Preparing for Mars Sample Return

The Conference on Life Detection in Extraterrestrial Samples is the kind of meeting that science fiction nerds dream of, a chance to sit in a room and methodically plan the logistics of what would be one of the most transformative discoveries of modern science. What kinds of samples would you pick up with a rover? What kind of evidence for life would be convincing? Oh yeah, and what exactly is “life” anyway?

I’m at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, looking out toward an idyllic palm-lined beach as surfers trot between the lab and the breakers, because, well, that’s what you do during your lunch break here. Inside the conference room, the few dozen scientists and engineers trade handshakes and inquire after family members before launching into a pointed critique of what went wrong in each other’s most recent scientific publications.

As the projector fires up, nervous fingers swipe at smartphones to check email: the 2013 budget is coming out today, and the word on the street is that planetary science won’t fare well. But the conference organizers – a veteran team representing NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) – concede nothing, noting that if you never really know when you’ll be put in the game, you’ve always got to be warming up.

Robotic missions to Mars have transformed our understanding of the Red Planet over the last decade, but even before the Mars Science Laboratory’s launch pad gets cold, scientists are planning for the next milestone: a Mars sample return mission. Of course, given the decade-plus timescale of interplanetary mission development and the vagaries of NASA funding, it’s best to start early.

A sample return mission would represent a leap forward in terms of both mission complexity and potential scientific reward. But where to begin? Dr. Andrew Steele, a Senior Staff Scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, sums up the challenges with a pithy riddle. “You have no idea what you’re looking for, you have no idea where to look for it, and you have no idea what to look for it with.  But you want to find it.”

For Dr. David Beaty, the Chief Scientist of the Mars Exploration Directorate at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it starts with landing site selection. Most site selection committees prioritize the habitability metric, seeking a location that could feasibly have possessed liquid water at some point in the past. Spirit’s Gusev Crater was an ancient lakebed, with 1000 meters worth of sediment; Opportunity’s Meridiani Planum was a hematite playground; and MSL’s Gale Crater seems to be a proverbial gold mine of sulfates and clays – minerals often linked with water. But that’s just half of the equation; you also need a setting that will preserve any interesting molecules over the millennia and prevent decomposition. After all, martian microbes are only interesting if we can prove that they existed. “You need life to arise,” notes Beaty, “but you also need the evidence of that life to be preserved. We would be looking for a site with both high habitability and preservation potential, and we’d do our sampling there.”

The real coup of a sample return mission is, of course, the return. Bringing samples back to the laboratories of Earth opens up a Pandora’s Box of experimental techniques that can be brought to bear on the hundreds of grams of martian regolith that would likely fall out of the Utah sky. High-end analysis of microfossils, isotopic relationships, and molecular biomarkers all require complicated preparation protocols and enormous machines. It’s a little hard to engineer a 1-kilometer diameter synchrotron onto a rover.

The experimental freedom of a sample return mission represents a fundamental philosophical shift to many scientists. “Robotic expeditions are typically planned in a hypothesis-driven way,” says Beaty, because the scientific questions they can ask are limited by the vocabulary of instruments bolted onto the spacecraft. With samples in hand and the world’s scientific arsenal at your disposal, however, “you could let the discoveries take you wherever you need to go.” In this way, scientists can ask new questions as they arise, using successive bits of information to build a more coherent, convincing analytical story.

At the next coffee break, excited chatter about the prospect of a sample return mission is interrupted by unwelcome emails: the budget news is in, and it’s not pretty. People like Beaty receive the news with measured disappointment: he’s been at this a while, ridden the funding peaks and valleys for years. But the planning must go on: the sample return mission might not be happening soon, but when it does, we’ll be ready.

Houston to NASA Mainframe: You’re Through!

This month marks the end of an era in NASA computing. Marshall Space Flight Center powered down NASA’s last mainframe, the IBM Z9 Mainframe.  For my millennial readers, I suppose that I should define what a mainframe is.  Well, that’s easier said than done, but here goes -- It’s a big computer that is known for being reliable, highly available, secure, and powerful.  They are best suited for applications that are more transaction oriented and require a lot of input/output – that is, writing or reading from data storage devices. 

They’re really not so bad honestly, and they have their place.  Things like virtual machines, hypervisors, thin clients, and swapping are all old hat to the mainframe generation though they are new to the current generation of cyber youths.

In my first stint at NASA, I was at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as a mainframe systems programmer when it was still cool. That IBM 360-95 was used to solve complex computational problems for space flight.   Back then, I comfortably navigated the world of IBM 360 Assembler language and still remember the much-coveted “green card” that had all the pearls of information about machine code.  Back then, real systems programmers did hexadecimal arithmetic – today, “there’s an app for it!”

Back in the 1930s, Columbia University researcher Wallace Eckert used IBM accounting machines — including the Model 601 Multiplying Punch — to do the early calculations that helped put the Apollo astronauts on the moon 30 years later. In 1955, the U.S. Army’s Computational Laboratory in the Guided Missile Division — which was later folded into NASA — used IBM 650 machines.

But the mainframe — introduced in 1964 — became a symbol of NASA’s glory days of big aspirations — and big budgets.

Mainframes kept track of materials for Saturn V and helped guide the first manned flight around the moon — Apollo 8. IBM 360 mainframes were chugging away back in Houston in the summer of 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon. The mainframes did the calculations that helped get them back to earth.

But all things must change.  Today, they are the size of a refrigerator but in the old days, they were the size of a Cape Cod.  Even though NASA has shut down its last one, there is still a requirement for mainframe capability in many other organizations.  The end-user interfaces are clunky and somewhat inflexible, but the need remains for extremely reliable, secure transaction oriented business applications.