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On February 18, the Mars Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero Crater. However, this isn’t the first time we put a rover on Mars. The Curiosity rover was the first one back in 2012, but cameras at that point never showed the rover land. But there are also Canadians who are also helping with the project. Tim Haltigin is a Senior Mission Scientist at the Canadian Space Agency. He’s helping lead the team that’s planning the science program for the overall Mars sample return campaign. He says Canadians from all aspects are working on the project.
“The Canadian Space Agency is supporting three scientists from around the country that have been invited to join the science team,” Haltigin said. “There are several Canadian scientists and engineers that are working in the United States right now at NASA and other places that are working on the mission.”
One of those Canadians is Western alumnus Raymond Francis. Francis is an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. He explains what that lab is for NASA.
“Here at the lab, it’s basically the home for most of NASA’s big planetary exploration missions around the solar system. We’re best known for our robotic planetary exploration,” Francis stated. “I work in a mix of Mission Operations for the Mars rovers and research in onboard autonomy.”
Francis did an unusual PhD at Western, where he had two supervisors, one in planetary science and one in engineering. He found out that doing this approach was really useful. Francis says that he was deliberately trying to bridge boundaries between disciplines at Western.
Francis driving rover during Western-led Mistastin Lake analogue space mission in Labrador in 2011/ Western Media Relations
“Sometimes you need someone who can talk to people on both sides, it was very good practice in talking to planetary scientists,” Francis said. “It also taught me a lot about the geology and the atmospheric science that we do on other planets.”
While also at Western, he was also helping develop image-processing algorithms for the Mars Curiosity rover. He also won a NASA Group Achievement Award for his work on the Curiosity rover. Gordon Osinski is the director of Western’s Institute for Earth and Space Exploration. He tells the story of meeting Francis in his office.
“We talked about his career aspirations and whatever he wanted to go. He was an engineer so I was like what does this person want to do, coming to a geologist to do a PhD,” Osinski stated. “To me, this is as good as it gets, it’s one of the biggest ways I can benchmark my success as a profit to what my students are doing.”
However, the Mars Perseverance rover is only just the beginning. The rover is a part of getting rock samples from Mars back to Earth. Francis said that probably two more space missions will follow on. He also says that the way things look, we won’t get the Mars samples for another decade. Then, that’s when the real work begins to analyze those samples.
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