Four months later, Clark sent a letter to select members of the lab science and engineering teams announcing that she had taken the new job—that, “as you know” she had become increasingly frustrated with the way things had been going, and that she felt she had become “totally ineffective, and that I can no longer be professionally or personally satisfied when coming to work every day.”332 In making her new position known, she noted that because much of the lab’s radiation expertise resided in her office, she would still be working to set up the orbiter for success. (It soon became clear that even that counsel was unwelcome.) And once Karla left, Rob Lock and most of the project’s engineers followed. It was clear what was happening: it was an invasion force, and the invaders had won.
Karla’s departure was a blow to the science team, and Louise Prockter really chewed on it from across the country at the Applied Physics Laboratory. The details of what had happened were scarce. She knew it was normal at Jet Propulsion Laboratory for managers to be moved around, but Karla had done so much for the mission that it felt utterly inadequate to just say thank you and sign a card. Maybe, she said to Bob Pappalardo, they could all pitch in and commission an art piece. Even if they collected only five hundred dollars, they could probably still get something pretty magical. They reached out to Monica Aiello, an artist whose work was well known in the planetary community for its fusion of science and the humanities. Aiello was all in for Karla, charging just half her normal rate, and in a matter of days, Bob, Dave, and Louise had raised three times the amount they had expected, from forty Europa scientists and engineers around the world.333
Aiello created four textured images of Europa, eighteen-by-eighteen-inch panels depicting Pwyll Crater—the most famous and distinct of the craters on Europa—in blues and browns, materials beneath the paint making the artwork three-dimensional. Karla’s dad was Welsh, and Pwyll being a Welsh name—well, it was because of him, the childhood kitchen table conclaves of scientists and engineers from around the world, his inspiration to her as a research chemist, that all of this had come to be.
Chapter 10
This Earth of Majesty, This Seat of Mars
THEY GATHERED IN THE MAIN BALLROOM OF THE Woodlands Waterway Marriott Hotel & Convention Center in the Woodlands, Texas, just north of Houston. Outside, sunset was fast approaching, and streetlamps and string lights woke higgledy-piggledy. The commercial center of the Woodlands could feel like a bland movie set: inoffensive, Main Street Modern, urban planning by way of plastic-injection molding, designed for the singular purpose of attracting convention crowds and facilitating their need to socialize and have a bite and booze in locations both picturesque and in walking distance, and whatever happened after, chaste or otherwise, was on the forgathered, because the anodyne polyurethane environs would do nothing to stoke primal urges. The restaurants, built along an artificial waterway connected to an artificial lake, were a mélange of familiar names and themed off-brands (e.g., an English-style pub that served fish and chips and looked exactly like you would imagine), and it was all a bit like an amusement park for business executives, the streets clean, pedestrian friendly, aglow with fairy lights and lined ever with fresh flowers real but not.
The Marriott’s main ballroom could hold twelve hundred at capacity, SRO, and it was definitely standing room only that evening, March 7, 2011, at the Forty-Second Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.334 Bob, Louise, and Dave were there. Curt and Susan Niebur were there. Alan Stern, Ralph Lorenz, Jonathan Lunine, Cynthia Phillips, Jim Green, Don Blankenship—everyone was there, eighteen hundred scientists total at the convention, and though they all wanted to be in that room, six hundred or so would just have to wait until later to find out what happened.335
The National Research Council was about to release the results of the next Decadal Survey. The announcement would directly affect the careers of not only the Europa team, which needed only a perfunctory nod, but also everyone in the room, whether she studied Venus or Vesta or Ceres or Saturn. Where the Decadal said NASA needed to go in the next ten years, NASA would work diligently to go. Powerful projectors cast the first slide of forty-seven onto two ceiling-to-floor screens.
VISION AND VOYAGES, it said, FOR PLANETARY SCIENCE IN THE DECADE 2013–2022.336
Though the Decadal was dated 2013, Ed Weiler had wanted it in hand by March 2011 so that agency planners might use it in 2012 to build the budget for the 2013 fiscal year.337 Upon commissioning it, he also had a few requests for the steering committee:
1. This time, integrate Mars recommendations into the overall priorities of planetary exploration.
2. Incorporate technical feasibility into your recommendations, and be sure to get credible budget appraisals. Find an independent organization to calculate the costs of candidate missions (i.e., do not trust the numbers from Jet Propulsion Laboratory).
3. Do not recommend that NASA increase the planetary science budget. We have already thought of that. There is no more money.338
Steve Squyres, still at Cornell, chaired the steering committee. The National Research Council chose him because, in addition to being highly regarded and accomplished in the field, he was the sort of steady-handed workaholic necessary to pull this thing off.339 The committee decided early on that given Weiler’s requests, rather than build on the 2003 Decadal, it would reset the report, recommendations, and reasoning entirely. It would start over. Tabula rasa.
THE JUPITER EUROPA Orbiter as presented to the icy-satellites panel of the Decadal Survey looked like this.340 It would launch on a medium-lift Atlas V rocket and take a VEEGA trajectory to the Jupiter system: fly to Venus, back to Earth, around the sun, and back to Earth again for a final gravity assist propelling it to the target. When it finally arrived six years later, the spacecraft would spend thirty months in orbit around Jupiter, conducting science on the planet and the Galilean moons: four flybys of Io, six flybys of Ganymede, six of Europa, and nine of Callisto.
The spacecraft would then enter orbit around Europa and spend nine months swimming in radiation, doing intimate science, and answering questions both vexing and mundane. What was the thickness of the ice shell? What was its composition? What caused those weird surface features? What was its interior shape and how did the ice interact with the ocean? And the ocean itself: How big was it and what was the water like? The science would be astounding—the best ever conducted on any moon save our own—and would be completed in ninety days. The extra six months were a bonus. Ideally, Jupiter Europa Orbiter would launch in 2020—eleven years away—and end in 2029 by crashing into Europa, where it would be vaporized on impact. (This made spacecraft decontamination before launch paramount, so as not to feed any stray Earth-born microbes to Europan fish.)
The Europa mission was, of course, but one half of the Europa Jupiter System Mission. One month before they checked into rooms at the Woodlands Waterway Marriott Hotel & Convention Center, Ron, Bob, Louise, Dave, and Tom Gavin flew to France to help the Europeans get their side of the mission approved, too. Unlike the Jupiter Europa Orbiter, which had won its war at NASA, the Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter still needed formal selection by the European Space Agency. And while it wasn’t looking grim, it wasn’t looking good, either. The prospective project was in competition against two formidable proposals: the International X-ray Observatory and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA. The first would study the evolution of the universe by way of black holes and supernovae. The second would hunt for gravitational waves—ripples in space-time.341 These were enormous astrophysical questions with supporters spanning the continent and, like the Ganymede orbiter, both competitors had promising prospects for international partnerships.
The Europeans’ general selection processes ran parallel with those of NASA. While the Quad Studies were under way, the Europeans held the Cosmic Vision 2015–2025 mission competition, which produced proposals for the X-ray observatory, the Laplace Ganymede orbiter, and TandEM, the Titan and Enceladus mission.342 (LISA had already been s
elected for the final showdown.) When the shootout saw the American Europa mission defeat the one to Titan, TandEM, too, took a round to the chest—there was no point in ESA even entertaining that one. And though NASA had made its decision, the Europeans had one more selection cycle to go before settling on a flight project. The interferometer, X-ray observatory, and Ganymede orbiter thus entered an assessment phase during which—as had been the case for the Europa orbiter—scientists would write inches-thick reports for follow-on feasibility studies. The final step now, before the three were narrowed to one, was a formal presentation to the scientific community. If the Ganymede mission was selected, it would put Alan Stern’s insurance policy into full force: it would be difficult if not impossible, politically, for NASA to abandon the Europa mission. But first the Ganymede mission had to be selected.
The culminating event was to be held on February 3, 2011, in the grand amphitheater of the Institut Océanographique de Paris—la Maison des Océans—on Rue Saint-Jacques, just up the hill from Notre-Dame. It was the hundredth anniversary of the building, the century of progress reflected in the contrast between the art in the back of the room—frescoes of sailors pulling sea life onto boats for study—and projection screens in the front, on which were the contesting scientific rationales for exploring the farthest reaches of outer space.
The American contingent came to bring an outside perspective to Ganymede’s final overture.343 For about a week, they did dry runs, polished presentations, tweaked weaknesses—it was a dream collaboration, a happy hint of the partnership to come. When the Ganymede team gave their closing arguments, the Europa team was there for moral support, and in the off hours, the teams joined for evenings of enjoyment in the City of Light. Everything was coming together.
In Washington, meanwhile, in anticipation of the Decadal’s endorsement, Curt Niebur finished work on what NASA called an instrument “announcement of opportunity,” or AO. This was a solicitation for organizations to propose the science payload elements of the Europa mission. Each scientific tool carried by the spacecraft—things like the camera, the radar, the magnetometer, &c.—was considered a separate experiment, a device distinct from the spacecraft itself. They would be built to specification by the winning teams and integrated later once the spacecraft was ready. To win an “instrument selection” was a huge deal and would bring millions of dollars to an institution, funding its scientists and engineers for years. Accordingly, these were prized contracts, and organizations across government, industry, and academia would move with alacrity to answer the announcement with proposals no less detailed than the very spacecraft on which they would ride. The AO listed the rules of the competition and included a detailed description of things such as power availability, mass constraints, communications methodologies, data return rates, and what an instrument would have to look like physically to actually fit on the spacecraft. Instrument teams would need to know what shielding the spacecraft could provide versus what would have to be radiation hardened internally. Curt got started on the announcement just after the shootout, partnering with Karla to get the details right. When she left the project, the orbiter was still being mutated, and Curt coordinated further with Tom Gavin.
Once the AO went out and instruments were chosen, NASA was committed. The agency could technically stop the train at any time, of course, but there would be legal implications for doing so. An institution spends a million dollars developing, say, a camera for a mission, and the mission is deleted, and that institution is going to want its money back, and then lawyers are getting involved and precisely zero people at NASA headquarters wanted to hear the words subpoena or pretrial hearing. So this would be the most significant milestone any Europa attempt had ever yet achieved. This was the moment Curt had long toiled toward. It would drop the day after the Decadal endorsement.
MAJOR TALKS AT the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference were spoken practically ex cathedra, no notes, no prepared texts, PowerPoint projections more than sufficient. Steve Squyres paced the stage that night like Steve Jobs unveiling the best iPhone yet. He explained the whys and hows of the Decadal. He described the whos and the wheres. He really drove home that, look, we didn’t do this thing alone or overnight. Squyres explained the easy things: the ongoing missions, the things already flying, the things being built even as he spoke. The Decadal, Squyres stressed, was all about keeping NASA firmly on the side of research. And the Decadal was solidly protechnology, both to bring down mission costs and to do better science.
Then it was time to discuss mission priorities.344
First up was the Discovery program. The Decadal endorsed keeping its small missions at current funding levels, adjusted for inflation—about a half million dollars per—and to get those Discovery spacecraft flying every two years or sooner. But the Decadal panel was not asked to recommend or prioritize missions, and it did not. Next were the New Frontiers missions, and the Decadal recommended that the program be boosted to one billion dollars per spacecraft, excluding the price of launch, and that NASA choose two missions to fly in the next decade, among the options: 1. a comet surface sample return; 2. a sample return from the moon’s south pole; 3. a small probe to study Saturn’s interior; 4. a visit to a “trojan” asteroid (i.e., one that lives not in the asteroid belt but elsewhere, and usually in Jupiter’s orbital path); and 5. a Venus probe. These mission concepts were not prioritized. Scientific institutions and NASA centers could propose any type of mission they desired so long as the mission addressed one of those five themes, and they would slug it out on merit and be judged by NASA headquarters. If NASA went wild and found funds for three New Frontiers missions instead of two, the Decadal recommended that the agency also consider an Io observer and a network of small lunar probes.
If you were Louise Prockter, you sat there taking notes in your spiral-bound Levenger planner because you were the supervisor of the Planetary Exploration Group at the Applied Physics Laboratory, and there was a good chance your lab would win one of these mission competitions. You were seated next to Bob, and Curt was right there, and Dave, and your notes were just so. And when the next slide came up, your eyes sped across it, line by line, the way the typewriters you sold twenty-five years earlier raced across the page. Ding. Next line. Across the page. Ding. And when you finished reading it, you read it again, you sat upright and immobile. Your face impassive, your demeanor stolid. But your eyes betrayed you—it was subtle, but they spoke loudly and in perfect paragraphs, and you made eye contact with no one, which was good, because if looks could kill, you’d have taken out half the ballroom.
Bob sat there, too, his face with pond-like placidity, and Curt as well. Curt already knew what was coming.
FLAGSHIP MISSIONS
(IN PRIORITY ORDER)
1. BEGIN NASA/ESA MARS SAMPLE RETURN CAMPAIGN
. . . and nothing beyond that line mattered.
In the ten years since the first Decadal, no flagship mission had been approved for launch. And now that the NASA planetary science program was broke, it would be a long shot even for the flagship recommendation of this Decadal. So whatever came after that line may as well have been lorem ipsum. Meaningless.
The decade-plus of Europa mission studies at Jet Propulsion Laboratory no longer mattered. The Quad Studies. The shootout. The JPL-APL partnership. The Ganymede presentation in Paris—none of it mattered. The years thinking through every aspect of a Europa mission, of conquering the radiation belt. The discovery of the saltwater ocean and the likelihood of life. The geomorphological mysteries desperate for data. The much-debated thickness of the ice shell. The alkalinity of the subsurface ocean. Even the basic stuff: What does its surface look like? The composition of Europa, its interaction with the other Galilean moons. Its geologic evolution. They’d worked out ways to answer all of it. Knew how to communicate with Earth, how much power they would need. The instruments and measurements and speed of the spacecraft and altitudes necessary to get every byte of data imaginable. The rocket that would
carry them, the launch window they’d work from, the trajectories from here to there—where around the solar system the spacecraft would swing, and, once at Jupiter, what it would observe during the slow roll to Europan orbit. They’d figured it all out, the whole thing. Defeated Titan and Enceladus in direct competition. Had been endorsed by the whole of the planetary science community, itself unified by OPAG. And the ten torturous years of study after study after study—try it with solar power instead—try it with a nuclear reactor—try it with a lander—try it without fission—try it with—and none of it mattered.
And then somehow, as the presentation slides progressed, it got worse.
The Mars Sample Return mission—the new consensus priority of the planetary science community—wouldn’t technically return a Mars sample. Not in this decade. No, it was explained, the Mars Sample Return mission was “multidecadal in character.” The mission endorsed by the 2013 Decadal would only cache the samples, i.e., it would scoop dirt into jars. There would need to be another flagship in a decade’s time to launch the jars to space, and perhaps another the decade after that to grab the space-borne jars and carry them home.
Mars! Which launched a new mission every two years—had so many spacecraft working actively on or around the planet that it would soon need its own air traffic control system—had so much unexamined science sitting on file servers that even if all work stopped tomorrow and every Martian spacecraft self-destructed, scientists could still spend a decade studying new data. Mars. Steve Squyres—he of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity—spoke so gleefully, and Louise was just blindsided.
The Mission Page 26
