Working on Mars - 9780262017756

Geologists in the field climb hills and hang onto craggy outcrops; they put theirfingers in sand and scratch, smell, and even taste rocks. Beginning in 2004, however, a team ofgeologists and other planetary scientists did field science in a dark room in Pasadena, exploringMars from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) by means of the remotely operated Mars ExplorationRovers (MER). Clustered around monitors, living on Mars time, painstakingly plotting each movementof the rovers and their tools, sensors, and cameras, these scientists reported that they felt as ifthey were on Mars themselves, doing field science. The MER created a virtual experience of being onMars. In this book, William Clancey examines how the MER has changed the nature of planetary fieldscience. NASA cast the rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, as "robotic geologists," andascribed machine initiative ("Spirit collected additional imagery...") to remotelycontrolled actions. Clancey argues that the actual explorers were not the rovers but the scientists,who imaginatively projected themselves into the body of the machine to conduct the first overlandexpedition of another planet. The scientists have since left the darkened room and work fromdifferent home bases, but the rover-enabled exploration of Mars continues. Drawing on his extensiveobservations of scientists in the field and at the JPL, Clancey investigates how the design of therover mission enables field science on Mars, explaining how the scientists and rover engineersmanipulate the vehicle and why the programmable tools and analytic instruments work so well forthem. He shows how the scientists felt not as if they were issuing commands to a machine but ratheras if they were working on the red planet, riding together in the rover on a voyage ofdiscovery.