They begin life as notions, as questions or hypotheses. In time they turn into elaborate sculptures of metal, epoxy and silicon. In sudden eruptions of fire and billowing smoke they are tossed up and out of the atmosphere, out into the cold void between worlds. Streaking like bullets across the immense expanses of the solar system, they carry armadas of instruments to catalog and analyze all that they pass — chattering away back to their human parents with tiny electronic voices across hundreds of millions of miles.
Abundant sunshine illuminates the leafy courtyard at the center of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus. I’m standing next to Brandon Rodriguez, an education specialist here at JPL.
He points to a group of people walking in a line. “That’s one of our few public tours — there’s about a six month waiting list to get into one of those.”
I nod knowingly. “Yeah, when I tried to sign up I got an automated response that said no tours available.”
Brandon grins. “Don’t worry — this will be much better.”
If you want to see some of the most beautiful scenes in our solar system, Brandon recommends following the Juno Instagram account, which regularly posts stunning images from Jupiter. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/David Marriott
“It’s impossible to pick just one image, but this is one of my favorites,” Brandon says. Before completing its final mission in 2017, the Cassini spacecraft captured this beautiful image of the icy surface of Enceladus. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
I had the pleasure of meeting Brandon while we were both living and working aboard the E/V Nautilus last summer. Parallels abound between ocean expeditions and space travel, and I loved hearing Brandon’s perspective on our deep sea research in the equatorial Pacific. During the month we worked at sea together, he patiently answered a million questions (from me and many others) about space exploration, and what it’s like to work for NASA. After weeks and weeks of hearing about all the amazing things happening at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I knew I had to visit.
Nautilus nerds: Brandon and I take a selfie during a quick break between outreach calls in the South Pacific.
We head to the cafeteria for a quick lunch and catch up on our latest travels (Brandon just returned from a work trip to Hawaii — one of the many perks of his job.)
Our first stop is the Spacecraft Assembly Facility: the birthplace of rovers for Mars and satellites for far-flung planets in our solar system. Right now engineers are placing the final touches on the Mars 2020 rover.
“This is crunch time,” Brandon says. “There are people in here around the clock.”
Later this month, the team will carefully pack the rover off to Florida. In six months (around the end of July or beginning of August) NASA will launch it into space from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The rover should land on Mars by February of 2021.
Brandon describes various aspects of the clean room, but I can’t take my eyes off the rover. It’s hard to believe that just over a year from now this incredible piece of technology will navigate across the surface of Mars. It’s very surreal.
While the rover as a whole represents the remarkable ingenuity and collective brilliance of NASA, many of its parts are not exactly cutting-edge.
“I was listening to a podcast about Mars exploration recently,” I tell Brandon, “and the engineers and scientists that were being interviewed said that a standard, modern-day cell phone wouldn’t survive a trip to Mars.”
“That’s right,” he says. “Rugged durability is more important than fine precision. Anything we send to Mars has to be tough enough to handle a long journey and a harsh environment.”
To visualize this “harsh environment”, Brandon and I head to the Mars Yard, an outdoor, glorified gravel pit where engineers run simulations with a model of the Curiosity rover currently on Mars.
The Mars Yard test area is 21m x 22m in size and has a variety of terrain arrangements to support multiple test conditions. The soil is a combination of beach sand, decomposed granite, brick dust, and volcanic cinders. The rocks are several types of basalts, including fine-grained and vesicular, both in red and black. Rock-size distributions are selected to match those seen on Mars. Large rocks are not Mars-like in composition, being less dense, but easier to move for testing. In addition to rearranging rocks, other obstacles such as bricks and trenches are often employed for specialized testing.
Brandon walks over to a storage shed and lifts up a small garage door to reveal an engineering model of the Curiosity rover. It’s covered by a tarp but he shows me the grooves in its wheels, and how the design has changed over the years. At the back of the shed, a row of shelving houses dozens of old wheels. Brandon reaches up and hands one of them to me — I can’t believe how light it is.
An overhead view of the Space Flight Operations Facility at JPL. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Ten minutes later, we walk into the Space Flight Operations Facility, a dramatic space illuminated by cool blue lighting and sophisticated graphics flashing across giant screens.
A large screen on the right side of the room shows the exact location of the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter. Brandon points out that it’s currently communicating with a satellite in Canberra, Australia.
If today was a launch or recovery day, this place would be packed with people. Right now there are only four or five employees milling around.
“We don’t have a lot of people in here regularly because our missions don’t include human beings.”
Brandon points out how much monitoring goes into manned space flights. For astronauts in the International Space Station, NASA constantly tracks everything from food consumption to exercise to water recollection.
“There are so many things that pose a challenge to keeping humans alive in space, but it’s a different story for autonomous rovers and satellites,” he says. “We just have to run checks to see that the thing is on course, and data is being collected.”
Our final stop is the von Karman Visitor Center. We walk through the solar system exhibit, then sit down to watch Cassini’s Grand Finale. Brandon worked on the education/outreach portion of the Emmy-winning film.
In 2017, after two decades of collecting data around Saturn and its moons (completing 294 orbits of Saturn and traveling a collective distance of 4.9 billion miles!) the Cassini team carefully planned the satellite’s termination.
“They intentionally crashed it,” Brandon explains. “We’re concerned about bacteria and contaminants, especially if it were to hit one of Saturn’s water moons. But instead it just burned up in the planet’s atmosphere.”
Image credit: XKCD
Brandon tells me a little bit about the Cassini team: people like Todd Barber, who grew up on a corn farm in Kansas. “The only science he encountered as a child was a subscription to National Geographic given to him by his grandmother. He worked on the entirety of Cassini.”
When I Google him later, I encounter Todd’s boundless enthusiasm immediately:
I am now on the Voyager flight team, more than 41 years after launch! The actual mission that defined my future is now part of my every day life, and I just can't believe my good fortune!
The devotion and joy of the Cassini team takes center stage in the short, striking film.
“It’s really a bit of a tear-jerker,” Brandon says.
And of course my eyes get a bit watery as we watch the striking animation of the dying satellite. Feeling some degree of emotion for a spacecraft in a remote part of our solar system reminds me of a story Brandon told on the Nautilus, about the day the Opportunity rover died.
It also makes me think of a line from the introduction to the JPL 101 document I read last night:
…they carry armadas of instruments to catalog and analyze all that they pass — chattering away back to their human parents with tiny electronic voices across hundreds of millions of miles…
As the credits for the Cassini film run, I turn to Brandon and say, “JPL is good at anthropomorphizing robots — you guys really give these things personality.”
Some people may debate the merit (or societal implications) of ascribing human characteristics to robots, but it seems as though you’d be hard pressed to find those people here at JPL.
We exit the solar system exhibit and walk into a large room full of circular tables — a formal event space for workshops and presentations. Brandon spreads his arms wide. “This is where I work,” he says proudly.
As an education specialist, Brandon connects with 200 schools and 10,000 teachers each year. He and other members of JPL’s education team develop content for K-12 classrooms, visit schools, speak to students, and provide training and resources for teachers who want to bring NASA into their classrooms.
When I ask him about the best parts of his job, Brandon tells me about how unique his position is. “I get to see a little bit of everything. Most everyone here is laser focused on their mission,” he says. “I’m a jack of all trades and master of none, but I get to see all the exciting bits — and then share them.”
I often use jack of all trades, master of none to describe my work as a science writer, photographer, and videographer.
“I know what you mean,” I say. “I work with lots of different scientists who dedicate their careers to a particular field of study, and I’m constantly learning about stuff I would never know about otherwise.” I say. “People always comment on how much I get to travel, but the constant influx of new knowledge is the best part of my job.”
“It is,” Brandon says, nodding. “We’re lucky.”
Brandon rocks his JPL swag during a hike in Angeles National Forest.