So I’ve finally caught up with my old posts, and am ready to break new ground. But first, a bit of contemplative navel-gazing concerning the experience of writing about my experiences.
Mars Phoenix was my first mission. It was easy to write about: after my 4 days on-shift, I could spend a little time writing up some aspect of the operations process and then put together a summary of the activities we had done and any science discoveries we had made. There was a rolling series of press conferences to provide nice science soundbites, and since each day we ran through an entire planning cycle everything was broken down into easily-bloggable pieces. The fact that I was living essentially in isolation (in Tucson, on Mars time) also made my little updates a way to keep in touch with family and friends; everything that I posted here was also sent out to a mailing list.
Cassini was harder to write about for many reasons. The planning cycle is much longer, and has a less-defined starting point. We started assembling the commands for a 5-week-long sequence (the spacecraft’s master to-do list) together 24 weeks ahead of uplink, but we started planning what science activities would occur in that sequence much, much earlier. Sometimes we were discussing flybys that wouldn’t happen for years. Once I was no longer involved in the assembling-the-commands stage, I became much more removed from what was actually going on day-to-day with the spacecraft, and would forget what flyby was coming up next. That made it tricky to write about! Cassini also, for various political in-fighting reasons, is not very good at doing press releases, so there were less cool snippets to write about, even though the stunning images returned daily really speak to the beauty of what the Cassini team is doing. Still, I managed a post here and there.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is even harder to write about, and I don’t think I’ve talked about it hardly at all, even though I enjoy the teams I work with and I love the HiRISE camera dearly. I think this is mostly due to the nature of the spacecraft – a planning cycle is about 3 weeks long, a much more digestible number than Cassini, but since MRO is an orbiter a lot of the process can be automated and so I don’t have to get elbow-deep in the guts of the instrument activities, I just have to make sure that they aren’t breaking any rules. The nature of the science that MRO does is different too – there aren’t individual flybys with particular science goals, there is one continuous flyby with a multitude of goals, and results that build up over years. There are some amazing stories to be told there, actually, but it is hard to look up and stop to say, hey I should write about that.
I haven’t yet tried talking about Mars Science Laboratory for many reasons. My personal role is rather nebulous: I do whatever the Science Operations Team Chief tells me to do to help make her life easier and to get the team closer to being ready for surface operations. This has ranged from writing procedures to counting chairs. It is harder to find a through-line that would interest the reader. I have a few stories to tell that may be interesting, but of course the real excitement starts in August when we land (fingers crossed!). Also, my personal life is much busier now than in the Mars Phoenix days, and I’m not doing any of my hobbies right now. But I’m hoping to clear out some time – like now, in the short space between sending my last email and leaving to pick up my son from daycare – to write about it a bit.
But, I do want to tell these stories and I think they deserve to be told. So I’m going to work on that.
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