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News
Local science heros Neil Mottinger, Chris Potts helping explore Mars : News : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, IllinoisLocal science heros Neil Mottinger, Chris Potts helping explore Mars
| Both Oswego High School grads
| by By Nancy Atkinson
| 7/17/2003
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NASA finally launched the second of two Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) late Monday night, July 7, overcoming yet another last-second problem to send the spacecraft named “Opportunity” thundering off to the Red Planet.
The 10:18 p.m. CDT lift-off lit up the night sky at Cape Canaveral in Florida. A problem with a sticky valve on the Delta II rocket threatened to postpone the oft-delayed launch, but was fixed just in time. The originally scheduled June 25 launch had been held up by bad weather, insulation problems, battery trouble, and launch range safety issues.
“Opportunity” now joins its twin spacecraft “Spirit” on a journey to discover if enough water ever flowed on Mars to support life.
Oswego native Christopher Potts is the Deputy Navigation Team Chief for MER. Potts works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. JPL built the rovers and manages the MER project for NASA. Another Oswego native, Neil Mottinger, who graduated from Oswego High School in 1962, is also on the navigation team. Mottinger specializes in launch support and navigation for JPL. Potts said that his career choice in space exploration in largely due to Mottinger visiting OHS when Potts was in high school and sharing his experiences of working at JPL.
Potts said the task of the navigation team during launch is to “quickly process the radiometric tracking data to get an initial estimate of the spacecraft’s trajectory. It’s critical to perform this function quickly and accurately to provide updated trajectory estimates to the Deep Space Network (DSN) to control their antenna pointing in order to maintain the communication link between the spacecraft and the ground operations team.” DSN is an international network of antennas in California, Spain and Australia that supports all spacecraft. It is the largest and most sensitive scientific telecommunications system in the world.
Potts described his schedule on launch day for the two rovers. “For launches, I’ve been scheduled to cover the second shift. With MER-A, launch occurred at 11:06 a.m. PDT, and I was here about 9 a.m. even though my official shift was from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. I wasn’t scheduled to be here during the actual launch, but for events like this and as strange as it may sound, there’s no place I’d rather be that at work.”
His schedule for MER-B was more difficult given the late night launch. His shift didn’t officially start until after lift-off, about 3 a.m. to 12 noon, so he had to “resist the temptation to be at JPL for the launch,” so that he could function during his nine hour shift. He planned to watch the launch from home and try to get some sleep before coming in to work.
Potts said that after initial contact with the spacecraft is made, the operations personnel continue to monitor the spacecraft systems to make sure everything is behaving properly. “We have nearly continuous coverage of spacecraft health and safety for 30 days after launch,” he said.
Since launch, “Opportunity” is reported to be in good mechanical health, and is scheduled to arrive at Meridiani Planum on Mars on Jan. 24, three weeks after “Spirit” lands in a giant crater halfway around the planet. So far, “Spirit” has traveled approximately 50 million miles since its launch.
(Nancy Atkinson is a free-lance writer from Rochester, Ill. She also teaches classes on space exploration to elementary students.)
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