Chapter 2: Go Back to Mars
Narration: Lauren Ward
Transcript:
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On 21st
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August 1993, a tragic event occurred.
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Communications with the Mars Observer spacecraft were lost
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during a sequence referred to as the pressurization sequence.
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This was a sequence in preparation
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for insertion to orbit about Mars.
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Once again, I mean, we are always trying things
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because they're hard, not not because they're easy.
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And so once in a while, we're going to have a failure
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because we are trying hard things.
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But I had been fully anticipated that we could have problems with this instrument.
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This was a new ballgame completely okay.
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But I was not concerned about the spacecraft.
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It never crossed my mind that the spacecraft would let us down.
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So this was a blow in the sense of, wow,
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something I completely didn't expect.
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You know, we held
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out hope for a while that maybe it would come back,
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maybe they'd find it or recover it or something, and then
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eventually that settles down and you realize the mission was lost.
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I was devastated. I think we all were.
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And it was it really wasn't clear at the time
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whether we were going to have a
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follow on to actually
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do what the mission was supposed to do.
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So that was extremely hard to take.
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What made it easier is the amount of time we had for grieving
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was actually pretty short.
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NASA's decided that we want to continue this and go back to Mars,
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and so we had to snap out of it literally and get back to thinking about
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and fighting for the next mission, which is Mars Global Surveyor.
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It was a difficult time and
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it was the first time I think I really felt
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I had to get in there and argue with my colleagues.
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But as the PI, particularly for me
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,that we needed to get to back to Mars and we needed to get back
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with this instrument
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knowing that they couldn't carry all six or seven instruments, only four would go.
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The laser altimeter had to be one of them.
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Okay.
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The engineers had a chance to kind of
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just not change it, but, you know, do certain things a little bit better.
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That's what engineers like to do was
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fix all the first round mistakes
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and the second round and make new ones.
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We were asked immediately, how long will it take
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you to rebuild another copy of MOLA?
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How much is it going to cost?
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Can you get your team back together in time?
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Do you have the parts or so?
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There was immediately a flood of things we had to do.
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Jim Abshire brought me in for the detector engineer
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who would just left Goddard at the time.
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So I was lucky to join the team working on the detectors.
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We were only given, I think, three years to rebuild it, much shorter than usual.
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And everyone,
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all the management knew that means there's no wiggle room in your schedule.
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But the team was largely still there and everyone's
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geared up to redo it since the first one didn't make it.
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So everyone really want to do it again and do it right.
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While the Goddard team was building MOLA-2 for the Mars
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Global Surveyor mission, a small team seized
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a long awaited opportunity to hitch a ride on the Space Shuttle
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with an experiment known as the Shuttle Laser Altimeter.
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I think confidence comes from demonstration.
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Sometimes you have to do more.
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Sometimes you have to do less.
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Working personally to build that instrument.
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We built it at Goddard in our lab down the hall
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without any fancy paperwork or flight procedures or anything.
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We just built it.
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I was hired then to come on board working on the shuttle laser altimeter,
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and I was brought in specifically to work on precise positioning,
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precise pointing and precise geolocation of the surface footprints.
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And we tested it on the roof, shined it over to a bank building
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eleven kilometers away, lined it up, and it was ready for the Shuttle.
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It was a Hitchhiker Special that we flew with
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help from NASA Headquarters on the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
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Booster ignition and liftoff of Endeavour in pursuit
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of a Japanese satellite.
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The area of maximum dynamic.
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They turned it on for us in the first the first time they turned it on,
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the Shuttle's upside down with the laser pointing at Earth.
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We were over the Middle Pacific.
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First light showed all this fuzz over the surface of the Earth.
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We're all looking.
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We thought we got something wrong.
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We realized later we were seeing the boundary layer clouds over the ocean.
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When we came to land, the first was the height of the trees.
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All of a sudden the laser pulses
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got shorter and shorter distances.
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The first landfall of the Shuttle Laser Altimeter and the first orbit
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went right over the summit of the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii.
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Well, we're extraordinarily delighted to report that the Shuttle Laser
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Altimeter experiment, it's a Hitchhiker
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experiment on STS-72 has performed absolutely nominally.
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In fact, everything has worked even beyond our expectations.
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And that was a genuine first light
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experience with MOLA technology.
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But on Earth.
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Really had to get those data sets out there
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and you had to get a couple people that really bought into it
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and built on it and convince others that this work.
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As the data from the Shuttle Laser Altimeter began to convince some skeptics.
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The Goddard team finished the MOLA instrument.
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Again.
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Our MOLA team really came through, was just really
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another
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great experience for many of us, including me.
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We're able to deliver to the Mars Global Surveyor project and it got launched.
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And we have liftoff of NASA's Mars Global Surveyor.
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As America begins its journey back to the Red Planet.
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When Mars Global Surveyor started getting closer to Mars,
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we were going to go into this aerobraking phase.
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That was an opportunity that we had
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to go ahead and turn on the lasers and see if we could track the surface.
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Somebody being carried.
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In Station 45 was having problems locking up to the two tape data.
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What was that?
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You said 1607 or 16-- Can you tell if MOLA is turned off?
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[radio chatter] Is that the nadir event?
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That must be the nadir event.
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I'm hungry-- Look at the laser beam coming back, Rob.
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[Lots of chatter].
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It's coming in too fast and I've got too much data coming in.
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Look at that!
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Yeah, look, there's a little tiny terrace.
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This is the first.
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profile of a crater we've ever seen on a planet.
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Nice laser, Rob!
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We have Mars finally!
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12 years!
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All right, let's take a look.
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Over a decade later,
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the Goddard team had proof: laser altimetry worked.
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It could map distant craters and valleys and mountains.
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It changed the game.
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Today, we've ushered in a new era in the remote sensing of Mars.
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And this particular dataset that we've acquired has in fact enabled us
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to generate what we consider
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a very detailed description of the shape of the planet Mars.
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This has significant implications for the flow of water early on Mars.
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We believe this is one of the youngest features on the planet.
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We're seeing a planet is very different from Earth
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and is telling us something about the Earth in an indirect way
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that says that not everything works in the way that we originally had in mind.
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The kind of measurements that we're making now are allowing us to,
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you know, characterize Mars on timescales of days to years now,
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and then the next step is to try to go back eons and
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try to figure out what changed on Mars.
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I mean, at that time, we used to brag that Mars was mapped better than the Earth.
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The accuracy of MOLA was so good.,
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and and after a couple of years, the coverage was so good,
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it was definitely a more accurate map of a planet than any place.
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And this came out of it can't be done in the mid eighties
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to a tool that we now accept as the standard.
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For those of us that worked on MOLA,
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it was transformative, wasn't the destination or a place
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that we were as much as a place that we would become.
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In some ways, we were in demand to consider whether we could
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provide a laser altimeter to another mission.
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Things were not working the way we expected them to
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and there were mysteries, and we weren't expecting after MOLA
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particularly to have mysteries at that point.