Mass. native helped rover land on Red Planet
» If you asked Chelmsford native Phil Bailey while he was in high school if he’d ever launch a rover to Mars — let alone two — “it would have been beyond my imagination at the time to say that like, ‘Oh, yeah, I would actually end up there,’” he said. “It blows my mind thinking back on it.”
That has become Bailey’s reality when, on Feb. 18, the “Perseverance” rover landed on Mars, the second Mars rover he has worked on as a robotics systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The first, as The
Sun reported, was the InSight rover, which landed on Mars in 2018.
Bailey, 28, graduated from Chelmsford High School in 2010, where he was captain of the robotics team and played sports. “I’ve always been super excited about, you know, space, and NASA and everything from like, Star Wars to all that stuff, when I was little,” he said. “Ever since at least high school, I’ve been super excited about robotics. This is really the perfect merger of the two.”
His father, Bill Bailey, said his son always excelled at math and engineering, and even took college courses at UMass Lowell in technology-related fields
while in high school. “He went out there, and he knew what he wanted to do,” Bill Bailey, who has advanced degrees in math and science, said. “He’s damn good at math. I mean, he was incredibly good at math… I’ll be honest, he’s actually done something I couldn’t have done.”
After high school, Phil Bailey earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Carnegie Mellon University, where, after a couple years off, he rediscovered his love for robotics at one of the top universities for the subject in the country.
After graduation, his father said Phil received offers from lots of prestigious companies, but chose to work at JPL, and started in 2015.
“JPL sort of is a dream come true as a workplace,’ Phil Bailey said. “It’s not often you get to work on stuff that you really feel this passionate about.”
The Perseverance mission is significant because it is the first rover that is planning to return samples from Mars to Earth that are uncontaminated by the elements on Earth. As Bailey explained, the rover is going to drill samples from rocks on Mars, seal them in tubes, and, in a few years, a small “fetch rover” will return the samples to Earth.
“There’s a limited form factor (on the rover) that we can stick instruments in, but if we can get samples to Earth, we can run any sort of test that anyone can imagine on it, right? And so we can get all sorts of more information on it,” he said. “We’ve never been able to get samples back to Earth before. The only pieces of Mars rocks that we have here are actually from asteroids that hit and then eventually ended up on Earth, but those are rare and (contaminated).”
According to the NASA website on the rover, the Perseverance mission is to “seek signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and soil) for possible return to Earth.” Bailey added that one experiment on the rover, in the form of a small device with the acronym “MOXIE,” is attempting to generate oxygen on Mars. “That’s a really exciting experiment, because if we can generate oxygen, that’s a first step to getting humans to be able to get there,” he said.
As for Bailey’s role in the mission, he primarily focused on the robotic arm, which is affixed with a bevy of tools including a drill, an X-ray machine, two kinds of imagers nicknamed with the acronyms “SHERLOC” and “WATSON,” a scanner, ”PIXL,” a tool that blows small puffs of gas to clear dust generated from drilling, and a sensor to measure the ground, among others.
On a high level, Bailey has been “looking at the robotic arm system as a whole, making sure that it’s all meeting its requirements, that it was designed as it was intended,” he said. Now that Perseverance has landed, he’s in charge of the arm’s “checkout activities” for the first few weeks to ensure everything is working correctly. Bailey described this process, which he programmed, as a “morning stretch” to try all the basic functions of the arm and check for issues.
After the first few weeks, Bailey will switch to a “downlink analysis” function, where he will be analyzing data to check the health and safety of the rover and flag issues. He said he expects to later be involved with the Mars sample return lander as well. He’s also programming other autonomous functions of the rover to save time while Perseverance is on Mars.
Due to the pandemic, Bailey said the landing experience in Bailey’s office was “completely different” than InSight’s. Instead of watching it with his coworkers in person, Bailey and about 600 other staff members watched on video with their cameras on, so he could still see everyone’s reactions in real time. “It was very exciting,” said Bailey, who watched at home with his wife. “We still managed to have that same sense of camaraderie.”
Because Mars is so far away, there’s an 11-minute delay between what happens and when the team on Earth is able to see it, and seven minutes between when the rover enters the atmosphere of Mars and when it lands. “By the time we first see the rover landing, or entering the atmosphere, it’s already on the ground, one way or another. It already happened on Mars, right? We’re just getting the video back now,” he said. “It’s the ‘seven minutes of terror’ for a reason, and everyone’s sort of holding their breath.”
Even remotely, Bailey called the landing experience “like no other sense of relief or excitement that I’ve ever felt” and a “catharsis” because of the years of work and thousands of people who have worked on the project.
As is tradition at JPL, Bailey and his wife ate peanuts throughout the landing. “It’s a superstition, but (with) one of the early missions, the first success they got, the only thing they could figure out that was different was that they had peanuts in the room. And so ever since then, there’s always been peanuts in the room for landing,” he said. “We had some peanuts, most of my friends were eating their own peanuts, and so that’s probably why it worked.”