Mars Odyssey: Why Failure Is Not an Option

Confidence is high that the probe will safely slip into orbit around the red planet. But a lot is riding on Odyssey – pride as well as payroll. A botched job means a replay of those embarrassing back-to-back duds in 1999: Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander. Moreover, a muffed up mission would damage a step-by-step work plan to reconnoiter the planet.

Engineers who handcrafted Odyssey at Lockheed Martin Astronautics near Denver, Colorado say that it’s likely the most reviewed spacecraft ever blasted toward Mars. Flight controllers maintain that the vehicle has been thoroughly shaken out while en route to its target and is ready for prime time action.

Launched in April of this year, the Odyssey is now only hours away from a roaring main engine burn – the Mars Orbit Insertion (MOI) maneuver.

Mars Odyssey is hauling a suite of science instruments. Key sensors are fine-tuned to study the Martian surface and map the chemical and mineralogical makeup of Mars. The goal is to find evidence for present near-surface water and to map mineral deposits from past water activity – a space age version of water witching.

To sail into orbit, Odyssey’s fuel tanks, the size of large beachballs, must first be pressurized and plumbing lines heated. The system is then cocked and ready to fire Odyssey’s large engine for some 20 minutes. That lengthy engine blast brakes the craft, slowing and curving its trajectory into an egg-shaped elliptical orbit around the planet.

From there, weeks and weeks of aerobraking maneuvers drop Odyssey into the desired orbit for science data gathering.

The plan now calls for the spacecraft to end aerobraking in early to mid-January of 2002.

"I feel very confident in the team we have and that MOI will be successful," said Bob Berry, Lockheed Martin’s 2001 Mars Odyssey Program Manager. "Obviously, nobody wants to fail. But to tell you the truth, you can’t guarantee that we’ll be totally successful," he said.

Berry said that if something were to go awry, it would have a significant impact, not only on Lockheed Martin but also NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. JPL is manager of the Odyssey mission.

"It’s a risky business. Everybody has said since the 1999 failures that this one has to work. There would be extreme disappointment if something does go wrong because we’ve tried to think of everything we could," Berry said.

"It’s kind of a waiting game as the sequence starts to clock out the events as we get close to the burn," said Wayne Sidney, spacecraft engineer on the Lockheed Martin operations team for Odyssey. "Everything is going very well and we’re very confident," Sidney said.

Like Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander, this latest arrival at the red planet, Mars Odyssey, is part of a special breed. It wears the banner of being a faster, better, cheaper (FBC) spacecraft.

"We are in the FBC spacecraft mode with Odyssey, and that philosophy is the right one and should not change in the future," said Stephen Saunders, 2001 Mars Odyssey Project Scientist at JPL. "Maybe the "C" in FBC will tend more to be more Careful and less to Cheaper," he added.

If Odyssey were to fail, it would be a significant loss to Mars science, Saunders said. "However, we have a Mars Program and a long-range program that will not be deflected by any one loss. We might lose a few because Mars is hard, but in the end, the Mars Program will not fail," he said.

It is important for Odyssey to "make it", said Jim Garvin, Lead Scientist for Mars Exploration at NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

"We have very confidence in our team at JPL and the partners at Lockheed Martin in Denver that everything possible has been done to make Odyssey and its upcoming orbital insertion maneuver a success," Garvin said. "None of us here at NASA Headquarters would ever find fault with the Herculean efforts our Odyssey tem has put in to make this mission the success we know it can be," he said.

"There is no question that the Odyssey orbit insertion is a tremendously important event for the Mars program," said Steve Squyres, a space scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "This is our first attempt at getting back to Mars after losing two missions in a row. So it obviously has enormous importance from a program standpoint," he told SPACE.com

Odyssey, along with collecting science, will help relay to Earth information gleaned by Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) as the robotic twosome meander over Martian terrain in 2004. That’s an important job to Squyres as lead scientist on the Athena package of experiments that each of the wheeled robots will carry.

Yet another early task of Odyssey, Squyres said, is to help pick and study landing sites for the twin rovers, as well as help plot their traverses.

"So scientifically, communications relay wise, and programmatically, Odyssey is a big one…a very big one for us," Squyres said. "There’s no question that if, heaven forbid, Odyssey was lost, that there would be an impact on the program. What that would be, my crystal ball is not that good," he said.

While there is every expectation that it’s smooth sailing ahead for Odyssey, NASA’s Garvin added that Mars has a habit of being "very unforgiving" in our exploration activities. If the spacecraft were to fall victim to "unknown unknowns", the Mars Program offers some resiliency, he said.

In 2005, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is slated for launch. Additionally, the Mars Scout Program flies in 2007. Each mission could help backfill at least some of the critical aspects in the overall Mars exploration science strategy, Garvin said.

"If something goes awry with Odyssey," Garvin said, "we will live on, hopefully with the understanding of the American people, Congress, the Administration. This is a risky business and lots of things have to go ‘right’. It’s in the hands of Mother Nature and the Gods now," he said.

Garvin said the Odyssey team will "weather" the many unknowns of aerobraking, made all the more tricky by the dust storms that have engulfed the planet and dusted the thin Martian atmosphere.

"We are confident that we will emerge with a superb science mission early in 2002…and one that is destined to rewrite the textbooks," Garvin said.

Why is it that we all accept the proposition that the government ought to be directing space exlporation?

I say, lets back out of all the stupid treaties that prevent us from claming land in space.

Believe me, private enterprise would get us there quickly and cheaply if there was an oppotunity to stake land.

If the spacecraft were to fall victim to "unknown unknowns",...

The "unknown knowns" don't usually give us much trouble. And we can deal with the "known unknowns." It's those horrid "unknown unknowns" that bring us down. AND they are detrimental to the environment and offensive to many minorities.

So let's start an online petition for the U.S. Federal Government to BAN "unknown unknowns." They should set up a new agency to enforce the ban, and a cabinet-level position to oversee this agency. To adequately fund this agency may require a sizeable tax increase, but would be well worth it.

Now we're going to...never mind.

Please do post when the Odyssey is successfully "inserted" into orbit...or whatever happens.

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