From Eight Months to Seven Minutes: NASA's Jim Adams on Mars' Curiosity

In less than 24 hours we’ll know whether the Mars Curiosity Rover, the next in NASA’s line of vehicles designed to probe one of Earth’s closest planetary neighbors, plummeted to the Martian surface as it’s been programmed to, or not. Jim Adams is biting his nails. The SUV-sized Curiosity launched eight months ago, and Adams, NASA’s deputy chief technologist, likely hasn’t slept much since.

Not only does the guy oversee technology transfer across the agency. All that insane tech you see packed onto rockets and rovers at launch time? Yeah, it’s Adams’ job to acquire the appropriate patents to eventually take those things public, as it were, and then to make sure the public knows it’s got access. But there’s also his role finding mission-focused cost-cutting measures within the agency. This has him operating as a sort of tech evangelist – Adams knows that rather than brute force a solution using old, antiquated methods, NASA-like problems are better solved with fresh solutions that employ new tools, even in times of flat budgets. Why? Because NASA-like problems only ever increase in difficulty. “As we go deeper into space with more and more stuff,” he admits, “the problems just keep getting that much harder.”

Take landing the Curiosity rover, the crown jewel of the Mars Science Laboratory. It’s a feat that Adams would probably be one of the first to say isn’t not completely insane, but that if all goes to plan will only nod to the ingenious engineering work of NASA’s research squads. This is his baby, in a way, after all. For the last five years, up until this past March, he served as NASA’s executive director of planetary science. The gig had him heading up all missions to destinations within our solar system. He’s been able to watch Curiosity and the MSL take shape unlike anyone else has been able to.

I had the chance to speak with Adams on Friday, just days prior to Curiosity's scheduled touch down on Monday at around 1:30 EST. He offered a quick sense of the vibe right now at NASA, from Kennedy Space Center to the Jet Propulsion Lab in southern California; geeked over some of Curiosity’s wackier specs, and generally gave a dizzying peek inside the life and times of a space program that’s very much not dead.

Motherboard: Hey, Jim.

Hey, Brian.

How are you doing?

I’m doing alright. I just landed at Kennedy Space Center. Setting up shop, here.

Oh wow. So how’s the weekend looking for you? I’m sure things are insane at the moment.

It’s a full agenda. At Kennedy there’s been what they now call a NASA Social. It used to be called a TweetUp. It’s been going on for two days — there’s been about 50 people participating. So they’re wrapping up this afternoon before a simulcast at the Jet Propulsion Lab on the Mars Science Laboratory. I’m going to give a few thoughts on landing on Mars, as well.

What’s the deal with the TweetUp?

There’s sort of this phenomena started during the Shuttle program. They would invite 50-150 Twitter followers, all space advocates, to come out. They’re given special access to things — things associated with human spaceflight, robotic launches. There are people who’ve gotten tours of Goddard [Space Flight Center] as a result. It’s a day long, sometimes two-day long, event. One of the neat things about that is the reach of Twitter is very broad, so you can bring in 150 people for a launch TweetUp and over the two or three days there will be something on the order of 90 million potential impressions associated with that event.

NASA likes using these TweetUps, but recognizes that social media is more than just Twitter. So they’ve changed the name to Social.

I see. So that just wrapped up. How’s the rest of the weekend shaking out?

I have a couple of informal meetups — people that I know down here, social followers — this evening, Saturday and Saturday evening. But then on Sunday I’m giving three talks. Two at the Visitor’s Center. On Sunday evening before the landing NASA is hosting a number of junior high or high school aged students for a slumber party underneath the Saturn V at the Saturn V Center. So I’m going to go talk to them about what it’s like to land on Mars.

I’ll stick around with them until the landing happens, about 1:30AM EST.

So what is it like to land on Mars, anyway?

It’s an incredible experience. The Seven Minutes of Terror just describes what it’s like in those seven minutes. But the years that lead up to it comes from just a lot of really careful, thoughtful engineering and testing to assure ourselves that all these different pieces that get strung together at one time, to go from 13,000 mph to zero, happen on time and precisely the way they’re supposed to. Otherwise you end up with trash on Mars.

Nobody wants that.

Yeah. It’s sort of a nail biter. But in the years that lead up to it, there’s just this passion around it. Like, OK, I’ve got to solve this problem. I got to solve this problem. I’ve got to solve this problem. I’ve got to put all of it together and then have to test them as a system. It becomes just an incredible exercise in engineering to make sure that it’s all going to work. And then in a moment, all you can do is sit back and let the computer do its job, because like that video points out, there’s nothing that Earth can do to help during that seven minutes. It’s all preprogrammed. It’s all going to happen before we ever get the signal that we actually did do it.

Wow. So just knowing the years of brainpower and labor than went into this, not to mention funding; and as you just said, how in a moment you guys just kind of have to put your hands up and hope the computer does its thing — knowing all of that, what’s the vibe like across NASA? Is it different out on the East Coast, where you are right now, as compared to the JPL? Or is everyone feeling sort of the same sense of excitement, or fear? What is it?

When you get a group of people together, you all feed on that same energy. And so the place where the largest amount of people that have put in the most amount of energy into it over the years, that’s out at JPL. I think that’s where people will have the greatest sense of excitement, but also the greatest sense of accomplishment.

However, it’s important that the public understand why we’re doing this. I feel, personally, it’s very important for the public to understand why we’re doing this. That’s why I’m here at Kennedy, instead of out in California. There will be thousands of visitors coming through here this weekend. It would be a shame for them to come to Kennedy Space Center and not have heard the story of the MSL.

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So why are we doing this, again?

Because it’s all part of the human desire to explore the universe that we live in. One of the fundamental questions that we ask ourselves, is, Are we alone? Understanding if we’re alone involves looking for signs of life beyond the solar system, and looking for them within our solar system. One of the ways we do that is we look for water. Where we find water on Earth — wherever we find water on Earth — we find life. Microbes, bacteria, microscopic organisms. All the way up to odd fish and worms and spiders and stuff that live in really hostile environments.

We are using that same strategy in the MSL. Now that we know there’s a lot of water of Mars, that it’s frozen and under the surface, MSL is a mission that will not only tell us about the geologic history of Mars, and why it is drier on the surface than it is frozen. It will help us look for signs of either past life or existing life on Mars, as well. It’s the next step in exploration.

One of the really interesting metrics, though I can’t remember if its pounds of kilograms, is the number of kilograms or pounds of instrumentation on the Curiosity compared to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. They each carried about 5 — let’s just say kilograms — 5 kg of instrumentation. MSL carries in excess of 100.

Oh wow.

It is a geologist’s and an astrobiologist’s dream laboratory. It’s capable of analyzing wet and dry samples, of doing spectroscopy. Hah. It’s got this laser beam on it that can vaporize rock at up to 14 meters away.

There’s a video out there, an animation, before the Seven Minutes of Terror, that at the end shows MSL firing this laser beam, vaporizing a rock. What that does is it releases the gases that were trapped when the rock was formed. And then we do spectroscopy on those gases to tell us what the environment was like back when Mars was churning and rocks were formed. With each layer that we find in this geology, in the wall of Gale crater, we can form a history about what’s happened there.

Is there a price on history? All told, the MSL project ran up to about $2.5 billion, right?

Correct. And included 7, 000 jobs. It’s just like the Shuttle program. There were people that were employed many years, making it happen.

Moving forward, just in terms of funding for NASA across the board, is this rover-to-Mars mission going to be the last of its kind?

I’ll say this. In an environment where the federal government has every one of its agencies seeing budgets going down, NASA is seeing its budget staying relatively flat. We are enjoying an opportunity to continue to explore. And while some of the things we’ll do are expensive, like developing the next rocket, may have to be delayed, or we may have to terminate them, NASA is not dead. NASA’s budget remains solid. And it’s a priority within the administration. We’re definitely moving forward.

The success of the MSL is definitely going to be a win, I think, in the public eye and hopefully in the administration’s eye, to solidify our position within the government.

Thanks, Jim.

Alright, thank you.

Godspeed.

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv.

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