u/UCBerkeley

Rob: We regularly have job openings! Please go to: https://careerspub.universityofcalifornia.edu/ and search for Space Sciences Laboratory.

Brett: I think the biggest challenge on the execution front is making sure all of the necessary commanding happens at exactly the right time. There are a lot of pieces to running a maneuver, and all of them need to happen in the right order, at the right time. We are currently working very closely with our colleagues on the operations team at Rocket Lab to make sure everything goes exactly as planned. 

That’s a really good question about fault response. Really what it boils down to on missions like this is what we call time to criticality. If a fault requires a response on a timescale faster than the ground can intervene, you want to have an autonomous response ready to go onboard. For issues when you have a little more time to breathe, it’s better to let the ground team step through procedures via ground commanding. There is another complicating factor for space missions related to ground station access. We can’t actually talk to the spacecraft 24/7, only when it is in view of a ground station and we have time allocated from that station. If there is a period of time where we know we won’t be able to talk to the spacecraft, we want to have adequate fault protection in place to keep us safe until our next opportunity to communicate.

Rob: Space radiation is certainly a concern for any long-duration spaceflight. NASA has an entire division devoted to it, the Space Radiation Analysis Group (SRAG). The short answer is that it’s not a showstopper, provided the astronauts have a place to “hunker down” in the case of a particularly bad solar radiation storm. Galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) are much too energetic to shield (you’d need a meter or more thickness of solid metal), but their intensities are low enough to be tolerable over the 6-10 months each way, maybe raising your lifetime cancer risk by 10 to 20%. But if astronauts got a sudden solar flare warning, they might only have 20 minutes to find shelter before a huge dose of lower energy but much more intense particles from the Sun hits them. If you’re in a spacecraft, then shelter could be inside a thick hollow water tank (water is an effective shield if you have enough it). If you’re on the Martian surface, it could be underneath your rover or underground.

Rob: Great question. The formation flying will allow us to investigate how the dynamic Martian magnetosphere varies both spatially and temporally. You probably have a couple questions.

First of all, how do we make the measurements? Well this doesn’t involve taking any “pictures” or other remote measurements. The only way we know of to measure these important plasma conditions is with in situ instrumentation, i.e. magnetic field and particle sensors on the spacecraft themselves to sample the conditions the spacecraft are flying through. 

Secondly, what do we mean by spatially and temporally? This is easiest to answer with an example. If you only have one spacecraft flying through some part of the Mars upper atmosphere or magnetosphere, and you see something change in the data (e.g. plasma suddenly gets 10x denser), you have no idea whether you’ve just witnessed a broader global change which is happening over a wide area, or whether you just entered a new spatial region where conditions are different.   But if you have two spacecraft flying through the same region, say 20 minutes and 2000 km apart, 1) By comparing simultaneous measurements at the two locations, you know how conditions are different in these two places and how they change differently with respect to each other, and 2) you’re sampling the same spatial region 20 minutes apart so you know how conditions in that region are changing on that timescale. 

Brett: I think a lot of us working in space enjoy science fiction! A couple of my favorites on the near-future side are Contact by Carl Sagan and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. On the more speculative far future side, I’m a big fan of both the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons and the Dune series by Frank Herbert.  While I wish these books were closely related to my operations work, I unfortunately haven’t figured out how to use prescience to safely cross interstellar distances just yet.

Rob: YES! For me, The Expanse (9 books and 6 TV show seasons) might be my favorite as a mix of (mostly) realism, drama, character dev and world building. But for near-future, exciting, super-realistic hard sci-fi, Daniel Suarez’s books Delta-V and Critical Mass can’t be beat. Vernor Vinge, Andy Weir, Iain Banks are all excellent. 

Phyllis: Of course! I’m a big fan of the Culture series by Iain M Banks, Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and like so many people recently read and watched Project Hail Mary. Also, it’s not strictly Sci Fi, but I highly recommend Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. I like the idea that science and art influence and inspire each other, and can both be expressions of the beauty of the Universe.

Rob: The ESCAPADEs will not be landing. They are twin orbiters. At UC Berkeley, we don't control either of the active rovers on Mars, so you’d have to ask the rover operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena what they are and are not allowed to do. The rover’s top speed is 0.1 mph, so I’m guessing they’re not catching much air  :-)

Rob: If you’re asking about engineering specifically, most aerospace engineers start off specializing in one area, usually mechanical, electrical, software, etc. Such specialties are always valuable, and some folks stay in one ‘lane’ their whole career, while some branch out. But regardless, a solid foundation in physics & math, with engineering is always valuable.  

Phyllis: I would say it depends on what you want to do! Space science as an industry needs accountants, lawyers, scientists, electrical engineers, IT technicians, even graphic designers and media specialists. I think most everyone that I work with regularly is interested or motivated by space, so even people who don’t enjoy doing engineering or science still find a way to be actively involved in space exploration.

Rob: That's a great question. The very simple answer is that once you go deeper than about 2 meters into the Martian regolith, you are protected from solar and cosmic radiation. So, if life exists or existed on Mars in the past, then that's likely where we would find it. Interestingly enough, the European Space Agency is sending a drill and organic analyzer on its Rosalind Franklin rover in 2028 to look for life in the Martian subsurface. Let's see what it finds!
https://explorationscience.esa.int/project/exomars-rosalind-franklin-rfm/

Rob: Actually, I think aerospace engineering is one place where AI will be a huge force multiplier, whereby, as a future employee, you will be managing a team of AI agents, each acting like a competent but Junior engineer in a different subspecialty of aerospace engineering (thermal, mechanical, electrical, software). In addition, someone has to check the actual hardware, and we are a long way from humanoid robots having the kind of dexterity, flexibility, and intuition of a human engineer. BUT, you will need enough experience in real engineering to know when the AI agents are giving you nonsense (and they sometimes will).

Robert: Just like human twins, they’re supposed to be identical, but they’ve developed their own personalities. Rocket Lab called them ‘Goldilocks’ and ‘Betty Blue’ during the build and testing phase before launch, when Gold was a little better behaved :).  

Brett: We love both of the twins, but Gold has been a liiiiitle fussier. Gold does have a slightly better view from its camera, though! The camera on Gold is rotated so that one of the solar arrays is in the foreground of the shot. It will make for some beautiful pictures when we get to Mars!

Rob: I'll start by saying that we have no hard evidence that any life at all exists beyond Earth. However, science shows us that life took hold on Earth very soon after it could have taken hold given the evolving conditions, so I think it's extremely likely that life of some kind exists elsewhere in the universe. But I guess you're asking about intelligent life and there I think we have no idea.  Life on Earth was just single-celled organisms for more than 3 billion years before anything more complex evolved, so maybe it’s really difficult to evolve complex life, let alone intelligent life.  But hey it's a very big universe out there with millions of quadrillions of planets, so even if the probability is extremely small for any given planet, one could imagine life happening out there at least sometimes. But it's all speculation. 

Phyllis: As a scientist, I would look for evidence rather than belief alone :) 

There are some very exciting concepts for science missions to Europa, Titan, and other alluring places in the universe that could host a type of life that we aren’t familiar with. At SSL we have a team working on an instrument that will measure the chirality, or handedness, of organic molecules like amino acids and can definitively say if life was involved in their synthesis. I think measurements like that would be paradigm-shifting if a mission ever makes it to one of those locations.

Robert: The spacecraft has multiple independent power strings and batteries, plus two redundant processors. Your questions about specific processor types, microcontrollers, and memory types fall under Rocket Lab’s proprietary information, so we can’t share it, unfortunately.

Brett: I can chime in on the data rates. The data transmission rate to the spacecraft (what we call Uplink) is on par with old school dial up internet. We don’t really feel that though since we aren’t uploading that much information to the spacecraft. A bigger pain than the actual data rate is the latency. We have to wait for round-trip light time to confirm the spacecraft has received an individual command. This isn’t that bad near Earth where the round-trip light time is only a few seconds. But once we are at Mars, we will be waiting for up to 34 minutes to see a response from anything sent from the ground. 

The data transmission rate to the Earth (Downlink) is a different story. Even close to Earth, our nominal downlink rate is only 8,000 bits per second. At Mars, the downlink rate will be as low as 1,000 bits per second. For comparison, modern high-speed internet is on the order of 100,000,000 bits per second or even 1,000,000,000 bits per second!  

If our spacecraft ever drops into safe mode, we have an even lower data rate of 10 bits per second. That is 10x lower than the nominal data rate of the Voyager spacecraft! 

Phyllis: By the way, I have to plug NASA’s “DSN Now” webpage. It’s a real-time feed of all the Deep Space Network’s antennas, and surprisingly accurate! It will show you bitrates, wavelengths, and even which station is pointed in what direction at what time to communicate with what particular spacecraft. Sometimes I’ll keep it up on a section of my monitor just to feel more connected to our work out in space. https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/dsn-now/dsn.html

Rob: Metric for EVERYTHING related to the science, the propulsion, and the navigation: nobody wants a repeat of the 1999 Mars climate orbiter disaster.  Sometimes certain machine shops need things like metal wall thicknesses or other measurements in inches or thousandths of an inch for certain parts, but all those are very carefully translated. 

Rob: We regularly have job openings! Please go to: https://careerspub.universityofcalifornia.edu/ and search for Space Sciences Laboratory.

Phyllis: My professional training is in space physics, so I had to learn the software side later, so I can command and configure my instruments on ESCAPADE to take meaningful measurements. We do lots, and lots, and lots of practice runs of any operation or command that goes to the spacecraft, sometimes for months ahead of the actual execution in space, on a testbed we call the “flatsat”. Flatsat has functional physical and electrical copies of every subsystem and instrument on the spacecraft. We first test all of our sequences on flatsat, using a written procedure that we don't deviate from. If something needs to change, we do the test again. Even so, sometimes we can’t anticipate every unexpected space event, so we try to simulate unexpected things to stress test the system and look for edge cases. Sometimes that means having a scientist (like me) execute a command sequence on flatsat (test first!) that should be fine, but sometimes isn’t (whoops!).

Realistically, though, spacecraft software isn’t nearly as complicated as the software that runs on the laptop I’m typing this response on. It turns out that it is significantly more complicated to reboot a computer when it’s 225 million kilometers away.

Brett: This is a really interesting question! Like Phyllis, my professional training is also in physics and not formal software engineering, but I can share my mindset with how I approach coding!

Like Phyllis mentioned, things get a little more complicated when your computer is several million miles away. We have to consider that we don’t have a hard wired connection to the spacecraft, so any software problems that pop up have to be identified, root caused, and resolved entirely over the radio. The main impact of this compared to other software applications is that we need to write our code to be as simple and low-risk as possible. We are extremely rigorous with our testing and validation of that software, probably far more than software engineers in other disciplines need to be. 

Rob: Yes, Mars most certainly has aurora, several types in fact.  As you may know, auroral emissions occur when charged particles from space smash into the upper atmosphere with enough energy to excite atoms and molecules into higher quantum states. When these higher states decay back to their “ground state”, the energy is released as light, typically visible or ultraviolet. 

These charged particles (usually electrons) are confined to move along magnetic field lines. But Mars does not have a global magnetic field like Earth, so Mars aurora are not limited to just the North (“Borealis”) or South (‘Australis”).  The interplanetary magnetic field (that travels out from the sun with the solar wind) piles up in front of Mars’ upper atmosphere, draping around the planet and stretching out behind it in a double-lobed “magnetotail”.  This combines with Mars’ patchy but locally strong crustal magnetic fields, to create an incredibly rich, complex, and dynamic environment that gives Mars three distinct types of aurora.

The first type is often called “Proton Aurora” and happens when solar wind protons touch particles in Mars’ extended outer atmosphere and steal an electron to become fast neutral hydrogen atoms that zoom into Mars dayside atmosphere and cause a glow at 121.6 nm (Lyman alpha).

The second type is “Electron Aurora”, whereby this complex changing magnetic environment guides and accelerates electrons into the nightside atmosphere in a dazzling array of patterns, with shapes ranging from curtains to fixed-location beams to diffuse hazes to shimmying long “serpents” known as sinuous aurora.  

The third type is “SEP Aurora”, where SEP stands for solar energetic particles. These particles come from the Sun during solar storms, and are energetic enough not to be much affected by Mars’ relatively weak magnetic field, so they strike the planet everywhere, causing the entire nightside atmosphere to glow. 

Mars aurora is a very active area of new research!

Great question! Please see the answer here: https://www.reddit.com/user/UCBerkeley/comments/1x5wwfl/comment/19rslsvtax8wz/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Brett: Hi there! This is a good question. On the hardware side, the spacecraft design was pretty locked in well before the original launch date. Not much was changed here to my knowledge. 

There were definitely software upgrades that were made to the core flight software during the delay. These were originally being tracked as updates to make once we were on orbit, but Rocket Lab (the manufacturer of the Spacecraft and its software) used the downtime to develop and load updated flight software for us prior to launch.

Really the biggest changes that were made during the delay were our procedures — the set of instructions we use to command and commission the spacecraft. The operations teams at UC Berkeley and Rocket Lab took advantage of the delay to run extra mission simulations of launch day, allowing us to refine our procedures and identify any weak points in our understanding of the spacecraft. So, while we could have launched in Oct 2024 and been safe, commissioning might have been more challenging. In other words, the launch delay was really beneficial for us from this perspective!

Brett: Hi Philip! Probably the biggest inspiration for my career journey around Phillip’s age was attending Space Camp at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville Alabama. I think that was the first time I knew I wanted to do something space-related one day. As for what inspired my journey into robotic spacecraft operations in particular, the many hours spent playing Kerbal Space Program in high school probably had something to do with that. 

Phyllis: Ok, I’m also learning for the first time here that we have at least two Space Camp alums on the project. Space Camp was so formative that I sometimes include pictures taken during that time in my current-day professional public talks. If Space Camp is not a possibility, don’t let the impact of seeing rockets in person be understated! There are space museums everywhere, and seeing a launch these days is easier than ever given the launch rate driven by space companies. I got my PhD at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, so during tough days I would visit the Saturn V at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center to get inspired. I also had early access to a computer that ran something called “the Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe,” which had a virtual planetarium and what I thought was a really great moon landing simulator. I guess that was the early 2000’s best guess at Kerbal Space Program? Also: Hi Philip! I was named after a Phillip, so we share both a name and a love of space!

Rob: Hey Philip! My journey was inspired by PBS series’ like NOVA, the 1989 Voyager flyby of Neptune, and a book my dad bought me with photos from the Viking Mars landers, plus the lore of the Apollo missions. These combined to get me super excited about space, plus I liked math and physics.

Brett: Coffee. Sooo much coffee. 

Phyllis: I donated our lab floor’s espresso machine to the mission operations center so they had enough coffee. It seemed important!

Rob: An apple a day, plus spicy Taiwanese peanuts.

Rob: Great question! The Martian is one of my favorite books and I’ve read it twice.  It’s a great mixture of science, excitement, and emotion, with a good splash of geopolitics.  I feel like it opened up public interest in Mars all over again. In terms of its accuracy, it goes to great lengths to stay true to the physical realities of getting to, and living on, Mars:  the long journey, the dust, the gravity, the communication delays, etc. I’ll only repeat here what I’ve heard Andy say publicly: two things are unrealistic in the book, one on purpose, one by accident.  

First, the dust storm blowing Mark Watney off the cliff at the beginning of the movie could never happen in real life because the air is too thin, only about 1% of Earth, so the force is 100 times weaker for the same wind speed. Wind force is proportional to the square of wind speed.  So to get the equivalent force of a 50 mph gust on earth (sufficient to blow you off a cliff), you’d need a wind speed of 50 * sqrt(0.01) = 500 mph (800 kph).  The highest winds ever recorded on Mars were around 100 mph (150 kph), which would shove you as hard as a 10 mph wind on Earth.  The author knew this but he took creative license because he wanted the planet to cause the tragedy that stranded him on Mars (not some human error or technical issue).

Second, the thick canvas coating on Mark’s habitat could not have been covered in special “radiation proofing” material to protect him from cosmic radiation.  The reason is that the particles causing radiation on the surface of Mars are extremely energetic and require approximately 2 m (6.5 feet) thick of solid rock to stop them.  The author admits this is the one major thing he got wrong by accident. 

Also, Mark Watney gets the old Pathfinder lander (from the 90s) back online with no documentation and no support from Earth. Which would be…. Impossible :).

It’s still an awesome book.

Phyllis: Hi! So it sounds like you’re on the right path. I would recommend looking into Research Experience for Undergraduates (REUs) that are Space Science or Aerospace focused. These programs are usually run by universities or research institutions to give undergraduate students the opportunity to work on a research project with field professionals. UC Berkeley / SSL has historically run one called ASSURE (sponsored by the National Science Foundation and UC Berkeley’s Aerospace Department) that specifically recruits California community college students looking to transfer eventually to a 4-year university. These are great opportunities to get experience doing real work and definitely will boost any application to a competitive university. I wish I had known about them as an undergraduate!

Rob: Space scientists are increasingly using coding tools like Codex or Claude Code to speed up the writing of analysis scripts for space science data, and for faster visualization/plotting. Software engineers are similarly using such tools to help speed up coding tasks. But it’s important to point out that the actual software running the spacecraft and the ground system is all 100% deterministic and heavily tested by humans. We don’t yet trust AI to actually fly our spacecraft.

Brett: As Rob mentioned, we aren’t using AI for any flight operations just yet. Our operations team has used AI for various ground tasks, such as helping generate new flight controller Graphical User Interfaces, porting ground scripts between different programming languages, and doing the telecommunications calculations that help us schedule effective ground station contacts. 

Although we aren’t using AI for flight ops on this mission, I will say that someone else in the industry (a small commercial company focused on Asteroid mining called AstroForge) is actually planning to fly their next mission with onboard AI supporting autonomous flight operations. The next few years will be very interesting as more companies experiment with letting AI take the reins.