After this weekend’s successful Mars landing, the national media heaped most of the credit onto NASA.
Certainly little of it, if any, went to the Goleta branch of a tech company called ATK, which designed several key components of the Mars Phoenix Lander.
But on Sunday, shortly after the three-foot-tall tripod descended successfully onto the Martian surface, two key mechanical movements took place that justified more than a year’s worth of paychecks for about 10 employees at the Old Town Goleta company.
First, the six-foot-wide solar panels that had been neatly folded into the side of the craft unfurled, “like an oriental fan,” according to a company news release. Then, a three-foot-long fiberglass arm mounted with a camera rose out of the pod’s head.
Because the Goleta team built the solar panels, the craft did not run out of power a few hours after landing. And because it also built the arm — or boom — that extended from the head of the lander, the world is witnessing the latest available photos of the rocky planet’s lonely red landscape. Some of those very photos in the past two days have graced the pages of The New York Times and USA Today.
James Spink, senior program manager at ATK and a graduate of both Dos Pueblos High and UCSB, said the Mars Phoenix Lander was the most exciting project he’s worked on in his nearly 20 years in the business.
“Only a few times in the history of mankind have we ever been on the surface of Mars,” he said. “We’ve also put hardware up on the space station — that’s also exciting, but landing something on another world is pretty cool.”
To be sure, the Goleta branch of ATK isn’t the only outfit that helped build the $420 million spacecraft.
The main contractor was Lockheed Martin, which built the actual lander for NASA, and subcontracted out portions of the job to the other companies.
All told, there were maybe five other contractors, and the Goleta group accounted for about 1 percent of the entire budget. Also, the Goleta branch of ATK, located at 600 Pine Ave. just off Hollister Avenue, wasn’t the only ATK contributor. A branch in Utah built the rocket booster. (ATK employs 150 people in Goleta, and 15,000 across the United States.)
The appendage that attracted the most media attention is the nearly eight-foot-long arm that, if deployed properly, will bore into the ground to collect samples of subsurface ice. That was built by ASI in Pasadena.
Like the last successful mission to Mars in 2004 that sent the famously named Spirit and Opportunity rovers, a major purpose of the current mission is to decipher whether the Red Planet contains any evidence of past or present life. But unlike the still-roving Spirit and Opportunity machines — which pick up and examine rocks — the Mars Phoenix Lander will dig beneath the soil to and take samples of ice.
The overarching plan is often referred to as “follow the water.” Simply put, if it’s true that on Earth, wherever there is water, there is life, maybe it’s also true on Mars.
There doesn’t seem to be any liquid surface water on Mars. But scientists have long known about ice beneath the surface. If scientists can detect so much as a spore or a microbe on a chip of ice, “that in and of itself would be a revelation,” Spink said.
Meanwhile, although the Mars Phoenix Lander launched from its pad in Florida nine and a half months ago, the most stressful part of the journey was the final seven minutes. That’s when the craft entered Mars’ atmosphere. It was here that eight of the world’s 13 other attempts to land a pod on the planet failed. (The first mission to Mars occurred in 1976, and was successful).
For Sunday’s landing, Spink and a handful of other employees flew to Lockheed Martin in Denver to provide technical support in case something went wrong. It was a nerve-wracking experience.
Sometimes, the pods crash. There is also the possibility they could deflect off the atmosphere, or burn up in the sun.
“(Landing) is the equivalent of hitting a golf ball from Washington, D.C., to Sydney, Australia, and getting a hole in one,” said shop supervisor Keith Horowitz.
When the lander touched ground, engineers cheered, but it wasn’t over. Next the crew needed to know if ATK’s camera boom and solar panels had deployed properly.
This involved a grueling two-hour wait, mostly due to the complications involved with transmitting images back to Earth. But it, too, was a success, and the Goleta contingent was able to fly home from Denver knowing that a year-and-a-half’s worth of work wasn’t for naught.
“It was surreal and euphoric and incredible,” Spink said.
The mission is far from finished, however. The project’s engineers are on tenterhooks as they await the verdict on the release of the mechanical arm. The Goleta crew isn’t out of the woods, either. Their hope is that the solar panels will keep the Phoenix powered during the entire 90 days of the mission. (After 90 days, it is expected that an unfathomably cold winter will bury the tripod in a blanket of dry ice. The summer nights alone get as cold as 130 degrees below zero.)
Now, ATK is six months into another major space project: Building larger solar panels — also known as arrays — for NASA’s next generation Orion crew exploration vehicle that will carry astronauts to the moon and transport crew and cargo to the International Space Station.
