A NASA Perseverance rover driver describes what it's like to drive a nuclear-powered machine during a pandemic, as well as how she maintains a work-life balance.
- Heather Justice, a NASA Mars Perseverance driver who operates the rover remotely, spoke with Insider.
- The team has established a successful operation, but drivers still face a few challenges.
- Maintaining a work-life balance, according to Justice, was difficult.
- More stories can be found on Insider's business page.
It's been about a year since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, and NASA, like most businesses, is still dealing with the crisis's ongoing effects and challenges. However, unlike other companies, the US space agency is doing so while also overseeing a massively ambitious mission to Mars.
One of the most difficult challenges for engineers and scientists working on the Mars 2020 mission's Perseverance rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California is adjusting to new working styles. This means that some rover drivers, for example, have adopted a hybrid-working model.
Heather Justice, a NASA engineer from the Perseverance rover team, spoke to Insider about the challenges of driving the machine. She also explained how she manages to carry out commands and make new scientific discoveries while operating on Mars time during a pandemic.
Justice has been with NASA since 2011 and is a rover driver on the Mars 2020 mission. She was the primary driver of the Opportunity rover, which traveled over 45 kilometers and was active on Mars from 2004 to 2018.
In the face of lockdowns and social-distancing restrictions, she explained the team's new way of operating Perseverance, which launched on July 30, 2020, and working together as a team. "It's definitely different than operating a brand new rover on Mars," she explained.
Normally, with previous rovers, the entire team would come to JPL and collaborate on operations for the first two months. "It's a group bonding experience for all of the engineers and scientists who are working together," Justice said.
She continued, saying: "We also have our own little huddle where we look at the images and say things like, 'OK, this part of the terrain looks steep, or 'this part looks like there might be some risks to how we want to drive.' We can't do that right now. We can't all gather around a computer at the same time right now, so it's a little more difficult."
Given the effects of the pandemic, the Perseverance team has had to consider new ways of working. The team was accustomed to working in a well-organized facility with many large rooms where all of the scientists and engineers would congregate.
"Instead, we have a few primary engineering roles that really need to be collaborating on the lab that is in there but spread out across new work stations that are really far apart," Justice explained. "It's almost like we're yelling at each other from our separate workstations, but it makes it a little easier to collaborate without having to worry about all of the virtual meetings."
One particular issue has arisen as a result of the fact that teams cannot gather around a computer to plan where the rover will drive. Instead, each day, scientists and engineers must piece together all of the sequences that will eventually command the rover via teleconferencing systems.
According to Justice, this is a popular method of communication among the teams, who are all dispersed across workstations due to social-distancing restrictions. Simultaneously, remote team members in charge of the navigation camera must coordinate with rover drivers in laboratories to obtain the images they require of the terrain.
However, there has been a lot of improvement and evolution in the process of driving rovers for Justice. Some of that has been a focus on the flight systems side, where they've attempted to improve Perseverance's capabilities.
She stated: "One example is autonomous navigation, where we've made significant improvements to the software so that the rover can drive further on its own. Hopefully, in the long run, this will make it easier for us to get longer drives in, allowing us to visit places that science really wants us to visit."
There have also been hardware improvements, such as different wheels from Curiosity that are more robust to drive over sharp rocks," she added.
Perseverance chief engineer Adam Steltzner demonstrates a rover wheel during a NASA Perseverance rover mission engineering and technology overview. APPreparation was essential for Justice before she embarked on the Mars mission. "I was very good about making sure that any major chores that needed to be done during this time period were done ahead of time," she explained. "I also made sure I stocked up on food because I don't know what time I'll be able to get to a grocery store to buy food if I'm trying to eat in the middle of the night."
When asked how she managed her work-life balance, Justice said it was difficult. "We work weekends as well, 7 days a week, so there was definitely a time when I forgot what day of the week it was."
"It's not like you have your typical eight-hour workday and then go home and forget about it," Justice explained.
Then there's the added difficulty of working on Mars time: "You're working and sleeping at odd hours and it changes every day - you don't really have a consistent schedule," she explained.
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