First of all, if you haven’t yet seen the “Seven Minutes of Terror” video, go watch it. Now.
Today at work, several hundred MSL team members watched that video together on a huge screen, and with a heavy-duty sounds system. Even though I’ve seen it at least 5 times before, it was quite an experience; not only is the video impressive, but the room contained the people who speak in the video and the people who have worked with them day in and day out for 7 years. There was a lot of cheering. It was a very special feeling being in that room even for me, as someone who joined the MSL team recently. I can’t really imagine what is was like for those team members who have been there since the beginning.
There’s been big countdown posters up on the two MSL floors of my building for about a month now, but today was the day that it sunk into my bones: we are landing in 10 days. A portion of the MSL team has been working on cruise and EDL (entry, descent, and landing), and they are probably seeing next Sunday as a culmination of all their hard work. For Science Operations, it is just the beginning. And as August 5 gets closer and closer, we are running faster and faster to make sure that we’re ready to take over.
We’ve had a number of “Operational Readiness Tests” where we pretend that the rover has landed and we run through the entire planning process, put the results through the testbed rover, and look at the resulting data. Part of my job has been to collect our “lessons learned” on what worked and what didn’t, and to follow up with other team members on what we’re doing to make the planning process better. It has made me learn a lot about nearly every step of the planning process, and yet there are many layers and subtleties that I have yet to learn.
If you tune in to NASAtv on Sunday night to watch the landing, you will not see me in the control room; I will be in another building with the Science Team, watching the live feed from the control room and gnawing on my fingers. A few hours later, it will finally be time to really get to work.
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