gathering dirt

 

NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Two trenches dug in Martian soil by the robotic arm of the Phoenix Mars Lander.

After days of struggling with sticky Martian dirt, the Phoenix Mars Lander has unexpectedly succeeded in getting its first soil sample into an onboard laboratory for analysis, jubilant NASA scientists said on Wednesday.The breakthrough came after the lander spent days vibrating a screen over its onboard Thermal Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) in hopes that the clumpy soil would break loose and fall into the onboard ovens. The scientists were caught by surprise when the trick worked on the seventh, and likely last, try.

Members of the normally staid Phoenix team, who have been forced to watch for much of the last week as their first Martian soil sample lingered maddeningly close to the ovens, celebrated by cheering and dancing around the room to K.C. and the Sunshine Band’s 1970s disco hit “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty.”
New York Times. June 12, 2008

Myths for Machines

Mars Rover Opportunity

When the Mars Rover Opportunity rolled onto the planet’s surface it started up its systems and played Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run”.

It’s a song drenched in nostalgia for a type of sleek, streamlined machine that represented escape and romance for young adults. It hadn’t been Bruce Springsteen’s era. He wasn’t sentimental about a vanishing age. He was just sharpening his wits, learning how to tell stories for his own time by first re-telling the stories that had filled him with wonder. I think that NASA, by giving Opportunity this song, has given the machines that inhabit Mars – Spirit, Opportunity and now Phoenix – myths of their own.

Phoenix landed on Mars recently with a library on a disc strapped to its hull, with visions, dreams and nightmares Earth-dwelling humans have had of Mars. It includes messages from writer/scientists Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan, the telling of “War of the Worlds” by both H.G. Wells and Orson Welles, and excerpts of books by J G Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut. And a video explaining Phoenix’s mission and giving its specifications and workings.

When I heard Bruce Springsteen perform “One Headlight” with the Wallflowers, it struck me that it could be added to Opportunity’s collection of myths.

Spirit and Opportunity continue to operate long after their termination time, heroically battling the malfunction of their own components and the tough Martian climate to send back footage from Mars. “One Headlight” is an ode to a stoic machine. A disillusioned Cinderella dies of a broken-heart and a grieving Prince Charming bravely faces the realisation that there’s no happily ever after. He didn’t need a magic coach, he decides he could have driven himself and Cinderella through life with a trusty old machine with one headlight.

 

 

Toolmaker celebrated

The New York Times has an obituary for Peter Staudhammer, a designer of tools and machines for NASA’s landing missions on the Moon and Mars.

In the 1960s, while working for the defense contractor TRW, Dr. Staudhammer was the engineer in charge of developing a way to put a manned spacecraft safely on the surface of the Moon. His team developed a powerful throttling engine that allowed astronauts to control the descent of the lunar lander, softening its landings in the historic series of manned lunar missions that began in 1969.

Later, in the 1970s, Dr. Staudhammer helped design the compact traveling laboratory that accompanied the Viking missions to Mars. The laboratory, known as the Viking biology instrument package, was placed on the planet’s surface, where it heated soil samples, studied the resulting gases and relayed the findings from the scene. Scientists of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had hoped to discover conditions favorable to primitive life — and perhaps even find single-cell organisms — but the instruments revealed what was an essentially sterile environment.