New Mars

Matthew Golombek will be a name familiar to both young and old Mars enthusiasts. As the chief scientist for NASA’s Mars Pathfinder, he successfully landed the first rover on Mars and brought the dusty and alien landscapes one step closer to millions of people watching on Earth. Eight years later, he’s guiding not one but two rovers on the surface of Mars in one of the most successful space exploration missions in history. New Mars Staff Writer Stuart Atkinson talks to Matt Golombek about a typical day at work on Mars, the joy of seeing Spirit safely land on Mars, and the discoveries that the rovers have made so far.

	Matthew Golombek

Matthew Golombek will be a name familiar to both young and old Mars enthusiasts. As the chief scientist for NASA’s Mars Pathfinder, he successfully landed the first rover on Mars and brought the dusty and alien landscapes one step closer to millions of people watching on Earth. The Mars Pathfinder and its Sojourner rover represented a turning point in NASA’s exploration of Mars, towards a more active, ambitious – and successful – programme.

Since the Mars Pathfinder, Matthew Golombek has been heavily involved in the planning of the current Spirit and Opportunity missions; he was Mars Exploration Program Landing Site Scientist and Co-chair of the NASA Landing Site Steering Committee that oversaw the selection process. Right now, he is working as a science team member heavily involved in day-to-day operations of the rovers. Stuart Atkinson, staff writer for New Mars, spoke to Matthew Golombek recently.

New Mars: First of all Matt, thanks for agreeing to talk to New Mars at what must be a ridiculously busy time for you. I know you won’t have time to just sit around net-surfing all day, but do you – or any of the other people on the MER team – follow the discussions and debates on websites like New Mars? I have often wondered if you check out what enthusiasts like ourselves are saying and thinking about your projects…

Matt Golombek: Some people on the project do as we often get e-mail notes or other postings on interesting, fun, or otherwise unusual reports.

NM: It must be an incredible time to be at JPL as we “invade” Mars. With two rovers on the surface, and various spacecraft in orbit, all sending back images and data, can you give us an idea of what it’s like to be in the middle of it all? What is the atmosphere there like?

MG: It is tremendously fun to rove around on Mars. There are days when you can’t wait for the downlink from the rover to find out what it has done and what its new location looks like.

NM: Going back to the very beginning of your story, why Mars? Were you a sky-watcher when you were young? Do you maybe have happy memories of gazing at Mars shimmering in a telescope eyepiece?

MG: I was interested in geology because I wanted to know why the Earth’s surface looked the way it did – why were there mountains and valleys. Planetary geology was even more fun because you could compare the Earth with its neighbours.

NM: What made you devote your career to exploring and studying Mars?

MG: Mars is the most Earth like planet with strong evidence for liquid water on its surface. It is a place where we can ask in a scientific manner – “are we alone in the universe?” Will life form anywhere that liquid water is stable, or is it chance happenstance?

NM: New Mars readers – and Mars enthusiasts in general – have grown up watching you on TV, and many will remember you from the PATHFINDER mission. You were never off our screens while Sojourner was trundling around Ares Vallis, and have featured on every Pathfinder retrospective made since. What was it like to be a part of that amazing, groundbreaking mission?

MG: Pathfinder was an amazing achievement by an absolutely committed, incredibly close, understaffed, and overworked team. It is an experience that could probably never be duplicated and one that I will never forget.

NM: How does working on the MER project differ from working on Pathfinder?

MG: MER is a much, much bigger project, with many, many more people. Pathfinder was small enough that I knew most everyone that worked on it. MER is so large that no single person knows everyone who works on it.

NM: What is your exact role within the MER project?

MG: I have two main roles. The first was during project development, when I led the 3 year effort to select the landing sites for the two rovers. I am the Mars Exploration Program Landing Site Scientist and Co-chair of the NASA Landing Site Steering Committee that oversaw the selection process. This occurred through project design and development, spacecraft build and launch, and final targeting with the trajectory correction maneuvers. My second role is as a science team member heavily involved in operating the rover on the surface and carrying out science investigations.

NM: Can you briefly describe for us a typical work day for Matt Golombek after he arrives at JPL?

MG: During the first three months of the MER surface mission, we were all living on Mars time. I would arrive at JPL 38 minutes later each day to synch up with daylight time on Mars for the solar powered rover I was working on. In 6 weeks, our schedule moved forward by 24 hours, so we were coming and going at all sorts of bizarre hours and we were always jet (er Mars) lagged and some of us moved back and forth between the rovers, which were separated by 12 hours. First thing on arriving at mission operations, I would review the data that was arriving at the end of the rovers day and then have several hours to analyze the data and decide what to do the next sol with the rover. Even though we were all in southern California, we were all really living on Mars with the rovers.

Opportunity looks back at its tracks after a record drive of 100 meters on Sol 70.

NM: Many New Mars readers sit at their PCs watching the MER Media Briefings live on NASA TV, and we’ve seen you up there on the stage a few times. What’s it like to be up there in front of the press pack? Do you get stage fright? You always seem supremely confident and cheerful…

MG: The whole point is to communicate the findings of the project as effectively as you can. Being afraid or boring doesn’t help and adding a bit of humor is usually a plus.

NM: On the subject of those briefings, in the aftermath of the media feeding frenzy which followed the now infamous announcement that fossils might have been found in the ALH 84001 meteorite, do the MER team feel under pressure to be 1000% certain of any findings they announce before the cameras?

MG: Any project science team is required to review its own finding before reporting to the media. The science process is to ask any and all questions and to test all sorts of different hypotheses. We have a responsibility to report truthfully and as well as we can what the consensus of the team is. Often this takes time to formulate the hypothesis and then make the observations to test it. Obviously for big impact hypotheses, it requires a larger burden of proof.

NM: We all shudder at the memory of the awful “Six minutes of silence” which followed the landing of Spirit. Did you fear that the rover had suffered the same fate as Beagle 2, which had vanished just a few days earlier?

MG: No, I was confident, but distracted as I was the live CNN commentator at the time.

NM: What were / are your thoughts on the loss of Beagle 2?

MG: A tragic loss. We were all looking forward to the scientific results. I felt sad for the entire Beagle team and in particular, Dr. John Bridges, who led the landing site selection effort for Beagle and with whom I interacted on the surface characteristics of the Isidis Planitia site.

NM: We all cheered along with you when Spirit eventually phoned home successfully, but can you tell us how you felt when the first black and white pictures of Gusev crater appeared on those screens?

MG: I was in an outdoor press tent with CNN. It was the middle of the night and very cold and the monitor with the images was too small to make out any of the details. Given the effort I had put in to select the landing site, I was anxious to see how the surface compared with our predictions, but the monitor was too small. As soon as the live commentary was over I raced over to the operations building to see them…

NM: And what about the first colour panorama? How did seeing that for the first time affect you, and your colleagues?

MG: I was joyous as the surface was very similar to what we predicted from the remote sensing data. We predicted a reasonably flat plain, generally similar in color (red and dusty) as the Viking and Pathfinder landing sites but with far fewer rocks.

NM: The rovers’ pictures are obviously the man or woman in the street’s main interest, and grab all the publicity and media attention, but can you describe for us how exciting it is for a scientist like yourself to receive and work on the data obtained by the other, less glamorous instruments?

MG: The story on the outcrop inside the crater we landed in in Meridiani needed results from all of the instruments to confirm that we were looking at an evaporite. The images gave the texture and morphology, but the chemistry and iron mineralogy were key. In fact, one of our eureka moments was when the first chemistry on the fresh outcrop was returned and many of us realized we were looking at a rock deposited in a shallow sea.

NM: The two rovers have now sent back many thousands of images. Which have particularly impressed or moved you?

MG: The images right after landing that showed what the surface is like (compared to what we predicted). The images at the end of long drives that show something completely new, and demonstrate real exploration. The images into Bonneville and Fram craters and the cracks in Meridiani Planum come to mind.

NM: What did you feel when you saw that stunning picture of Earth shining in Mars’s dusk sky? Many of us here were deeply moved by that.

MG: We tried to take pictures of the Earth with Pathfinder and we were always thwarted by night and early morning clouds, so when we succeeded with MER is was really fun.

NM: Is there a picture, as yet untaken, that you’re particularly looking forward to seeing?

MG: Most of us are looking forward to peering inside Endurance crater at Meridiani and looking at the Columbia Hills up close.

NM: Be honest now, do you and the other guys at JPL have a good laugh when you read the accusations on websites that you’ve discovered ancient martian artefacts – or even fossils or skulls – at Gusev and Meridiani but are covering them up? Or is it annoying and distracting?

MG: The more outrageous the more fun!

NM: What was your reaction when you realised that Opportunity’s cosmic “hole in one” had set it down just a short drive away from that rocky outcrop? That was an amazing stroke of luck, surely?

MG: I remember talking to a colleague in the elevator of the operations building after we had learned that Opportunity had landed safely, but before the images had been returned (I was on my way out to the CNN tent again). When he asked me what I thought the Meridiani Planum landing site would look like, I said it would look completely unlike anywhere we had landed before. It would be a dark and flat granule to basaltic sand plain with little dust and sparse outcroppings of a light unit. Fortunately, I could see the images on the CNN moniter better this time, so I got to celebrate all the way to the operations building.

NM: We’ve been searching for decades now for evidence or proof that Mars was once a warmer, wetter world, with water on its surface, and it looks like we’ve finally got it thanks to Opportunity’s study of that rocky outcrop in Eagle Crater. When you all realised for the first time that those rocks were sedimentary, and knew that Meridiani was once underwater, how did that feel? Did you all share a quiet “wow…” moment? Celebrate? What did you do to mark the historic discovery?

MG: There was one “eureka moment” I shared with two other geologists on the science team after the first chemical analysis showed the rocks were sulphates and we realized the rocks were evaporates. To us that really was the “wow” moment.

NM: So, we now know Mars was warmer, and wetter… that sedimentary rocks formed… that there’s sulphur in the rocks, ice beneath the surface, water locked up in the soil and hematite everywhere… We now also know that there’s methane in the martian atmosphere. To enthusiasts like us, this all seems to be preparing us for the Big Day when NASA announces it has discovered fossils, or even living micro-organisms…Is there a “buzz” about this possibility in the corridors and backrooms of JPL? Any betting pools going?

MG: The environment in which the rocks at Eagle crater were deposited are ideal for preserving whatever was in the water at the time. The chances of finding a fossil are remote. Even in fossiliferous sedimentary rocks on Earth, identifiable fossils tend to be rare and require quite a bit of hands on searching (such as splitting shale with a rock hammer). Even if the MER rover were to image something that might look like a fossil, there would be almost no way to prove it were a fossil as opposed to being formed by some inorganic process. Whether life actually began on Mars will need to be addressed by subsequent missions and will rely strongly on chemical and isotopic measurements and may even require the return of samples to the Earth for study in labs.

NM: Okay, leaving Spirit and Opportunity on Mars, we’re going to grant you a wish -just one, tho. You can snap your fingers and go to anywhere on Mars, anywhere you like. Where would you go? Which place would you like to see in person instead of through a probe’s camera eyes? And why?

MG: For those of us who worked on the MER landing sites, the Melas Chasma site was intriguing. It is at the bottom of Valles Marineris, so the view of the canyon walls (10 km high) would have been extraordinary and there were very interesting layered materials at the bottom.

NM: Which other solar system bodies would you like to explore – remotely, with probes, or in person? Do the ice plains of Europa beckon you? Or the bizarre landscape of Titan?

MG: They would all be great to see.

NM: Finally, with NASA now actively planning to send people to Mars within our lifetimes, it’s possible that the first person to set foot on the red planet is a young New Mars reader, and that he or she is reading this interview right now. Have you a message for them?

MG: Follow your heart.

NM: Matt Golombek, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us!

Visit the Mars Exploration Rover Mission homepage for more information.

Filed under: Interviews on May 5th, 2004