[somber music]
On 21 August, 1993, a tragic event occurred.
Communications with the Mars Observer spacecraft were lost
during a sequence referred to as the pressurization sequence.
This was a sequence in preparation
for insertion to orbit about Mars.
Once again, I mean, we are always trying things
because they're hard, not not because they're easy.
And so once in a while, we're going to have a failure
because we are trying hard things.
But I had been fully anticipating that we could have problems with this instrument.
This was a new ballgame completely, okay.
But I was not concerned about the spacecraft.
It never crossed my mind that the spacecraft would let us down.
So this was a blow in the sense of, wow,
something I completely didn't expect.
[music]
You know, we held out hope for a while,
that maybe it would come back,
maybe they'd find it or recover it or something, and then
eventually that settles down and you realize the mission was lost.
I was devastated.
I think we all were.
And it was--it really wasn't clear at the time
whether we were going to have a
follow on to actually
do what the mission was supposed to do.
So that was extremely hard to take.
What made it easier is the amount of time we had for grieving
was actually pretty short.
NASA decided that we want to continue this and go back to Mars,
and so we had to snap out of it literally and get back to thinking about
and fighting for the next mission, which was Mars Global Surveyor.
It was a difficult time, and
it was the first time I think I really felt
I had to get in there and argue with my colleagues.
But as the PI, particularly for me,
that we needed to get to back to Mars and we needed to get back
with this instrument,
knowing that they couldn't carry all six or seven instruments, only four would go.
The laser altimeter had to be one of them.
Okay.
The engineers had a chance to kind of
just, not change it, but, you know, do certain things a little bit better.
That's what engineers like to do is
fix all the first round mistakes
in the second round and make new ones.
We were asked immediately, how long will it take
you to rebuild another copy of MOLA?
How much is it going to cost?
Can you get your team back together in time?
Do you have the parts?
So there was immediately a flood of things we had to do.
Jim Abshire brought me in for the detector engineer
who would just left Goddard at the time.
So I was lucky to join the team working on the detectors.
We were only given, I think, three years to rebuild it, which is shorter than usual.
And everyone,
all the management knew that means there's no wiggle room in your schedule.
But the team was largely still there and everyone's
geared up to redo it since the first one didn't make it.
So everyone really want to do it again,
and do it right.
While the Goddard team was building MOLA-2 for the Mars
Global Surveyor mission, a small team seized
a long awaited opportunity to hitch a ride on the Space Shuttle
with an experiment known as the Shuttle Laser Altimeter.
I think confidence comes from demonstration.
Sometimes you have to do more.
Sometimes you have to do less.
Working personally to build that instrument.
We built it at Goddard in our lab down the hall
without any fancy paperwork or flight procedures or anything.
We just built it.
I was hired then
to come on board working on the Shuttle Laser Altimeter,
and I was brought in specifically to work on precise positioning,
precise pointing and precise geolocation of the surface footprints.
And we tested it on the roof, shined it over to a bank building
eleven kilometers away, lined it up, and it was ready for the Shuttle.
It was a Hitchhiker Special that we flew with
help from NASA Headquarters on the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
Booster ignition and liftoff of Endeavour in pursuit
of a Japanese satellite. [radio chatter]
They turned it on for us and the first time they turned it on,
the Shuttle's upside down with the laser pointing at Earth.
We were over the Middle Pacific.
First light showed all this fuzz over the surface of the Earth.
We're all looking.
We thought we got something wrong.
We realized later we were seeing the boundary layer clouds over the ocean.
When we came over land, the fuzz was the height of the trees.
All of a sudden the laser pulses
got shorter and shorter distances.
The first landfall of the Shuttle Laser Altimeter and the first orbit
went right over the summit of the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii.
Well, we're extraordinarily delighted to report that the Shuttle Laser
Altimeter experiment--it's a Hitchhiker
experiment on STS-72--has performed absolutely nominally.
In fact, everything has worked even beyond our expectation--
And that was a genuine first light
experience with MOLA technology,
but on Earth.
Really had to get those datasets out there
and you had to get a couple people that really bought into it
and built on it and convinced others that this worked.
As the data from the Shuttle Laser Altimeter began to convince some skeptics.
The Goddard team finished the MOLA instrument.
Again.
Our MOLA team really came through, was just really
another great experience for many of us, including me.
We're able to deliver to the Mars Global Surveyor project and it got launched.
And we have liftoff of NASA's Mars Global Surveyor
as America begins its journey back to the Red Planet.
[radio chatter]
When Mars Global Surveyor started getting closer to Mars,
we were going to go into this aerobraking phase.
That was an opportunity that we had
to go ahead and turn on the lasers and see if we could track the surface.
[room chatter]
In Station 45 was having problems locking up to the two tape data.
What was that?
You said 1607 or 16--
Can you tell
if MOLA is turned off?
[radio and room chatter]
Is that the nadir event?
That must be the nadir event.
I'm hungry. You didn't really want those sandwiches-- [room chatter]
Look at the laser beam coming back, Rob.
[Lots of chatter].
It's going to be too fast, and I've got too much data coming in.
[cheering and applause]
Look at that!
Yeah, look, there's a little tiny terrace.
This is the first profile of a crater we've ever seen on a planet.
Rob, nice laser!
We have Mars finally!
12 years!
All right, let's take a look.
[room chatter]
Over a decade later
the Goddard team had proof:
planet-scale laser altimetry worked.
It could map distant craters and valleys and mountains.
It changed the game.
Today, we've ushered in a new era in the remote sensing of Mars.
And this particular dataset that we've acquired has in fact enabled us
to generate what we consider
a very detailed description of the shape of the planet Mars.
This has significant implications for the flow of water early on Mars.
We believe this is one of the
youngest features on the planet.
We're seeing a planet is very different from Earth,
and is telling us something about the Earth in an indirect way
that says that not everything works in the way that we originally had in mind.
The kind of measurements that we're making now are allowing us to,
you know, characterize Mars on timescales of days to years now,
and then the next step is to try to go back eons and
try to figure out what changed on Mars.
I mean, at that time, we used to brag that Mars was mapped better than the Earth.
The accuracy of MOLA was so good,
and and after a couple of years, the coverage was so good,
it was definitely a more accurate map of a planet than any planet.
And this came out of "it can't be done" in the mid eighties
to a tool that we now accept as the standard.
For those of us that worked on MOLA,
it was transformative.
It wasn't a destination or a place
that we were as much as a place that we would become.
In some ways, we were in demand
to consider whether we could
provide a laser altimeter
to another mission.
Things were not working the way we expected them to,
and there were mysteries, and we weren't expecting--after MOLA
in particular--to have mysteries at that point.