A Day in the Life - On Mars

I read the news today - oh boy - and NASA has officially announced that the Mars Phoenix Lander has completed its mission operations.

I thought it would be fun to summarize what a day in the life of an engineer working on the lander looked like.  Many friends and family have asked this question so here is my attempt at answering it-

Phoenix is a tactical and strategic mission.  We start everyday with a baseline science plan.  This is the strategic portion.  For example, we want to trench with the robotic arm, take x number of images of the trench location before the dig and x number of images after the dig, take pressure and temperature readings, etc....  All of this is known as "the plan."  Many more details are included in the plan, but they aren't the most exciting.

The tactical portion is where is gets fun.  We must react what happened the day before and make sure that everything from the strategic plan is still valid and worth commanding.

Now you need to know how all of this fits together.  To do this, we need to understand how Phoenix operates.  Details will be vague here to comply with international trade and arms regulations.  The lander wakes up in the morning and sleeps in the evening.  In the morning, it receives its commands so that it knows what to do during the day.  Then during the morning and into the afternoon, it carries out those science activities as defined in the commands that it was sent.  Finally, in the evening it sends its data back to earth.

In order for this to happen, the engineers and scientists must work during the middle of the Martian night.  The shift starts as Phoenix is sending its data home.  Then, we look at that data and the strategic "plan" to come up with a finalized plan for the next day's operations.  This plan is a hybrid of the initial science objectives for the day and also based on the state of the lander from the recently received data.  We work all [Mars] night and uplink the plan in command form early the next Martian morning.  Then we go home and sleep during the Martian day and do the whole thing over again once the shift starts back up again.

So it really is a simple model.  Now throw in the wrench that a Martian day [or sol, as we call it] is 24 hrs 39.5 minutes long.  This means that if we start our shift at 9 am on Monday, our shift starts at 9:40 am on Tuesday and 10:20 am on Wendesday, etc, etc, etc.  Our start time is the same with respect to the Mars clock, but different from the Earth's point of view by 40 minutes each day - this is known as "Mars time" in our Phoenix [and MER and MSL] worldview.

So that is basically the model we followed all summer long.  When you throw in all the surprises that Mars holds - both good and bad - it turns into a very unique experience.