Patience, Teamwork Skills Serve Flight Director Well

Twenty-eight-year-old Jennifer Harris never set out to be the flight director in the hot seat during the Pathfinder spacecraft’s first excellent adventures on Mars. In fact, after graduating from MIT with a degree in aerospace engineering in 1990, she seriously considered joining the Peace Corps--or the CIA.

But the one quality that would serve her in all these fields also turned out to be essential during the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes terrifying first day of Pathfinder’s at times hair-raising arrival.

“Mostly it’s patience,” said the woman from Fostoria, Ohio, who dominated America’s TV screens during Pathfinder’s tense Independence Day landing. “Everything’s so chaotic. I’m trying to talk to Richard [Cook, the mission controller], and other people start in. . . . You’re always working on three or four problems at once.”

With half a dozen people and more than 1,000 channels of information from Pathfinder and its companion rover vying for attention, Harris relies on simple wisdom she learned during a hardship-plagued year volunteering as an English and Bible teacher in Ukraine.

“You learn to be joyful in all circumstances,” she said. “You learn that there are some things you can’t control, so you may as well not dwell on them.”

Being flight director means coordinating a team of specialists in all areas of spacecraft operation--from keeping track of the temperature and pressure of instruments, to power levels, image quality and general health of the craft.

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As a lifelong volleyball player and sports addict, Harris likes teamwork. “But I’ve never been on a team like this,” she said. “We have a camaraderie that’s beyond belief.” And even though she’s flight director, she said, “I’m as much of a peon as anyone.”

Still working on her master’s degree at USC, Harris believes she got the job because “I happen to excel at putting it all together, making it happen. I’m not necessarily good at figuring out what’s wrong.”

She has to be on intimate terms with Pathfinder’s technical secrets. For one thing, she says, that knowledge helps her judge whether the people she’s working with are competent--and whom to grab when a problem crops up.

“You need to know a lot of things, and I love that,” she said. “It’s problem solving. It’s mind games.”

The hardest thing is simply that there’s too much information and too little time to make decisions.

She has been working on Pathfinder for so long, however, that most of the spacecraft’s maneuvers are second nature. The team has run through the mission in practice sessions literally hundreds of times in JPL’s faux Martian landscape, the “sandbox.”

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“Now we’ll never have to do it again,” she said, admitting that it makes her “almost nauseous” to think about the sandbox anymore.

“So many things could go wrong,” she said in the midst of Saturday’s tense--and ultimately successful--attempts to restart the critical modems in the lander and rover. “And the job of an engineer is to think of all [of them].”

As for being the only female on the Pathfinder flight team, she doesn’t see it as an issue. “There’s definitely a difference” between the way men and women relate to each other, she said.

“But I don’t need to be like them [to do my job]. They don’t yell at me. I like that. Especially when things get tense.”