1961 Magazine Fall 2016

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
MISSION CONTROL:
Do Missions to Mars Ever go Wrong?
DR. JIM RICE:
You know I worked on a mission that crashed on Mars.
It was called Mars Polar Lander. We were supposed to
land near the south pole of Mars. This was in December
of 1999. It crashed and you know you lose your job
and this was around Christmas time. Not because you
did anything wrong, just flying to Mars is a dangerous
proposition. Roughly 2/3 of all the missions that go
there fail. Those aren’t good odds to start with. It takes
a certain fire and ability to do it, you really have to
have a passion to do it.
It happened, I was out of a job. The Mars program
shut down. I didn’t know what was going to happen.
I was trying to find a job to pay the bills and eat and
eventually the program came back a couple years
later. I got involved in it again and I got selected on
the Rover team. Once you’ve gone through one of
those failures, you never want to go through it again
It’s people crying, it’s like a funeral. You spend years
of your life on this project and it’s gone in the wink
of an eye and you don’t have a job; the media never
covers that aspect of it. The thing you hear about is
X millions of dollars, program failed. You can’t really
appreciate the highest of highs until you’ve been to
the lowest of lows.
Another time, people actually forget, is that the
Columbia accident happened in 2003. We landed
the rover mission about a year later. We had a lot
of pressure on us. The Vice President, who was golf
buddies with the NASA administrator at the time,
whenever we had a science meeting we were told
these things have to work.
The whole Mars program is riding on you guys and
we were trying to do the best we can but we can’t
guarantee if Mars is going to cooperate. Of course it
all worked out, but there was a lot of pressure. We
had some black eyes at the time: The Space Shuttle
deaths, the last time we tried to land on Mars it was
a failure. It was pretty special to be part of that team
and to still be part of that team. We have a great team
and we’ve written the science book on Mars and we’re
still doing it.
MISSION CONTROL:
How many people, all in, does it take to get a Rover to
Mars?
DR. JIM RICE:
There’s a book that Steve Squires wrote called “Roving
Mars” about 10 years ago now. He’s our Science Team
leader and he’s a great leader. In the back of his book
he acknowledged every person that worked on that. I
didn’t ever count them up but it’s easily in the hundreds
possible thousands. You need the engineering team to
develop and test the hardware. The science team is also
involved in developing and testing that. Integrating
instruments with the Rovers, it’s definitely a team
project. These things are so complicated, no one person
could ever possibly understand every aspect of it. The
example I always use is a football team. When you
pull together you win a super bowl or land a mission
on Mars. Anyone’s role is just as important as anyone
else’s. You need it all pulling together to make it work.
MISSION CONTROL:
How did the Mars Rover team discover 92% pure silicate
deposits on Mars?
DR. JIM RICE:
I’ve always made the comment, “Somebody upstairs
likes us!” The right front wheel of both Rovers went
out but the weird thing about that was, we were kindof
disappointed because that means we can’t climb
slopes or as steep as we could before. We were in
these hills, the Columbia Hills - and we thought well,
we were basically dragging it, it locked up and we
were driving it backwards. And the biggest discovery
of Spirit’s came because of that bum wheel. If we had
not had that wheel, we would have not found this soil
because we’re driving it backwards, we’re dragging it.
You can look at the pictures and see we’re dragging
it, and it creates like a little trench. Well, it uncovered
this bright white soil. Which turned out to be silica,
92% pure silica.
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1961 Magazine Fall 2016