Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: Features


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Summer Adventure: Exploring Mars

September 06, 2006

This picture shows eight of the students who worked on Mars missions at JPL during the summer of 2006. The tallest of the bunch are Brooks and del Guercio; the shortest are Connelly and Wong. All are brunettes except for Connelly, who is blond, and King, who has sandy-colored hair. All are wearing jeans of various colors save Connelly, who is wearing a calf-length khaki skirt. The students are standing outside the open door of a lab. On the ground in front of them are an empty canister that holds liquid nitrogen and a trash can for recycling used paper. Wong is holding a printed circuit board she worked on and Del Guercio is holding a lab safety helmet. More detailed descriptions of the students accompany their individual photos below.

Several high-school and college students got real-life experience helping engineers and scientists explore Mars. From left are Ben Gordon, Chelsea Graf (a student who worked on the Mars Science Laboratory mission), Elizabeth Connelly, Devin King, Stephanie Wong, Justin Brooks, Chris del Guercio, and Caroline Furman. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Instead of hanging ten in the California surf, Chris del Guercio spent his summer riding a sea of Martian radio waves, keeping track of the volume of data they delivered to terrestrial shores.

Rather than watch sailboats maneuver in the wind, Stephanie Wong worked on a technique for controlling the tilt of solar panels on future spacecraft to Mars.

Instead of flying an imaginary spacecraft in a video game, Justin Brooks plotted the path of a real spacecraft orbiting Mars.

This picture shows a smiling, curly-haired Ben Gordon, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and standing in front of a welcome banner with the word 'HI' in bright pink letters on a pastel blue background. He is wearing a gray dress shirt with a black T-shirt underneath the open front collar.

Ben Gordon was one of a team of students who conducted statistical analysis of radio transmissions. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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These and sundry adventures of an other-worldly sort challenged the brainpower and energy of high-school and college students who spent the summer working on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Paired with scientists and engineers who served as mentors, the students helped solve problems and monitor spacecraft performance.

"It's been a lot of fun," said Ben Gordon, entering his senior year at La Cañada High School. "We're working with some really smart people."

This snapshot shows Chris del Guercio, a tall, slender youth with short, brown bangs combed sideways across his brow, smiling in front a wall banner that reads 'HI' in pink letters on a pastel blue background. He is wearing a white-and-gray-checked dress shirt.

Along with two of his classmates, Chris del Guercio kept a statistical count of radio transmissions. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Crossing the Void of Space

With classmate Devin King, del Guercio and Gordon kept a statistical count of radio transmissions. Like ocean waves, radio signals are sometimes lost as they travel long distances. The students could tell when data were missing because the spacecraft assigns numbers to packets of data and transmits the numbers separately.

In the process, they found a glitch that had been suspected but not pinpointed by mission experts. The transmissions indicated that suspiciously large volumes of data were missing, though the data appeared to be intact.

This photo shows Justin Brooks, a dark-haired youth wearing a lime green dress shirt, seated in a chair in front of a board that has a list of tasks written on it in erasable marker.

Justin Brooks wrote software that plotted the constantly changing surface of Mars as viewed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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A fourth classmate, Elizabeth Connelly, wrote a computer program enabling commercial telescopes to present star tours that will be downloadable on the Web.

Brooks, a former classmate and student at Cornell University, wrote software that automatically generates plots of the spacecraft’s orbit together with the changing view of the Martian surface. He also helped develop an internal Web site giving navigators easier access to course-plotting data.

This photo shows Caroline Furman smiling for the camera as she leans the right side of her head on her right hand, which is supported by her elbow on a desktop in front of her. She is wearing a black fleece, zip-front jacket that is open in front with a white shirt beneath it. Her shoulder-length, wavy brown hair is swept back from her face around her ears. On the wall behind her are two colored topo maps of features on the Martian surface.

Caroline Furman wrote computer programs for spacecraft instruments. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Creating Well-Laid Plans

Like all spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter relies on computers to operate as intended. Caroline Furman, a third-year student at the University of Chicago, worked on computer codes that command the spacecraft. Her mentor, engineer Tracy Drain, helped her understand a complicated, very long sequence for operating the high-gain antenna. Meanwhile, Furman wrote short blocks of programming for the Shallow Subsurface Radar antenna to make sure it would be able to accept commands if anything unexpected happens.

This photo shows blue-eyed Cecelia Hedrick smiling slightly with her lips together and wearing oval-shaped, brown-rimmed eye glasses and a dark blue polo shirt with light blue, horizontal stripes. To her right and left are tan-colored walls that make up the sides of office cubicles. Behind her, on the wall, is a poster of the launch vehicle that carried the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter into space.

Cecelia Hedrick is working on the weather instrument carried by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Cecelia Hedrick, a 6-month intern from the University of Nebraska, arrived just in time for a Southern California heat wave in July and began working on the spacecraft’s weather instrument. She wrote mathematically sophisticated software enabling the Mars Climate Sounder to calculate atmospheric pressure based on measurements of infrared radiation.

Infrared radiation, like body heat, is invisible to humans. But water vapor and carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere are sensitive to it. Atmospheric carbon dioxide affects climate. To measure it, scientists need to know how much infrared radiation comes from the sun and how much is generated by the spacecraft’s own instruments.

This photo shows blue-eyed Sarah Gibson, seated and smiling for the camera, her short, wavy, reddish-brown hair swept into bangs across her brow and feathered on the sides. She is wearing a multi-colored print dress with short sleeves and an aqua neckline.

Sarah Gibson helped fix a flight software bug in digital camera images. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Solving Real-Life Problems

Like a pilot in flight, a planetary explorer needs to know her precise location. Sarah Gibson, from the University of Nebraska, checked star tracking measurements from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment that determine the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s position. She compared measurements of brightness and location of star clusters to values listed in star catalogs and, if necessary, adjusted them.

During her internship, Gibson found a flight software bug that caused a smear in images of the Martian surface as the spacecraft began to orbit the planet. The orbiter rotates slightly to compensate for the planet’s rotation, but in some images, features such as craters had shifted slightly. Based on her findings, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the spacecraft builder, wrote a software patch to eliminate the smear.

This photo shows Wong, her long, shiny, wavy black hair parted on the left and draped forward over her shoulders, smiling for the camera while seated in her workspace. She is wearing a dark gray jacket over a turquoise-colored top and a choker-style necklace with a silver pendant bearing a small red stone. Behind her, on top of a standard office desk, are a laptop computer, textbooks, and a notebook. The desk has a brown top and two columns of vertically stacked, vanilla-colored steel drawers.

Stephanie Wong wrote computer programs controlling the angle of the solar panels as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter dipped into the planet's atmosphere. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Wong, a student at California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, wrote computer algorithms controlling the orientation of solar panels during aerobraking, a technique in which the orbiter uses atmospheric friction to trim its orbit. Based on desired outcomes, such as a certain change in velocity, she determined the requisite orientation of the orbiter's solar panels while passing through the Martian atmosphere. During each "drag pass," the solar panels fly "spread eagle" into the atmosphere to maximize the amount of surface area available to slow the spacecraft down. But navigators have to be careful not to put too much stress on the spacecraft. They also need to move the solar panels as little as possible. Wong's work on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will enable future missions to change the amount of surface area rather than the spacecraft's altitude to control velocity during aerobraking.

This photo shows Devin King smiling for the camera, his sandy, wavy hair draped slightly over his right eye and covering his ears. He is wearing a short-sleeved, cream-colored, polo shirt with horizontal dark gray stripes. On the wall behind him is a poster of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter firing one of its thrusters as it approaches the red planet.

Devin King was one of a trio of high school students who did a statistical analysis of radio transmissions from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Looking Ahead to Future Challenges

All of the students agreed they learned a lot and would like to return in the future.

Said Wong, "I'm a mechanical engineering major – I like working with my hands. Doing programming is different from taking things apart. Yet working with Dan Kubitschek has made this project challenging and interesting in ways I couldn't have learned in a classroom. It's given me a new perspective. I would definitely like to return next summer."