HOW OUR CAMERA PLAYED KEY ROLE IN MARS LANDING

Capturing images of other worlds is both hard and essential. I actually started doing it when I was 15 years old, and I’ve been at it for much of the last 45 years. I’m with Malin Space Science Systems, a small San Diego company. MSSS builds cameras for space missions and operates them when they get out there. My job is managing and leading the development of our cameras. As part of our team and as part of that job, I had a couple of really good moments this past month.

On Thursday, Feb. 18, I sat alone in my office, on my thousandth Zoom call of the global pandemic. I watched a feed from mission control at NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, listening to workers call out the events of the last 10 minutes of the landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars. There are five cameras we built on the rover, so I was literally holding my breath.

One of those cameras was taking pictures as the rover was coming in to land, to pick out a safe spot to touch down. This system was an innovation for JPL and a new thing for all of us. It was new for JPL — the rover deciding where it was safe to land — and new for our company — having the mission riding on one of our cameras.

There was a rapid-fire sequence of picturetaking, and image processing lasted just a couple of minutes before the rover touched down. The parachute deployed, the spacecraft was slowing down, and I was sitting there wondering, “Is it gonna work? Is it gonna work?” Then between the call-outs of altitudes and velocities, the JPL announcer said, “We have confirmation that the lander vision system has produced a valid solution.” My brain went was spinning, processing that into a sequence of images. Our camera took the pictures. It transferred them to the JPL processor, which did its thing and told the rover to land there. That was the high point for me.

A-OK, great, a couple of minutes later, the rover landed on Mars, 15 feet from where it was targeted — but in that moment, I was most happy that our part did its job.

The rover, Perseverance, is a complicated machine. After it landed, there were many things it had to do to get squared away to operate on the surface. So it wasn’t until the following Saturday that JPL commanded Perseverance to deploy the mast that points some of its instruments, including the two zoom cameras we built for geologist Jim Bell of Arizona State University. We spent five years building Mastcam-z, as it’s called, dealt with all sorts of problems, got it finished and tested, and put on the rover and launched to Mars, and landed on Mars, all to be at the point when we could send up commands to turn the cameras on, point them around, zoom in and shoot some pictures. Is it gonna work?

It did. We got the first Mastercam-z picture back from Mars.

We’d been working pretty hard since 2014 to

make that picture happen, and I was sitting in my dining room at my computer in 2021 staring at it, breathless. Seven years of anticipation dawning into reality. It’s got our calibration target with the cute little color circles and part of the rover’s nuclear generator and Mars in the background. Mastcam-z will take thousands of pictures that will look way cooler than this, but none of those will give me the sense of, well, relief — that this one did, whoosh! Again, our part worked. So that was another moment.

MSSS has been pretty successful and has had some success in the space business. We’ve got three cameras orbiting the moon and three orbiting Mars, nine on the surface of Mars, three at the asteroid Bennu and one orbiting Jupiter. And we’re building a bunch more for future missions. So we’re busy, and that’s great, but it also means that I reflect on what we do less than I should.

When I do step back and think about it, I think this: I’m lucky to be doing this at all. We’ve got a country full of people working hard and paying taxes, and a tiny sliver of that goes to exploring space. I believe that’s great and an important part of who we are, but I also think the folks paying the bills deserve a way to connect with it. And for most people, that’s through pictures — you went to Mars, show me, let us see what it looks like.

I’m proud we can can help people experience something that they helped make happen to let them feel what they’re getting for their money.

We did this. We all did this. Look at the pictures. Marvel at them. And know that someday, some of us will be standing there, too.