Transcript for:
Developing a Thermal Properties Sensor for Mars

Martin called me up on a Friday afternoon and said, Hey, do you want to work on developing a thermal properties sensor to go to Mars? You know, for three or four hours, we sat down and talked about some of the coolest ideas that I'd ever come across, just doing soil physics, not in this world. And it was an amazing conversation for that whole time, we were just fixed on this goal. How do we measure thermal properties on Mars? The thermal and electrical conductivity probe was probably the only instrument on Phoenix that worked perfectly from beginning to end, we could say, How hard would it be to add a humidity sensor? The number of times I came with what I thought were really hard problems. And the response was, we know how to do that. Here you go, You get one shot at measuring Mars, right? So once in a lifetime, maybe for us, we get to send something to Mars, we tried to eliminate all the possible limitations to that. We were thinking, how much stuff can we cram into this little thing, so it's really cool. T minus 20 seconds now. 15 seconds, locks stopping and work t minus ten, nine. So it's still dark out. And we're out there in a field at Cape Canaveral and waiting for the thing to launch and at some point, you know, it lights up the sky, it's extremely bright light. I've been working for years on an instrument, you know that's, 25 by 35 by 15 centimeters that's about this big. And suddenly, I'm looking at this 150 foot behemoth that somebody else has built that's going to carry my sensor to Mars. And it's humbling it's truly humbling to see this candle light up the sky. I mean, you know, when you're a kid, you think about these things. you know I want to be a NASA scientist or whatever. And we got to play a part. What I think should come out of that discussion is that a small company of scientists who had a great passion for the science and for learning about new things, were able to develop and fly and use an instrument that really came out of something that we'd never done before.