FROM ROCKET CLUB TO ROVER ON MARS
Three in Wisconsin helped develop camera
For three Wisconsinites who met through the rocketry club at an Elm Grove middle school, Thursday’s launch of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission will be much more than a fiery spectacle.
The rocket blasting off from Cape Canaveral, sending its Perseverance Rover on a seven-month journey to the Martian surface, will also be carrying a specialized camera they helped develop.
Brookfield resident Michael Wolff is a senior research scientist with the Space Science Institute, a nonprofit corporation that supports space research and education. About seven years ago, Wolff started helping out at a rocketry club at Pilgrim Park Middle School in Elm Grove, where his children attended.
There, he started interacting with students Tim and Ben Vrakas, whose father ran the club.
“They’ve always been hands-on, and they like to build things,” Wolff said.
The club members were still meeting regularly a few years later when Wolff started working on technology for a camera that would eventually be
used for the Perseverance Rover.
“It just seemed like a project that was made for someone interested in tech and had the time to invest and just wanted to play,” Wolff said.
He asked the Vrakas brothers if they would like to help work on building a system that could take stereo images — images with depth — from readily available components.
The brothers were interested and Wolff signed them on as workers with the Space Science Institute in 2015. Tim was a junior at Brookfield East at the time and Ben was a freshman. One of the institute’s missions is to inspire young people to consider STEM education and careers.
“While working for Dr. Wolff, I developed test equipment for the Mastcam-Z system, which acts as the eyes of the rover,” Tim Vrakas said.
The equipment and software he developed “emulated the behavior of the rover hardware,” which helped the Mars 2020 science team try out their analysis tools.
The brothers continued working with Wolff on the camera project until 2018.
Tim is now studying electrical engineering at Stanford University and Ben is studying mechanical engineering and physics at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.
Scouting out the Martian landscape
Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z camera is one of the rover’s 19 cameras and was developed by researchers and engineers based at Arizona State University. Wolff was one member of the team.
Mastcam-Z will be the rover’s main eyes, allowing the rover’s controllers to look out over Mars’ Jezero crater.
Since 2018, test versions of the Mastcam-Z camera and rover have gone through numerous field tests. Wolff participated in these tests, helping scientists simulate the camera’s operation on the rover and assessing how well the camera worked.
“The most recent one in 2019 was near Barstow, California,” Wolff said. “You know, I can’t say it’s like Mars, but it certainly has a lot of rocks and a lot less plant life.”
The Perseverance Rover should land on Mars in February. Though the first few Mars days will be spent testing the equipment and making sure everything is still working after the rover’s 61 million-mile journey, the Mastcam-Z camera should start taking images almost immediately.
The Mastcam-Z was designed to take sweeping panorama images and be able to zoom in on features as small as a fly from as far away as a soccer field — that’s where the “Z” in Mastcam-Z comes from.
In the same way that our own eyes can perceive depth, the camera’s two “eyes” will also be able to generate 3D images of Mars’ landscape. Unlike human eyes, however, the camera can see wavelengths of light that our eyes can’t detect.
All these features will help geologists pick out potentially interesting landscape features and rocks from a distance and plan out which sites Perseverance should travel to next.
One goal of the Mars 2020 mission is to collect rock and soil samples that could eventually be brought back to Earth during a later mission.
“The science goals for the geologists are really to figure out what are the best samples to take,” since only a limited number of samples can actually be collected, Wolff said.
Mastcam-Z will support this goal by picking out potentially interesting sites for later investigations.
During the rover’s mission on Mars, Wolff’s job will be to build commands for the camera’s operation, most of which he’ll be able to do from his Brookfield home.
Wolff, who grew up in Appleton, decided on a career in astronomy after being assigned to watch Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” and write summaries of the episodes during high school.
“After that, I just decided I was going to get a Ph.D. in astronomy,” Wolf said. “You know, these decisions are not always well-informed.”
Wolff did end up receiving a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1993, and his graduation happened to coincide with a ramping up of NASA’s Mars missions.
“I ran into a project on Mars that could use some of my astronomical skills, and I just started doing more and more Mars and less and less astronomy,” Wolff said.
Through his involvement with various Mars missions, Wolff and his family have been able to attend launches in Florida. This year, due to restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, he and his family plan to watch Thursday morning’s launch from their Brookfield home through a video feed.
Information on how to watch the Mars 2020 launch can be found on NASA’s website. Jordan Nutting is a mass media fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science writing about science at the Journal Sentinel this summer. She’s working on a doctorate in organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.