Looking for Life on Mars

If you were in elementary school in the 1960s, chances are you were one of nearly 50 million people who watched the historic launch of the first astronauts, known as the Mercury 7, into orbit around the Earth. All of those original astronauts, including John Glenn and Alan Shepard, have passed away, but their legacy of space exploration and the search for life on other planets, including Mars, is firmly established through the continuing work of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

For Quechee resident Stephen Gorevan, a robotics engineer and co-investigator with the Mars Science Laboratory Mission at NASA, the Mercury 7 launch inspired a lifelong career supporting NASA space exploration. “For me, it was like, “Wow!”, and I was hooked,” Stephen says, remembering watching the launch as a young child on a television placed on the stage in his public school cafeteria. “I didn’t want to be an astronaut, but I did want to be part of our efforts to go to the Moon.”

Stephen Gorevan

Stephen initially thought that his chances of joining NASA were slim because all of the programs were based in Texas, California, and Florida, and he was from New York. “I thought, ‘they’re not going to let me get involved’. So I went to music school, and forgot my dreams of working at NASA,” he says. Eventually, pursuing his lifelong dream won out, and Stephen left music school and transitioned to studying engineering, earning a master’s degree from Columbia University. “My best friend offered to start a business together, and in 1983, we founded Honeybee Robotics. We were young upstart kids who were studying robots in college, and at that time, businesses like IBM, 3M, and FedEx all wanted to automate.”

The stars were aligned for introducing robotic engineering to space missions as well. With the tragic explosion of the Challenger spacecraft, NASA decided to turn the dangerous jobs over to robots. “I got an appointment with a NASA employee just by serendipity and got my dream job at NASA,” Stephen says. “When President Clinton announced that it looked like there might be life on Mars, it opened the floodgates to explore Mars with robotic devices. Suddenly, I found myself going from a small company in New York to helping NASA explore Mars.”

Honeybee Robotics supported the 2004 Spirit and Opportunity missions to Mars, supplying scientific instruments on both missions, which allowed the collection of new data not possible on previous explorations. “My job was to send data collection commands to the rovers exploring Mars,” Stephen says. According to NASA, Spirit and Opportunity confirmed that water was long standing on the surface of Mars in ancient times by studying the rock record, an indication that life might have been present on the ‘red planet’.

Stephen continued his work with three more rovers – Curiosity, Perseverance, and the Phoenix Lander, exploring craters and other areas on Mars. Right from his cabin in Quechee, he now sends daily commands exclusively to the Curiosity rover – the most advanced rover NASA had designed to date when it launched in 2012. “When it’s my turn to ‘uplink’ a command set to Curiosity, I am specifically acting as a Payload Uplink Lead (or PUL) sending a program to an instrument suite on Curiosity named SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars),” Stephen explains. “The SAM team decides they want to run an experiment on Mars and a team of engineers like me participates in a careful execution of what the science objectives are.”

Stephen prepares two days in advance of the uplink process to be sure the program is correctly designed. “The day of uplink, I am looking out of my picture window [in Quechee] with Moosilauke in the distance, and I am online with about 50 engineers and scientists as we refine our commands over the course of an eight hour day, culminating with the commands being sent to Mars by large antennas in California, Spain, and Australia,” he says. Stephen notes that the uplink process is intense because ‘no mistakes’ is the goal, but working remotely from the bucolic Upper Valley helps ease some of the tension. The whole process of implementing the computer program some 140 million miles from Earth takes several hours from uplink to receiving results. Curiosity is looking for ancient habitats on Mars that would have been suitable for life fossils of amoebas and microbes, but its primary mission is to study rocks, dirt, and geoformations, as well as minerals like granite, iron, basalt, and sulphur.

So what are the space rovers learning? According to Stephen, NASA’s #1 priority is to understand the mystery of the origin of life. “If any other planet is going to support life, it’s Mars because it’s so close,” he says. “What we have proved so far is that there were seas, lakes, oceans, and rivers on Mars. Anywhere on Earth where there is liquid water, there is life.”

After decades of exploring Mars and analyzing the data, an important discovery is that the ultraviolet and cosmic rays hitting the surface of Mars are so intense that humans would not survive being exposed to them, but still there’s hope. “We’re close,” says Stephen. Ten years ago, an instrument Stephen programs – the tunable laser spectrometer – discovered high levels of methane on Mars. “Methane can be produced from volcanoes, geysers, and microbes. Scientists suspect microbes, because they show up on many mornings, and there are no volcanoes on Mars.”

Before working on Curiosity, Stephen worked for 20 years on the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers. His group of Honeybee Robotics engineers designed and built the Rock Abrasion Tool pictured.

NASA’s work continues with new missions to Europa (a Jupiter moon), Venus, our Moon, and unobstructed observations of the Milky Way. As a member of NASA’s Curiosity Science Team, Stephen works from his home in Quechee and often travels to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California. He recently sold Honeybee Robotics to Blue Origin, a space exploration company owned by Jeff Bezos.

Future NASA missions will gather actual Martian rocks for analysis and bring them to Earth. Still, it’s likely that if humans were ever to live on Mars, it would have to be underground, and any outside activity would require a space suit. “I admit, I prefer to do my planetary exploration from my kitchen table,” Stephen says.

For more information on the Curiosity mission, visit NASA’s website science.nasa.gov.