The University of Arizona Alumnus / Fall 2007
UA Leads Mission to Mars
Scientists Bid It Godspeed
by Dan Sorenson (Contribution by The Arizona Daily Star – August 5, 2007)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A chorus of University of Arizona planetary scientists, their friends and family face north on the dark-as-a-closet, pre-dawn Florida beach counting down from 10 in ragged unison.
They get to “one,” there is a pause — and the sky lights up noon-bright. They turn into a chorus of yipping and howling coyotes.
They’re here to watch the launch of the Phoenix Mars Mission; the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Lab team leads the mission science and even built some of the instruments that will look for signs of water and past or present habitability on the red planet.
The Delta 2 rocket, which just seconds before had looked like a big white-and-blue candle bathed in searchlights on launch pad 17A two miles to the north, now arches out over the Atlantic as it climbs. The pulsing glow lights startled faces, throwing shadows on the beach.
The power of this thing is shocking. Some people gasp, stunned by the light and the rolling roar that followed the launch by several seconds. Some cry.
It’s like the Grand Canyon, one of those things so immense that words can’t prepare you for it.
A minute and six seconds into the flight, six of the Delta 2’s strap-on booster rockets burn out and are dumped. It looks like a massive version of the glowing debris that falls after a fireworks finale.
The rocket’s main motor still burns and the remaining three boosters are lit. Another minute and they burn out and are jettisoned. By this time the rocket and payload are 28.5 nautical miles above Earth.
A few minutes more and a tracking station in Africa picks up the rocket and its UA package. The beach party continues with nothing but a cloud of rocket exhaust glowing miles above the Atlantic.
Champagne corks pop, the celebration led by UA LPL professor and NASA mission veteran William Boynton. He’s a big, gregarious, bearded man, and in the minutes after the launch he’s swarmed by his team and the rest of the UA crowd while he pours the bubbly for family and friends. It’s a hugfest.
Boynton is the lead scientist on one of Phoenix’s instruments — the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA), a series of mini-ovens that will cook Martian soil samples and “sniff” them for signs of water and organic material.
His first mission was in 1984, yet a minute or two before this morning’s launch, he said, “I have butterflies.”
He has reason. Boynton also had a stake — another scientific instrument — on the Mars Polar Lander that apparently crash-landed on Mars, never to be heard from, less than 10 years ago. Lockheed-Martin Space System experts believe a sensor mistook the shock of that lander’s telescopic legs’ explosive deployment for landing shock and cut off the craft’s retro rockets too far above the red planet’s surface.
Though it was in no way Boynton’s or his team’s fault, the failure briefly halted NASA Mars missions. But the UA jumped right back into the Mars science mission business, getting the nod from NASA for the High-Resolution Imaging Experiment — the stunningly successful camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — and the majority of the instruments and management of the entire science mission for the Phoenix Mars Mission lander.
Missing on the beach for the launch is the UA’s Peter Smith, the principal investigator on Phoenix Mars — the mission’s overall science boss.
Smith was supposed to spend the launch with the NASA and rocket scientists at a control room on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Hours later at a press conference at Kennedy Space Center’s media center, Smith will admit that he couldn’t stay in the control room staring at computer screens and listening to that cool NASA commo chatter. Two minutes before the launch boss lit the fuse, Smith said he went outside to watch as the Delta 2, and the UA’s biggest space move to date, roared into the pre-dawn sky.
He swears the exhaust gas cloud was in the shape of the mythical Phoenix bird for which the mission is named. That gets some laughs.
Meanwhile, back at the beach, minutes after the launch, with Phoenix out of site, Heather Enos, TEGA project manager, says she cried. “Oh, I cried hard. I’ve got no words,” Enos said.
With their own hands, Enos said, her team built and tested TEGA. They tried to kill it with extreme pressure, cold and heat — so much heat that most metals would melt. Then they improved it so it would survive any of the extremes thrown at it by the trip to Mars and its brief but intense search for signs of conditions favorable to life.
Now, Enos said, this thing they created, perfected, touched and lived with for years is gone forever, on its way to Mars. “To Mars, you know? Mars,” Enos said.
Eighty-five minutes later, as the crowd dwindles, the rocket is long out of sight and far over the Pacific as it approaches the coast of Baja California. Another Phoenix rocket motor kicks it out of Earth’s orbit toward Mars.
Just a little more than five hours after launch, Smith is at a news conference at the Kennedy Space Center media center. Smith and the rocket and spacecraft experts for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Lockheed Martin Space Systems are grinning like three guys who just won the Powerball.
Everything, they all say, went as close to perfectly as they’ve seen. They can’t find anything to fret about.
Still, they say, there will be plenty to worry about in 295 days, when Phoenix slows from thousands of miles per hour to just 5 mph in a mere 5 minutes and lands on Mars’ frozen, northern polar region.
The UA's Peter Smith
Principal investigator on Phoenix Mars —
the mission’s overall science boss.
In his own words...
Describe how the Mars launch felt for you.
By the time the countdown was to three minutes, I realized that nothing was going to go wrong with the launch so I ran outside to watch. I got outside just in time — everybody was counting down and then boom, everything shook. The launch lit up the sky. It was just spectacular. Mars was in the sky, near the Pleiades, and the rocket headed right towards Mars, then turned away and went across Orion’s Belt and down over the horizon.
Launch was at 5:30 a.m. and the sun came up 15 minutes later, so it was incredible to see the plume lit up by the rising sun. The plume could be seen 20 miles up in the air. The sky was pitch black, and then, a cloud arose and just like any cloud, it formed a shape. It looked like the Phoenix bird. There was a moment when it looked even more like a Phoenix bird than the photos show. It was a good omen.
When will the most stressful time of the Phoenix Mars mission take place?
Landing is the most difficult part of the mission. For us, it is much more complicated than launch. Landing on Mars, especially using thrusters, after 10 years of using airbags is new and different and difficult. We don’t fully understand the Martian environment, so that makes it even more difficult. Who knows what we’re landing on? But, we’re off to a good start. We have nine-and-a-half months to prepare for the landing. We can’t change the hardware, that’s on its way, but we can change a lot of the software and a lot of the parameters for landing. For example, when we deploy the chute at landing, we will have to decide which angle to come in from. All these decisions can be altered and are changeable.
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