Phoenix landing: A tale of two telltales
The Phoenix team has posted a bunch of new photos tonight, after the first full day of operations on Mars. To the right is a photo of the telltale at the top of the weather mast, the tallest point on the lander.
It's a very similar photo to one I took a few days ago. Yet one telltale hangs in a comfortably air-conditioned room, and the other dangles in the airless, near vacuum of Mars.
I took my photo here in Tucson, in the Science Operations Center, pointing my camera at Phoenix's doppelganger. And scientists here in Tucson, in the Science Operations Center, told the real Phoenix to point its camera at the real telltale and take a snap. These two photos, so similar, are separated by a few pages of scrolling on this blog -- what, maybe 10,000 pixels or so? Yet think how far those Martian pixels had to travel to reach your eyes.
There's a feeling of synchronicity between everything that's going on here, and everything that's going on there. Peter Smith must know what this is like. Is he with the engineers in Pasadena? Or is he with the scientists in Tucson? He's like a diffracted photon, in both places at once, on perpetual video conference. Part of all this doubling is intentional and necessary. The scientists rehearse and simulate to avoid catastrophe. But the simultaneity is a strange feeling.
And it is demonstrably false. In the build up to the 4:53 pm Pacific Daylight Time landing on Sunday, hundreds of people had gathered in the operations center to stare at video screens. Clocks were counting down, and blips of light, signifying the spacecraft's radio signal, were marching in an arc across the screen. I was standing towards the back of the room with John Moores, a loose-limbed graduate student of Peter Smith's. He glanced down at his watch. “I've got 38 minutes past the hour,” he said. “So what's happened has happened.”
It takes 15 minutes for radio signals to travel from Mars to Earth. What was done was done. Phoenix had either landed, or it hadn't, and there we were, playing make believe that something was still to come.
Make believe. NASA is incredibly good at what it does -- sending actual spacecraft to other worlds. But it has also come to rival Pixar in its ability to render simulations. This was the first landing I've witnessed this close. Before this, my impressions of space landings were informed by movies and documentaries that portrayed a previous era of exploration: Mission control engineers with slide rules who updated spacecraft trajectories by hand with pushpins. The momentousness of the occasion could expand within the imagination of my mind.
But just hours after this landing, NASA had spliced together a cinematic montage, cutting between the nervousness and exultation in JPL's control room, and a rendered simulation of what Phoenix was supposed to be doing at those same moments.
I don't mean to be critical. The simulations are beautiful, and explanatory to boot. But I'm not sure if they help me believe. I'm more affected by that stark, lonely photo of the meteorological mast. It is the tallest thing for miles in that alien world. It is really there, and the Phoenix mission is really happening. On Mars.
Comments
Just want to inject this 76 year old's comment that all of this staggering, exponential increase of space data is leaving me spaced-out. Pun intended. Particularly, I'm trying to absorb that 15 minute lag in data reaching us on this planet. So, tell Eric Hand for me that I enjoyed his nicely written comment of 08:05 on 27 May. We're in a Time Machine of sorts, aren't we? H.G Wells...are you there?
....God bless you all.
CMG.
Posted by: Charlie Griffith | May 31, 2008 03:34 AM
Thanks for that perspective, Eric. :)
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Posted by: Video Conference | December 29, 2008 07:02 AM