IEEE Member Albert Haldemann is living like a Martian. He goes to work on Mars every day, he lives by Mars time, and the license plate on his car reads "MARS ROX."

Haldemann is the deputy project scientist for NASA's Spirit and Opportunity vehicles, the rovers that landed on Mars in January. Once the rovers touched down, Haldemann began working on Martian time to coincide with the rovers' sleep and work cycles. The Martian day is 24 hours and 39 minutes long, which means that his work cycle shifts by 39 minutes every day.

"I've been a space nut since I was a kid reading science fiction and watching 'Star Trek,' " Haldemann says. "My interest in Mars jelled when I saw the images sent back from the Viking landing on Mars in 1976."

He describes his job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., USA, as similar to that of a customer service representative in a traditional engineering firm. He makes sure that the JPL engineers who build the rovers have the right information about the Martian environment for design and planning purposes. He makes sure that the scientists working with the data mostly academics working at universities around the country, not at JPL understand the hardware constraints. And he and his colleagues must also be aware of how an engineering decision might affect the scientific information being transmitted back to Earth.

Haldemann's eye is always on the data. "The project scientist is there to make sure the science returned to Earth meets the objectives that were laid out," he says.

He got involved in the Mars Exploration Rover project in October 2000, shortly after NASA asked JPL to take the two rovers on. Spirit and Opportunity were sent to gather data from Martian rocks to try to determine if Mars's past climate could have sustained life.

Reaching for the stars

Born in Bern, Switzerland, Haldemann moved with his family in 1970 to Toronto, where he grew up and attended high school. He returned to Switzerland in 1984, however, to attend the Universit de Neuchtel, and he also served in the Swiss Air Force as a jet pilot.

After earning a bachelor's degree in particle physics, Haldemann attended the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, USA, to pursue a Ph.D. in planetary science. For part of his thesis, he used radar remote sensing to evaluate possible landing sites for NASA's Mars
Pathfinder rover that landed in 1997. With radar remote sensing, Haldemann and his colleagues can get a preliminary idea of what the surface of Mars looks like. This work got him a postdoctoral position on the Pathfinder team, which turned into a staff position within JPL's planetary radar group.

On the Pathfinder mission, Haldemann worked on soil mechanics as well as geomorphology, a fancy way of saying he counted the rocks, more than 4000 of them, in the images the Pathfinder lander sent back.

Spirit touched down in the Gusev crater, a dry lake bed near the Martian equator, on 5 January, and Opportunity landed in the Meridiani Planum, where mineral deposits might indicate the presence of water, on 25 January. The spacecraft traveled the more than 450 million kilometers to Mars in seven months.

Haldemann was not in the control room at JPL when Spirit and Opportunity landed. Because more than 1000 engineers, scientists, and support staff are involved in the project, JPL set up a large auditorium on the nearby Caltech campus for them to view the images from Mars. The auditorium had a direct feed from the JPL control room, and Haldemann served as a master
of ceremonies during both landings. He provided commentary on the images and cheered along with everyone else, including his wife and two daughters.

Haldemann says his reaction when seeing some of the first images that Spirit sent back to Earth was, "Hey, the radar works. I got it right."  Radar signals from Earth played a role in choosing the landing site on Mars.

"It's a small contribution that I share with a small group of people in planetary radar at JPL," Haldemann says.

Haldemann and other engineers had cause to be pleasantly surprised that it all worked, at least at first. Most attempts to land on the Red Planet in the last decade have failed. And just two weeks before Spirit touched down, a British-built rover called Beagle II tried to land. But by late January, Beagle II still had not been heard from.

After Spirit sent some pictures and data back to Earth, it too had problems. Its transmissions stopped. JPL engineers and scientists diagnosed the problem, which appeared to relate to the flight software and memory systems that caused the rover's computers to reboot several times a day.

Back to health

At press time, engineers had erased and reformatted Spirit's flash memory system and they expected the problems to be fixed. "We have plenty of reason to be optimistic, and we're looking forward to having a healthy Spirit rover," Haldemann says.

For Haldemann the strange hours and hard work have been worthwhile.  "The big payoff is the exploration, seeing new vistas, being able to influence how that information is acquired, and being right there when that information is returned," he says. "It's a big mission and it generates big
science."

For more information about the Mars rovers, visit:

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home.

BY ERICA VONDERHEID
The Institute, March 2004