Moore Foundation grantees working at JPL on underwater microscopes too, but that’s a story for another day.
Robert Kirsher, Ph.D. is the chief program officer for science at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
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