I’m no stranger to the amount of work that goes into operating a robot on another planet. Experience working with the Curiosity rover has shown me that it takes an extremely talented, well-oiled machine of a team to accomplish all that Curiosity has done. However, I had never considered all the work it takes to send a rover to Mars. The next Martian explorer, Mars 2020, currently exists as a robotic skeleton at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Teams across the world are working diligently to construct the instruments that will adorn the rover, inside and out, and thereby give it the tools it needs to explore. My favorite instrument, Mastcam-Z, is a pair of zoomable cameras that will sprout from the rover’s mast. They are the rover’s science cameras, specially designed to see Mars both in visible light wavelengths (where Mars rocks and dust mostly look red) and in near infrared wavelengths (where rocks and sediments appear much more varied).

Before the cameras can be installed on the rover, they have to be constructed to extremely tight specifications, and then calibrated. I won’t detail the long and arduous build process because Jim Bell already described it here. It took a lot longer to get to the science calibration (the last step in the testing process) than some on the team expected because of many of the kinds of typical last-minute tweaks and fixes often needed once you start testing complex instruments designed for harsh environments like the surface of Mars.

Earlier this month, the cameras were finally ready for calibration. The calibration team—a subset of the full Mastcam-Z team that includes scientists, engineers, operations specialists, and students—descended on Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego to perform an impressive array of meticulously crafted tests. The calibration team worked during morning and night shifts to run as many tests as possible within the time available before the cameras had to be delivered to JPL. On one of my night shifts, we took more than 100 images of a poster printed with a semi-random pattern of dots, while a technician in the clean room moved the poster a few centimeters after every. single. frame. It was precisely as tedious as it sounds, but soon evolved into a sort of dance: technicians adjusted the poster, camera operators commanded frames to be captured, documentarians recorded parameters, and data validators (that was me!) checked the images that Mastcam-Z took to verify the quality of the data while the technicians adjusted the poster for the next frame. Then we did it again. And again. And again.