Rule for Next Red Planet Mission: No Red Faces

George Pace hops on an airport shuttle and the driver asks what he does. Working on a Mars mission, he says, the next Mars mission.

“Ohhhh, that’s got to work,” the driver tells him, remembering NASA’s embarrassing back-to-back Mars flops in 1999.

“Yeah, I think I’ve heard that before,” Pace replies.

Weeks later, Pace laughs as he recalls the conversation. He’s admiring the spacecraft that he’s been charged with overseeing, the 2001 Mars Odyssey, scheduled for launch April 7.

Seven technicians in white jumpsuits and caps are conducting electrical tests on the glittering half-ton craft, mounted on a low, square pedestal and not yet loaded with fuel. Pace, the project manager, observes the work from behind a large window in a small outer room.

The shuttle driver’s words have followed Pace from Pasadena, home to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, all the way to the launch site at Cape Canaveral.

Mars Odyssey has got to work.

It should work, considering that it’s probably the most scrutinized --and second-guessed--Mars probe in NASA history. Officials say they know of no other that has undergone so many reviews and so much testing before launch.

“A lot of scrutiny, a lot of nervousness at high level,” Pace says.

Pace insists neither he nor his team is more anxious than usual, even though NASA’s last two Mars spacecraft failed, one because of a simple math error. One set of engineers crunched the navigation numbers in English units; the other assumed the figures were in metric.

The result: a doomed Mars Climate Orbiter.

Its companion, the Mars Polar Lander, was lost a few months later. The lander crashed onto Mars, most likely because of a premature engine shutdown.

The real culprit, in the minds of many, was excessive streamlining and penny-pinching in NASA’s Mars program. So this time around, NASA spent millions of extra dollars and increased the spacecraft staff.

The entire 2001 project, which until last year included a companion lander, ended up costing $305 million, up from the original budget of $282 million. (That excludes the launch.) Mars Odyssey alone costs $151 million; that doesn’t count its flight operation over several years.

“I see a real determination for some redemption, and show that we can make it right,” Pace says. “But I don’t sense there’s any anxiety--maybe except in the management.”

This is NASA’s first opportunity since the Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander debacle to launch a spacecraft to Mars, and the last opportunity until 2003 based on the alignment of the planets. The space agency couldn’t resist naming this year’s probe after the movie and novel, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It has the endorsement of the book’s author, Arthur C. Clarke.

Mars Odyssey is meant to orbit Mars, not land on it.

The circuitous trip to Mars will take six months and cover roughly 500 million miles. Once the spacecraft gets there in October, it will ease into a 220-mile to 250-mile-high polar orbit that will have it flying over the entire planet.

Three sets of scientific instruments aboard Mars Odyssey will measure the amount of hydrogen in the soil in a search for frozen water, scour the planet for silicate-rich rocks for clues to the composition of the Martian core, identify minerals in the soil and rocks, and monitor radiation around the planet.

NASA wants to better understand the radiation environment around Mars to protect future human explorers.

Scott Hubbard, NASA’s Mars program director, acknowledges the stakes are high. He and everyone else are yearning for another success story like Mars Pathfinder, which bounced onto the Red Planet on July 4, 1997, and unleashed the Sojourner rover to eyeball rocks.

The companion lander to Mars Odyssey was canceled, in fact, because of its high risk and ever-diminishing science objectives, Hubbard says.

“It’s clear that this is the next mission by which the Mars program will be judged,” he says.

A team of experts from inside and outside NASA went through every detail of the Mars Odyssey project and made more than 140 recommendations, most of which were implemented. The biggest change involved the addition of check valves between the fuel and oxidizer lines. Because last-minute changes can later become booby traps, engineers proceeded with caution.

The experts found nothing that could doom Mars Odyssey, Pace says. He describes their suggestions as “safeguards.”

And yes, the math and all the drawings were double- and triple-checked. This time there is no confusion over which figures are in metric or English units, NASA officials insist.

Hubbard likens the attention to minutiae to that which surrounded NASA’s 1993 shuttle mission to correct the blurred vision of the Hubble space telescope. The Hubble mission obviously had a happy ending.

“We’ve done just about everything that you can do with the spacecraft, where you have gone into it after the design and after a lot of the manufacture and assembly,” Hubbard says.

Hubbard is well aware that something could still go wrong.

The unmanned Delta rocket could blow up. The booster’s upper stage could jam or misfire and leave the probe in low-Earth orbit. The spacecraft could skip by Mars or descend too fast through the Martian atmosphere and burn up.

“If we demonstrate that we’ve done everything we can possibly, reasonably, do to ensure mission success and then Mars simply throws us a curve or we just have a bad day at the launch pad or something is completely random, I think the public would understand,” Hubbard says.

“I think what the public told us after the last set of failures is, there were dumb things that happened here and we don’t want you to try so hard to save money that you do dumb things. We’ve tried to listen to that.”

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Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/2001/new/index.html