NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

How did you get the access to Phoenix mission control?

The principal investigator of Phoenix is this guy Peter Smith. He has this instincthe knew the space story was awesome and could appeal to a lot of people. One of his first big missions was Pathfinder, and he came up with this idea that if you built the camera and made the images look like normal photos [and] mounted the camera at normal human height, people would react to them. Then he made this crazy deal to make sure the images were sent from Mars directly to the Internet. He basically created the first-ever viral marketing campaign: In 1997 he sends 100 million hits to NASA's website and almost crashes the entire Internetnot just NASA's site, but the entire Internet.

He knows that if you do it right, it works. So he was looking for people that worked in media or helped with creative ideas for companies to help him. I kind of had a science background, I had a little journalism background and I also made quirky kinds of campaign things in my advertising life. Once I met Peter and got to go to a training mission, I was hooked.

What's crazy is NASA's gulf between what you see when you're watching a talking-heads documentary on the Discovery Channel and what's actually happeningthe debate that goes on, the personalities. I thought, wow, this is really the hook.

What was mission control like?

Mission control is the least exciting workspace ever. It looks like the rec room at your local religious facilitylike a church basement. But then the most exciting things ever happen there. Several times a day you're downloading images directly from Mars, or making some discovery and people are freaking out. There's this insane duality between mundane and sublime.

There are a few interesting spaces in mission control, and one is the testbed where they have a copy of the lander, which simulates all the code they're going to run on Mars to make sure they don't hurt the lander. That's this big open warehouse; it's this crazy cinematic space, and you feel like you're on Mars a little bit.

We know now, nearly three years later, that Phoenix was a huge success. But what was the mood in the room then?

First, there was crazy excitement and adrenaline-fueled everything. But then, people start getting tired and cranky because you're living on Mars time. Your body can't adjust to this ever-changing schedule. Your schedule shifts by about 40 minutes every day, so you keep getting worse and worse jet lag.

But also, in our mission, there was a problem: a short with the main instrument they hoped would get this headline-grabbing "water on Mars" headline. And then all of a sudden NASA freaks out and says, "You can't do anything until you get water." They basically... imposed their will on the mission. That makes people really mad.

How did that happen? How did the NASA directive change the mission?

[The Phoenix team members] had their whole idea of how they were going to attack the understanding of the soil. They went there to understand the history of water on Mars. That involves looking at the different layers of soil, and so they dug down to this ice-soil boundary, which is where all the good science happens.

Going to Marsthis is only our sixth trip, and it's the first time we've done this kind of digging. You think, oh, digging up dirt and putting it in a little paileven a two-year-old could do that. But actually executing it is really hard. So the plan for the mission was to really understand these instruments and how they'd operate on Mars, because they knew it was going to be hard to get ice. Then NASA steps in, [and] they're basically like, "Get the ice!" There's this amazing story arc of NASA stepping in to make sure they get the headline they need so that people will care about the mission.

Were you surprised by how difficult it was to command a rover on Mars?

Just communicating with the lander is a crazy task. Every day, the lander wakes up and it has a list of instructions. And it's supposed to do those instructions. But you don't know if it actually does them until [the results] come back to you. And then you have one night to understand what happened and recode the lander for the next day.

But then you have these limited opportunities in which to execute these [commands]; the communication has to be scheduled in advance, because you're relying on an orbiter to pass over the lander, and the lander has to be turned on and ready to communicate with the orbiter. To get hundreds of scientists to work on their individual experiments and be ready for that moment requires amazing organization.

Were there other memorable characters among the supporting cast?

There was an amazing cast of characters. Nilton Renno is this Brazilian scientist from the University of Michigan who ends up discovering those droplets on the lander legs, and he sparks this big controversy over whether they've discovered water on Mars. He was like the mission gadflypeople either love him or hate him.

There another man on the mission, the chief engineerDara Sabahi. You have this feeling of serenity when you talk to him. You know when lots of really smart people are saying "This is the smartest guy we know" that there's probably some truth in that.

What was it like being with the mission on the really big days, like when water ice was confirmed?

The big daysit's like winning a sporting event. You're cheering for your team, and then they win, and you feel great. You care about these people because you spend so much time with them, and you want great things to happen. For the ice in particular: There were just so many tries when they couldn't get enough ice init kept sublimating away. They try it again and again, and finally it works. It's this amazing feeling of relief. Not only did they do something cool, but they just did it on Mars.

Was it clear in the lab how big it was becoming in the outside world?

No. You're sort of insulated, so you can watch stories spread on the Internet, and that's kind of fun. You watch the numbers go up on news aggregators, like when a story gets to be number one on Reddit, you feel like, we've done something cool.

But the converse is true as well. There was this conspiracy that started to unfold when [there was this story in] Aviation Week about the President being briefed on the possibility of life, or something like that. That was crazy, because from the inside of mission control it was no big deal. But then you could really see it becoming a big deal on the Internet. That kind of blew my mind, like, wow, these people are going to be so disappointed when they find out what this real story is.

It sounds a lot like the arsenic bacteria story from last year.

Both of those storiesthere's nothing all that nutty about them. They speak to the potential for life. We wouldn't be going [to Mars] if we didn't think there was potential for life.

You've now done the book on Phoenix, and you're tracking the future Mars missions. What are you excited about?

One, it'll be fascinating to see when they look for organics on MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) with all this new knowledge of perchlorate. That was such a big moment of the mission, but kind of a heartbreaking onefinding this perchlorate changes how we really understand Mars and what was happening on all those experiments on Viking.

Now we're going to go back with that knowledge, and it opens up all this possibility. We've unlocked one little [door] to the next room. Now I think we'll see there is organic material there, and then next it'll be some little guys who live there, and hopefully that will get people excited about space and science.

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