Note: I am posting my old blog entries from elsewhere on the internet. This entry was originally posted on 6/2/08.
Just woke up after a 12 hour shift, and am getting ready to go back in later tonight.
I put together an email for some family and friends about what I’ve been up to, and I’m going to cross-post it here.
I am in training to be a Instrumentation Sequence Engineer on the TECP (Thermal and Electrical Conductivity Probe) which is a part of the MECA (Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer) instrument located on the robot arm. I’m living in Tucson for the duration of the mission (through August, if all goes well, and perhaps even longer if we get an extended mission). Due to the fact that Phoenix is in the arctic, though, it will die when martian winter comes and I will get to go back to Los Angeles. And sleep. We’re basically working full steam ahead from now until the lander dies, since we don’t know how long we actually will have.
What does an Instrumentation Sequence Engineer do? Basically, we take the science plan (created by the science team based on the goals of the mission and the results of the previous day’s activities) and turn it into a step-by-step to-do list for the lander each day. Once the science plan is approved by everyone, we race against the clock to coordinate all the instruments with each other and the engineering requirements of the lander (for example, when are there heaters and when is the lander downlinking data to an orbiter), getting blocks of code all together and through a series of checks in time to be uploaded to the spacecraft at the beginning of the Mars day. Right now I learn how to do this by watching someone else do the job, and I ask a lot of questions. In a few weeks, I will be able to do the job myself – and I will have to, as the person who I’m “shadowing” needs to go back home when his wife has a baby. We have to organize our days around the times when we can talk to the lander, so that it has its to-do list at the beginning of the day on Mars, and can report back to us at the end of the day on Mars. Right now that means I have to work at night (yesterday’s shift started at 10 pm) and sleep during Earth’s day, but because the day on Mars is slightly longer than the day on Earth, so I go to work slightly later every day. Eventually, I will be able to work during the day and sleep at night again.
There’s a lot of programming involved in this job in one way or another, but I’m not a programmer at all – my training is actually in planetary geology, and my current interest is where the engineering and the science intersect. (I also continue to do Mars research with part of my time). Other people have written blocks of code (or are currently writing them and getting them through the approval process), and I have to know what’s in the code, what the engineering constraints on the instrument are (for example, do we have to be above a certain temperature? can we run other instruments at the same time?), and what the science team wants to do with the instrument and why. I use the pre-written programs to build my part of the day’s sequence, so there’s a lot of understanding code, but I don’t have to do the programming myself.
Since we landed, we have been telling the lander to see if all of its parts are working after their long, cold ride to Mars. We want to be careful not to break anything on the lander, so we are having the lander work through the list very slowly. We’ve already spotted some really neat things and are beginning to start the science observations. For example, we used the camera on the robot arm to look under the lander – we wanted to see if one of our footpads was on a rock or not – and we saw an area that is flat, very bright, white in our greyscale images, and a couple inches lower than the surroundings. Our best guess right now is that this is an ice layer that was exposed by the firing of the retrorockets during landing and we are rearranging the science plan for tomorrow to get stereo color images of it to give us a better idea if it is ice or not. This feature is being called “Holy Cow” since that’s the first thing said when the image came down. (Mostly, the science team is naming features after fairy tales, but this is an exception!)
We work 4 days on shift (my shift is usually 10-11 hours long, but yesterday’s was 12) and 2 days off. I just got back after 2 days off, and was doing a bit of catchup reading on the team webpage, and finding that they’ve done all sorts of cool things without me. This is clearly where the temptation to never leave the operations room comes in – I’ve heard that sometimes on missions some team members ignore their days off and just keep coming in. But I know that there will be more cool things to come, and that it is better to recharge whenever I can.
In addition to the discovery of Holy Cow, several key events occurred while I was off shift. The robot arm reached out and touched the scoop to the surface of Mars, and then did a test scoop of some soil, took some pictures of it in the scoop, and then dumped it out on the surface again. According to some of the documentation, someone in the room declared it to be “A small scoop for Phoenix, a giant scoop for Phoenecians!” which I find very funny.
Most of the instruments seem to be working great, but many of the science teams are still working on calibration and getting the software blocks approved for future activities. One instrument, TEGA, appears to have an intermittent short circuit on part of it, but they’ve worked really hard in the last few days to figure out a way to work around it. This is truly impressive, as of course you can’t just go swap out the faulty component on the lander deck, but have to figure out some other way to operate your instrument as-is.
There were some late changes to the science plan last night, so there was a lot of frantic activity in the uplink room as some observations were cancelled and others were scheduled, and everything juggled around. I think the science team decided that they wanted to be more cautious before delivering the first scoop of dirt to one of the instruments, and so they decided to bump up some of the other activities (imaging Holy Cow, for example). After my shift ended at 10 am, I went home, had a bowl of cereal, and collapsed into bed. I just got up, and in about 4 hours we will get the first downlink, where the first batch of data from the commands we sent up this morning. It will be very exciting to see the data come down, and see if everything worked right, and how what we see in the data affects the plan we will put together tonight.
Here’s some nifty data that’s available on the public website: This is the picture of Holy Cow, underneath the lander. In addition to Holy Cow, you can see the edge of “my” instrument, TECP, at the bottom. It’s the thing with the needle sticking out. Here is Snow Queen, another platy feature that might be ice. This color picture shows some dirt in the scoop. Here and here are two images, a couple hours apart, of the “telltale” (basically a windsock) showing how wind speed has changed in that time.
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