Mission to Mars

Discovery

Monday May 26th 2008

On August 4, 2007 the Nasa Mars exploration spacecraft set off towards the red planet to search for water and signs of life in the Martian arctic’s ice-rich soil. Barry Goldstein, project manager of the Phoenix Mars Mission, reveals his hopes and fears for the project. For more background on the Phoenix project, read author Marcus Chown's piece here

Monday May 26th 2008

The Phoenix spacecraft. Photograph: NASA

I was paired with Peter Smith, the principal investigator, to pull the project proposal together during what we call our Phase A Study, which is basically the concept study of the mission. We wrote a proposal that was submitted in May 2003 and we were selected by Nasa as the winning scout mission in August.

I’m guessing we had about 400-500 people altogether working on the programme; that includes everyone at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, and the University of Arizona – and all the sub-contractors who built the components.

We’re the first in a series of scout missions that are scientist-led missions. This launch will have cost around $400m. We’re reacting to the 2001 Mars Gamma Ray Spectrometer’s (GRS) discovery of low accessible sub-surface ice, at the most southerly polar latitude of Mars.

The GRS shows that within half a metre of the surface is accessible ice, and what we’re going to do is land at 57 degrees north latitude, which is equivalent to Iceland on Earth. We’re going to dig in through the permafrost with a 7.5-feet-long robotic arm that can scrape and dig, and has a grinding tool to acquire ice-dirt shavings. We have some in situ experiments that can analyse the constituent components of the ice we collect. We’re trying to determine what’s inside it. Obviously, the holy grail of discovery might be organics.

It would be absolutely phenomenal to discover the potential for life. One of our instruments, the thermal-evolved gas analyser, was developed in a very clean environment – the pains they took to develop it were incredible, to make sure we didn’t have a false-positive. We didn’t want to think we’d detected organics only to discover we’d found our own thumb-print on the instrument. That would be embarrassing.

Not being a scientist (I’m an engineer on the project management side), I can’t speculate on whether we’ll find organics, but if we do, I guarantee there will be a lot of controversy about it, and a lot of debate in the scientific community. People would start to think philosophically about it.

But the goal of the mission is not so much to say that we have found life, it’s more the issue of biological potential. Is there water on the planet? Could that water sustain life? No matter where we look on our planet, whether it’s in volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean or up in the arctic, wherever they find water they find rather tenacious life. So it’s an intriguing prospect.

Launch is by no means routine. At launch the vehicle goes from 0 miles an hour to 2,600 miles an hour on its approach to Mars. And then in seven minutes we’ll be back to zero again and over 170m miles away, so it’s a nerve-wracking time.
It’s fraught with some amount of risk, but there are lots of statistics that have been built up for us to use and analyse and our launch vehicle, Delta, has launched literally hundreds and hundreds of times.

The scary part of the mission is landing on Mars (we land on May 25, 2008). The pedigree of the team goes back to the Mars 1998 landing, which was obviously not successful. So we’ve spent an enormous amount of effort over the past four years flushing out all the potential bugs and things that people suspected (and didn’t even know about) that could have caused the 1998 failure, to try and make this project more robust.

If we’re successful, in two years’ time the scientists will be telling you what was discovered. I’ll be in Tahiti on vacation! I can say what I hope they’ll be telling you. I hope they will have seen a vastly different terrain than ever seen before on Mars; I’m hoping we can make some very significant inroads into understanding the toxicity – or lack of toxicity – on the planet. Knock on wood, maybe we’ll see some biological potential and generate some controversy but, hey, I’d much rather have that debate than not find it at all.

I don’t think the public has the same "gee whizz" factor towards space exploration and Nasa that it had a few decades ago. I was born in 1960 and was in my early teens when the Apollo project happened – it captured my imagination and got me into the business. But I think a lot of that has gone away.

Do I think this will rekindle it? To be frank, though I'm always hopeful I think public enthusiasm for this and recent launches doesn’t compare to that of the Apollo days. I hope we can turn things around in that regard.

• Barry Goldstein was talking to Mark King.

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