(This post was split into two parts; Part 1 is here.)
In the early hours of August 6, I sat in the back of the Geology theme group planning room, checking my email as the HiRISE operations team sent out status reports on the EDL image. Vicariously, I tracked the image as it traveled from the DSN station to JPL and then on to the HiRISE Operations Center at the University of Arizona, and through the image processing pipeline. Every so often, MSL science team members would stop by: “Is it here yet? Is it here yet?” Then, I watched the banter between team members @HiCommander and @MarsMaven on twitter as the team spotted the parachute and then gloated about how cool the image was. And finally, the image was in my inbox.
And what a glorious image it was. There’s something really visceral about seeing it; yes, Curiosity has really landed. And what this image represents! The commands for both MSL’s EDL and MRO’s roll (in addition to the camera settings for HiRISE) were uplinked days in advance to two machines that are millions of miles away. That’s an amazing accomplishment.
It was going to be my job to convey this all to the press at 9 am. And really, I probably could have gone up there and stumbled and slurred my way through the press conference and the beauty of this image would have carried me through. But I knew that my coworkers would be watching, and especially the HiRISE team would be watching. And I wanted to make them proud. So, I was determined to do well but also kind of freaked out. (Which pretty much describes me overall – that’s just how I roll.)
I tried to get a nap a few times – once in the nap room set aside for the purpose, and once in my car. I’d brought a blanket from home in the hopes that having something familiar would help me settle, but I was too full of adrenaline and too worried about sleeping through the alarm on my phone and missing a meeting. That is actually the memory that lingers with me the most from Landing Night – walking by myself across the Laboratory, carrying a blanket and realizing I was getting dog fur on me while I looked at the moon and breathed the warm night air, listening to the crickets and thinking about robots at Mars.
A little after 6:30 am, having now been at JPL for 12 hours, I took a deep breath and walked into the media editorial meeting. It was the epitome of multitasking: a few people were focusing on graphics, another was focusing on figure captions for the website, and another was focusing on the text of the press release. They were all bouncing ideas off of each other, and grabbing information from the other press conference participants – I’d be talking to one person to work out what order the graphics would go in, and he’d break off to get something from someone else. So I’d turn to the guy ironing out the press release when another person would walk in the room and need some other information from him right away. It was hard to keep up with, especially on no sleep. Finally they seemed to have everything they wanted from me, so I wandered off to get some coffee and organize my thoughts before the event.
After an all-nighter spent mostly inside a heavily air conditioned building, walking from the ops building to the media building was like being beaten with a hot, bright mallet. I remember trying to lock away my churning stomach by taking deep, slow breaths. The lady behind-the-scenes powdered my face, and it was time to go.
It turns out that doing a press conference is terrifying and exhilarating all at once. It was pretty incredible being up there with some of the Important Mission People, and I quite enjoyed the fact that I was bringing the average age down and the X-chromosome count up. I’d done my best to remember pertinent facts from the press release and caption, and thought about a few good things to say. And of course, the image could speak for itself.
After answering questions and heading back to my office, I sat at my computer and twitched for a while. There is a point at which you are so tired that you can’t stop being awake because it is too much effort to pack up and go home. But, eventually I did and got home at noon. Unfortunately, I didn’t do well at sleeping, possibly due to a combination of the adrenaline, the sunshine, and the toddler.
The second night of Curiosity operations began smoothly, and once again I did my best to help out with A/V troubles and computer systems being weird and generally being available to help. But I was also keeping an eye on my email because there was another HiRISE image planned: the first time that MRO flew overhead in the daylight, HiRISE would take a picture of the center of the landing ellipse. Depending on where Curiosity actually landed within the ellipse, we might see the rover and parts of the EDL hardware – or we might see nothing at all. (MRO and HiRISE have to plan in advance; there was no time to adjust the targeting of the image with the actual landing location.)
Again I waited and watched my email as the HiRISE team processed the image and poured over it, looking for the rover itself and the various EDL hardware components. Two other HiRISE science team members are also on MSL, and they each downloaded the image from the HiRISE internal database and started racing to see who could spot the rover first. We’d thought we’d found it – we saw the big splotch of disturbed dust – but weren’t sure until the operations team sent out the full resolution data over email. And once again: HiRISE took a spectacular image. You can see the rover itself, plus the heatshield, the parachute and backshell, and what used to be the skycrane.
I didn’t know that they’d want me to do the press conference for that one until I was in the end-of-the-sol Science Discussion meeting and Gentry Lee (JPL’s chief engineer for solar system exploration, and the husband of an MRO coworker) stopped by my chair. He mentioned that the press team were saying things like: “and then Sarah will show this image.” So, I raced over to find that I was on deck again. This time I had a better handle on the process, but less time to mentally prepare for the press conference. Oh yeah: and I’d had 5 hours of sleep total in the last 48 hours.
Before the press conference itself, the MRO project management team asked me to show the HiRISE photos to Doug McCuistion, the NASA Director for the Mars Exploration Program who was visiting from NASA HQ. So, of course, I did! It can be hard to absorb the fact that you are having an Important Career Moment when they happen one right after the other…
And then it was off to the press conference, this time with Ken Edgett from the MMM team. He and I were a little giggly beforehand backstage, as both of us had little sleep and were just so excited about life in general and our images in particular. Ken and I know each other from attending the same conferences for years and following each other’s research. (Ken is probably most famous to the NASAtv watchers for joking about squirrels and getting misty-eyed over having the first image from MAHLI, the hand lens of our martian robotic field geologist.) When we finally went into the press room and sat down at the podium, I heard the reporter from Irish News saying, “Well Sarah’s here so there must be pictures!” Which made me laugh and reminded me that I was in a room full of people who would be just as excited to see this image of the EDL hardware as I was. And they were.
And finally, eventually, I got home and was able to sleep for 6 hours, before going to see Gustavo Dudamel conduct Yo-Yo Ma and the L.A. Phil at the Hollywood Bowl and then heading in to work another night shift on Mars. It was truly an extraordinary few days.
Before I close, I want to say again: I got to be the face of HiRISE for a few days, but I didn’t take the images – I didn’t do the imaging design or commanding, and I didn’t do the processing. The HiRISE Operations Team at the University of Arizona did. My part was to make sure that all parties – the HiRISE team, the MRO spacecraft team, and the MSL team – had the correct info to allow them to do their jobs. And then I got to do a nice song-and-dance in front of the press. I love doing outreach, and I love talking about my job, and I think that HiRISE is the coolest camera in the solar system, so that part felt like a gift (albeit a nerve-wracking one) instead of a chore. And it has honestly been delightful and amazing to find myself quoted in the New York Times and interviewed by BBC News online and for a Nature podcast. (My mother went to pick up my son from daycare, and when the teachers asked her how she was doing she said: “I just heard my daughter on NPR!”) But I hope that the people who watched me on the press conference, or are now following me on Twitter, know that there are a lot of very dedicated people who were not on NASAtv but are the ones who really got these images to work.
All the HiRISE images I’ve been talking about can be seen here on the HiRISE team website. I’m not likely to talk about the day-to-day science planning of Curiosity much; Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society is your best source of science news other than the MSL website itself. I’m not embedded with the team tactically anymore – after the first 4 sols of planning, I switched back to Earth time to continue to support MRO and HiRISE as well as MSL. Right now I’m mostly working on longer-term issues with Curiosity, including how do we do the switch to remote operations on sol 90 when the science team goes home. But whenever I can, I will pop down a floor to check in on how things are going.
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