There is a room at JPL that is currently covered in printouts – covering the walls and taped to the windows, stacked on the conference table, and in a few cases accidentally fallen on the floor. Each of these hundreds of pieces of paper is an individual step of logic in the chain that will hopefully take us to another great Martian adventure. This room is called the Mars 2020 War Room.
I’ve been noticeably absent from a number of things – as my MRO coworkers, my friends, and my husband can attest – for the last 6 months. That is because I’ve been working as support staff for the Mars 2020 Science Definition Team, and spending a lot of time in that room. (And yes, my boss has been known to quote Dr. Strangelove: “Gentlemen, there is no fighting in the War Room!”)
NASA spacecraft missions come in many sizes and flavors. Some are proposed by the scientific community in response to announcements of opportunity (these include the Discovery missions like MESSENGER and the New Frontiers missions like New Horizons). Some are pre-chosen by NASA to have a particular destination (these include flagship missions such as Cassini), and the scientific community proposes instruments to go on these spacecraft in order to carry out the measurements needed to answer the science questions that this spacecraft is intended to address. Before those instruments can be identified, a team of scientists is assembled to figure out what those science questions should be and what kinds of measurements are needed to address those questions. This is a science definition team.
Back in December of 2012, the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (the part of NASA that includes all robotic solar system exploration) announced a plan to essentially rebuild and refly the Curiosity rover system in 2020 with new scientific instruments to answer new questions. NASA set forth an initial set of questions; a science definition team was put together to figure out if those were the right questions and how would we put together a realistic mission to answer them. Realistic is important: this encompasses if there are instruments in existence that can make the measurements, are those types of instruments affordable, and can we collect enough data in one Mars year of operations to answer the questions.
The Mars 2020 Science Definition Team (SDT) got started at the end of January, and turned in their report is to NASA on July 1. On July 9th, the report was released to the public; you can read it here (http://mepag.jpl.nasa.gov/reports/mep_report.html) and watch a video about the science goals here (http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/m2020/multimedia/videos/index.cfm?v=133). The punchline is that we want to look for the signs of past life on Mars via a suite of instruments onboard the rover combined with collecting rocks to eventually bring back to Earth to analyze for signs of life using terrestrial laboratories. This is very exciting to a Mars scientist – we’ve been trying to do Mars Sample Return for decades, and NASA has always been reluctant to take the first concrete steps before now. I’m not going to go into details of what we want to do right now, as I hope there will be plenty of time for that in the future; check out the video to find out more. Or, you can read our report!
The report is where I come in. I am the SDT Documentarian, which basically means that I am the keeper of the documents – multiple team-internal powerpoint files (each of more than 100 slides) and the final report (just over 200 pages). I wrangled figures, files, meeting notes, and text so that the SDT didn’t have to, and I made sure that their thoughts are captured electronically so that the science content and logic is there but in a way that a non-expert can understand it. (To be clear: all the intellectual content was generated by the people on the SDT and not myself.) It’s the sort of task that requires someone with a scientific background (in order to understand the conversation and make sure the important parts are captured) but who is willing to be a beast of burden (in order to pull together the inputs, edits, and quibbles of ~20 very smart people). I helped to keep the train running so that the SDT could decide where it is going. I work for two people here at JPL who have been stoking the fires and making sure that track exists, and I run around doing what I can for them so that they are free to keep their eye on the horizon.
It’s been fun and intense. I’ve spent a lot of late evenings gathering up and reconciling inputs, and turning around a new product to the SDT so that it is sitting in their inbox for them to start working on afresh as soon as they get in the office in the mornings. I’ve worked with some of the team before on other missions, including Curiosity and Mars Phoenix. One was a researcher in my department at grad school and another served on my Ph.D. thesis committee. I’ve been struck by their dedication: unlike myself, they are volunteers and not getting paid for this work, and they have put in a lot of time into nailing down the precise wording of their findings and arguing their way through the logic of each step in the chain, simultaneously with teaching, participating in MER and MSL operations, and doing their own research.
It was strange to have this document lurking on my computer and be so very excited about its findings but not actually be able to tell anyone about them. Although I was on vacation this past week, I went in to work to watch the press conference and I spent several hours watching what people were saying on twitter. I eventually had to pry myself away and get back to my vacation (with some reminders from my twitter friends! HiCommander, I’m looking at you.)
If all goes well, later this year NASA will release an announcement of opportunity to the community and people will be able to propose instruments to go on the rover. I think this would be a very exciting mission, and I hope that the rest of the planetary community and NASA agrees with me. Even at this stage, this is still just a proposed mission, and I’m not sure what role if any I will be playing in its future, but I hope it will take us all the way to the surface of Mars – and maybe even return some of Mars back here to Earth.
You can keep an eye on our progress at the official Mars 2020 website, http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/m2020/.