The first real job I ever had was at Ames Research Center, a NASA facility in the heart of Silicon Valley. Ames was one of NASA's first research laboratories, founded before the agency was born, and for years it had been a player in the business of exploring the solar system. Fresh out of grad school and freed from the shackles of finishing my Ph.D. thesis, I went off in a dozen directions at once at Ames, several of them having to do with new ways to explore the planets. None of them led anywhere; most space exploration concepts don't. But it was a start.

After five years at NASA, I got an unexpected call from the astronomy department at Cornell. They had a faculty job open, and they were wondering if I wanted it. I didn't, really. Ames was a good place, and I was happy where I was. But I was recently married, and my wife, Mary, had family in Ithaca, the small town that's home to Cornell. Ithaca is a leafy and pleasant place, filled with earnest academics, left-leaning activists and organic farmers. It was getting to be time for us to put down roots somewhere, and the countryside of upstate New York-especially with family near at hand and, we hoped, a family of our own on the way soon-seemed a better choice than the congestion of Silicon Valley. So I took the offer, and in the fall of 1986 we packed up and moved to Ithaca.

It was good to be back at Cornell. The astronomy department there was a strong one, with good researchers and sharp, aggressive grad students. But being there posed a problem. As long as I had been at Ames, I had a direct line to whatever NASA might be doing in the way of space missions. When I left California for the wilds of upstate New York, that line was cut.

Cornell isn't exactly an academic backwater. But if what you really want to do is space missions, a university isn't where you obviously want to be. At NASA, if you're clever and you're willing to put in a lot of hours, getting involved in some fashion in a mission to the planets isn't all that hard. Out in the remoter reaches of academia, though, it's a different story.

And flying a mission to Mars, ten years after the Mars Room, was still what I wanted to do.

Fortunately, I didn't need to learn how to build a spacecraft. That's the business of aerospace engineers, and there are plenty of people who know how to do it. But if I wanted to be a significant part of a Mars mission, at a minimum I was going to have to learn how to build a scientific instrument that could go into space. And even that was pretty much a mystery to me.

NASA doesn't do its missions into deep space all by itself. Most planetary spacecraft are NASA creations, but when it comes time to pick the scientific instruments that fly on their spacecraft, NASA casts the net more widely, with something called an Announcement of Opportunity. An AO is a document that NASA sends out to anybody who might be interested in sending scientific hardware into space, be they from universities, the government, industry or anyplace else. It describes the spacecraft that NASA intends to fly, and it describes in very broad terms the science that the spacecraft is expected to do. And then anybody-anybody at all-can send in a proposal.

Teams of scientists and engineers band together when an AO comes out, in marriages that are born out of anything from shrewd planning and friendship to raw necessity and ambition. Sometimes, scientists with a smart idea go out and find engineers that might be able to make their idea a reality. Other times, engineers with a slick new technology go out in search of scientists who can find something useful to do with it. Either way, once a team is formed, it's the scientists' job to decide what they want to learn, and what measurements they have to make in order to learn it. Then it's up to the engineers to try to come up with a detailed design for a scientific instrument-a camera, say, or a spectrometer-that can make that measurement and get the job done.

Problem is, scientists and engineers don't always work well together. Science and engineering are profoundly different disciplines, and their practitioners belong to two different tribes.

Scientists are seekers of truth. They're people who look at the world and wonder how it works. Scientists are people with hunches, and the good ones are people who know how to pursue those hunches to the correct conclusions, whatever they might be and however long it might take to find them. To a scientist, there's enormous appeal in an open-ended research project, where there's no telling where it might lead.

Engineers, on the other hand, are creators. They are tinkerers and inventors. To an engineer, the goal is to build a machine that works. And even better is to build a machine that works right. The best engineers can look at a problem and not just find a design for a machine that can solve it. They can find the best design that can solve it.

But engineering is a real-world pursuit, and in the real world you have to deal with realities like finite budgets and schedule deadlines. Engineers wrestle with these realities daily, often compromising their profound aesthetic sense of what makes a good design to arrive at one that is simply good enough-but that gets the job done on time and within budget.

The problem when engineers and scientists have to work together is that "good enough" is anathema to a scientist. There's no such thing as "good enough" when what you're after is the truth. So on every space project, there is a tension: the idealistic, impractical scientists against the stubborn, practical engineers. On the good projects, it's a creative tension that draws out the strengths of both disciplines. On the really bad ones, it's an acid that eats away at the collaboration until it's rotten.

There aren't a lot of things that can get scientists and engineers to pull together, but one of them is an Announcement of Opportunity. When NASA puts out an AO, teams form up to write proposals that respond to it. If the scientists on the team get their way, the design gets the job done. If the engineers on the team get their way, it gets the job done without breaking the bank, the schedule, or the laws of physics. And if everybody gets along, it's a big plus.

One way or another a proposal gets written, and off to NASA it goes. NASA's headquarters are in Washington, D.C., and that's where the decisions get made and the winning proposal gets selected. It's an intense, competitive process. The proposals take months to write, and preparing them can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many teams compete, and only one wins. The theory is that the proposal that wins is the best one. But whether they're the best team or not, it's only the winners that get to go to Mars. There are a lot more losers than winners.

In 1987, just after my arrival at Cornell, the only kind of spacecraft instruments that I knew anything at all about were cameras, from my grad school days with the "imaging team" for the Voyager mission to Jupiter and Saturn. But Voyager had been built in the late seventies, using early seventies technology. By 1987, camera technology had moved far beyond the TV-like vidicon tubes that were at the heart of the Voyager cameras. Where it had gone, I understood only barely.

If I was going to write a proposal to send something to Mars, clearly what I was most likely to succeed with was a camera. But to do that, I needed to find a real camera expert-an engineer who could take whatever concept I came up with and turn it into something that could actually work.

As the semester began in the fall of '87, I unexpectedly received in the mail an elaborate envelope postmarked from Moscow. I knew no one in the Soviet Union, but this clearly was not a bulk mailing. I opened it to find an invitation to attend an international symposium on space exploration, commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik. Where the symposium's organizers had come across my name I could not imagine.

Sputnik had been a very big deal; its orbital mission in 1957 had marked the beginning of the space age. More than that, Sputnik had provided the impetus for the birth of America as a space power. Sputnik carried no instrumentation, scientific or otherwise. Instead, it was a tool of propaganda, broadcasting a beeping tone that could be picked up almost anywhere on the globe with a simple radio set. Sputnik's communist beep-beep-beep was heard across the United States, conjuring visions of Soviet spacecraft flying at will over the country, ready to drop bombs like cannonballs from the heavens. The American reaction to Sputnik was an outpouring of funds that led to the birth of NASA, Apollo and everything we know as the space program of today.

I sent in my RSVP.

The Americans who were invited to the symposium were an oddly assorted lot of former astronauts, aerospace engineers, business executives and space scientists. Our hosts flew us from Washington to Moscow on a lumbering Ilyushinjet that was the Soviet answer to the 747. Not exactly a model of efficiency, it had to set down to refuel in Newfoundland and again in Ireland, both overcast, cold and gray, before it got us to Moscow.

We touched down at Sheremetyevo, and our hosts eased us through passport control with none of the KGB-style intimidation that was usually encountered by American travelers to Moscow in those days. Bags gathered, we were whisked downtown in a motorcade, the blue flashing lights of our police escort reflecting off rain-slicked streets. The regal treatment ended as we were dumped abruptly at the Rossiya Hotel, a cavernous eyesore on Red Square.

The symposium was a hodgepodge, ranging from ordinary scientific and engineering talks to historical paeans to the glories of Soviet aerospace. The highlight was the banquet, held in a vast hall inside the Kremlin. Chandeliers sparkled overhead, and red cloths covered tables lined with heavy bottles of Georgian mineral water. My companion at dinner was an old man in a rumpled brown suit, wearing a small cluster of medals on his chest. His English was broken and I spoke no Russian, but I sat rapt through dinner as he described the elegant system he had designed to assure that the spacecraft of Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the Earth, would be oriented properly when it began its plunge through the atmosphere at reentry. I was among people who had made spaceflight history.

As the banquet ended and I walked down the red-carpeted marble steps at the exit to the hall, I spotted someone I recognized. It was Alan Delamere, an engineer from Ball Aerospace in Colorado. Ball is a strange outfit. The same company that makes the famous Ball canning jars, it turns out, also makes scientific instruments and spacecraft. I knew that Alan was an expert in the developing field of charge-coupled devices, or CCDs-the light-detecting silicon chips that were used in modern spacecraft cameras (and that, today, are at the heart of every handheld digital camera). I didn't know him personally, though I'd admired work he had presented at a few conferences we had both attended during my NASA days. Elfin, wiry and built like the cross-country ski racer he was, Alan had a mop of white hair, a middle-class British accent and a pleasant smirk that made you feel like he knew something you didn't.

Emboldened by my conversation at dinner, I strolled over to him as casually as I could and introduced myself. We chatted about the meeting, and about our experiences at the banquet. Then, with what subtlety I could muster, I steered the conversation to the fact that I was looking for an engineering partner to help me develop a camera to go to Mars. I don't think I sounded much like I knew what I was talking about. But Alan had just been through the same banquet that I had, and I hoped he was in a similar frame of mind. To my surprise, he gave me his number and told me to give him a call at his office in Boulder once I was back in the States.

I stepped out of the banquet hall and wrapped my coat around me. The rain of the previous days had cleared, and a cold wind was whipping along the pavement. I looked up at the Kremlin towers as I walked slowly across Red Square to the Rossiya. I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.

One thing that became clear very quickly was that I was going to have to put together a strong team if I was ever going to have any hope of getting real hardware onto a real spacecraft. With Alan onboard, the next guy I went after was Fred Huck from NASA's Langley Research Center, down in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia. Fred was a tall, aristocratic German who had been a driving force behind the Viking lander cameras back in 1975. He probably knew more about building cameras to go to the surface of Mars than anybody alive. I made a pilgrimage to see him on his own turf at Langley, and I told him about my hopes to send a new camera to Mars. To my joy and relief, he agreed to join forces with us-joy because he would bring so much to the team, and relief because if he was with us then he wouldn't be working with anybody else.

There was no mission out there for us to compete for yet, but something was bound to come along sooner or later. So we put a proposal in to NASA for a little bit of camera development money, with Fred as the principal investigator-the PI-because I was still too green to lead anything like a serious effort to develop space flight hardware. To my surprise, we got it: a whopping $100,000 a year for three years to build a prototype of a camera to go to Mars.

Just weeks after the money from NASA arrived, we all got together at Ball Aerospace in Boulder to work out the basics of what we wanted to build. I told everybody what I wanted the camera to be able to do, Alan figured out how to turn it into hardware and Fred kept everybody honest with his experience from Viking. It was my first taste of what later became one of my favorite parts of developing flight hardware: the blank sheet of paper. You start oft with nothing but a bunch of smart colleagues and a vague idea of what you hope to accomplish, and then a concept starts to come together before your eyes. There's enormous potential at a moment like that, and a multitude of ways to go hopelessly wrong. Success or failure, maybe months or years down the road, can turn on the outcome of one decision you might make after half an hour of discussion. It's exhilarating and terrifying at the same time.

Trying to guess what future Mars missions might need, we decided to focus on panoramic imaging, since almost any kind of vehicle that might go to the martian surface would have to have some form of panoramic vision. Our idea was to build a true panoramic camera that could take a full 360-degree picture all in one shot. The design that we came up with was a variant on the "pushbroom" cameras that are used on many kinds of orbiting spacecraft. A pushbroom camera doesn't use film, and it doesn't use a two-dimensional CCD array that mimics film. Instead, it uses a simple one-dimensional linear CCD array, taking advantage of the spacecraft's motion across the ground to sweep the array along, pushbroom-style, building up an image as it goes. But whatever our spacecraft was, it wouldn't be orbiting above Mars; it would be sitting on the martian surface. So the way we conceived our camera was with the CCD linear array turned up on its end, oriented vertically and then slowly swept around the scene by an ultra-precise motor to build up one enormous image. Alan named it "Pancam."

By 1990, NASA had chosen their next big goal at Mars. It was something they were calling the Mars Environmental Survey, or MESUR. This thing was a real hummer: sixteen identical landers to be launched over a period of four years. The idea was to put them down at sixteen widely separated places on the planet, deploying a network of seismometers and weather stations, and also studying what would have been sixteen very diverse and interesting landing sites. Each lander would, of course, carry a camera. Sixteen cameras to build and send to sixteen different places on Mars ... that sounded very cool.

MESUR was a complicated beast, though, and NASA was very worried that it would be tough to build that many landers, and make them all work, at an affordable cost. So before MESUR flew, they were planning to do a single test flight of one MESUR lander, in a mission they were calling MESUR Pathfinder. MESUR Pathfinder would be fundamentally an engineering mission, but word was out that there would be an AO to pick a camera for it. Whoever won the competition was expected to have the inside track for building the cameras for all of the MESUR landers, so it was a very tasty target.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from ROVING MARS by STEVE SQUYRES Copyright © 2005 by Steven W. Squyres. Excerpted by permission.
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