From SKC to Mars

PASADENA, Calif. - An education at Salish Kootenai College can take you a lot of places. Including Mars.

While many people in the area and around the world spent the weekend following the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars, SKC students Noel Stewart and Judy Hudgins were at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. to witness the action firsthand. The pair will be spending the next three months working at ground control along with their supervisor Tim Olson, the Chairman of Sciences at SKC.

Stewart, a 24-year-old Browning native, is pursuing her bachelor’s degree in hydrology.

Hudgins, a 27-year-old from Ronan, already has a bachelor’s degree from SKC in information technology and is currently working toward a second degree in computer engineering.

The SKC contingency is part of an international team of over 300 scientists collaborating with NASA on the project. According to Olson, who teaches physics, engineering and astronomy courses at the college, “lots of those are university-based people (like himself) that have undergraduate and graduate students that are also working on the mission.”

The rover’s mission is to gather information about the geology and chemistry of the Red Planet to help scientists determine if it may have been suitable for life in its past.

“We’re not directly searching for signs of life,” Olson is careful to clarify. “We’re trying to look for either past or current habitable environments at the Gale Crater site.”

Stewart adds that, “this mission could tell us what’s there (now), what could live there and what was there.”

Images taken from satellites orbiting Mars helped to identify the crater as the ideal site to gather clues about the planet’s natural history. Olson says that viewing satellite imagery of the Martian surface reveals an abundance of landforms that look as though they were ancient lakes or riverbeds formed in the presence of water. For instance, the crater was likely a lake in its past, a theory supported by both its topography and the visibility of layered sedimentary rocks. The crater also has a three-mile high mound at its center, with exposed rock layers that preserve a record of hundreds of millions of years of climate data.

Olson says that those sedimentary rocks are what attracted the interest of the scientific community congregated at NASA.

“On Earth, that’s been the best place to look for long-term preservation of biosignatures from ancient life,” he says. “Another thing is that when you see sedimentary structures, it really gives you some pretty good evidence of what that environment was like.”

LIGHTS, CAMERAS, ACTION

The Mini Cooper-sized rover is outfitted with a dizzying array of high-tech gadgetry to go about its work, including three different camera systems, which is how SKC became involved with this particular project.

In 2004, development of Curiosity’s cameras was contracted to Malin Space Science Systems, a private San Diego-based company, which then tabbed Olson as one of more than 20 scientists and engineers to lend their expertise to the project.

“Since then, it’s been getting the cameras designed, made, tested, prepared for flight, and waiting for it to arrive,” Olson says of the process eight years in the making.

The resulting camera equipment appears to be worth the wait. At the end of the rover’s robot arm is MAHLI (an abbreviation for Mars Hand Lens Imager), which will be used to capture detailed close-ups of rock samples in order to identify their mineral composition.

Meanwhile, navigation will be aided by a camera system known as MARDI (Mars Descent Imager), which will record a continuous video feed of the ground covered by the rover. Lastly, Curiosity will be also guided by MastCam, which includes multiple cameras mounted to a periscope. These cameras scan for obstacles in the distance while capturing pictures of the Martian landscape.

In addition to the cameras, the rover has myriad tools for chemical analysis of samples collected from the Martian terrain. Olson reports that it even has the ability to “zap rock with a laser beam, and then look at the spectrum of light that’s emitted by that vaporized rock material to come up with the chemical identification (of that rock).”

Olson, Hudgins and Stewart will split their time between the scientific and technical aspects of the mission.

Half of their time will be spent interacting with a team of scientists, examining data relayed from the rover and deciding what to do and where to go next.

The rest of the time, their primary responsibility will be assisting with the logistical components of data collection in an instrument operations role, specifically with the onboard camera systems. This requires them to consult with their scientist colleagues and convert their research interests into the appropriate computer commands that will provide the rover with the next day’s instruction.

This multifaceted role reflects Olson’s belief that it is vital for Stewart and Hudgins to be familiar with both the science and the engineering guiding Curiosity’s voyage.

FUTURE WITH NASA

Though ecstatic to be contributing to the mission, Stewart and Hudgins are not starry-eyed around the Jet Propulsion Laboratory facilities. Stewart has past NASA internship experience on her resumé, and Hudgins, too, has visited Johnson Spaceflight Center to learn about robotics. The two are seeking to parlay their involvement with the current mission into future work opportunities with the organization.

Olson expects that SKC will continue to play a role in future space exploration, as well.

“It’s been a real good partnership for us to be involved with,” Olson says of collaborating with NASA. “For students, it’s really motivating… for me, it’s important to stay active in research in my field to be a more effective instructor.”

“I plan on us continuing with this over the long term on various projects,” Olson said.