On the Red Planet and Football Fortunes
This has been an amazing month with two Rovers landing on Mars. Spirit was first and Opportunity followed quickly behind. I have thoroughly enjoyed the JPL briefings each day from two aspects. The first is as a physicist, and the second as a systems analyst.
The physicist me has enjoyed sharing the thrill of accomplishment of the many teams working together. My favorite quote came from Rob Manning, the EDL Dev. Mgr. Of the Mars Rover Project said yesterday, “For engineers, truths are temporary.” I heard someone refer to that quote during a JPL briefing on the next day. As JPL crew talk, they are talking a language I am familiar with, and I identify myself with each member of the team as I listen to the technical reports of each one's phase of the project.
The system analyst me is intrigued by the reports on the recovery of the Spirit Rover. It shut down for a whole day till they finally discovered that it was re-booting itself constantly. What could have made this happen? They had a fail-safe mechanism that performed a re-boot if some critical function did not get carried out by a certain time. As soon as they discovered the re-booting cycle, they instructed it to stop doing that, and it did. Their hypothesis is that the Flash Memory had been overloaded and they are running diagnostics to confirm that hypothesis. They are trying fix the problem without dumping Flash Memory, but will clear it and re-acquire the data it contained as a last resort. Most or all of Spirit's functions will be recovered, and it may yet go roving before Opportunity gets to roll off the pad.
One aspect of the whole system of Mars Rover operation that I haven't heard covered nor heard any questions asked about after each briefing has to do with pure physics: the speed of light. Light takes about 8 minutes to reach us from the Sun at 93 million miles or about a minute each 10 million miles. Mars is about 50 million miles, I think, so communication time one-way between Earth and Mars should be about 5 minutes. Imagine the problems of debugging a computer system if you input some code to test the computer and it take five minutes for the code to reach the CPU, then five more minutes before your display is updated to tell you how the computer reacted to the new code. This exacerbates the systems analysts' problems --- it's like debugging in slow-motion. The drivers of the Mars Rover have a similar problem. They need to steer five minutes ahead. At 12 miles per hour, the vehicle will travel a mile in five minutes. If you turn right, the wheels won't turn for five minutes and you won't see the results of the turn you executed for ten minutes! Talk about over-cautious drivers — those Rover drivers will be that.
The planet we call Mars got its name from the God of War which could be the patron planet for the gridiron wars of the football field. This brings me to an anecdote I'd like to share with you about the LSU and USC football fortunes of this season.
Back in August Del and I went to a Mars Party at our friends' house where we were to look at Mars through the telescope at its nearest approach to Earth for some 60,000 years. I mentioned how I sat with two guys, Bert and Bob, in the dark on the back porch waiting for Mars to rise and we discovered that we were all in LSU's Tiger Stadium during the Duke of the 1958 National Championship season. Bob was a resident of Metairie that I met that night for the first time, and he told us how after graduating from LSU in English, he went to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. He matriculated at USC, got a Master's Degree there, became a screenwriter. Over the years, he had become a USC football fan. He told us about this new coach, Pete Carroll, who was doing good things with the football program, and how he was bringing USC back to prominence nationally. I told him that Nick Saban was doing a similar thing to LSU.
Now, who could have thought, sitting on that back porch in the dark waiting for Mars to rise, that LSU and USC would a short couple of months later each go on to finish at the top of the National Rankings in football? USC would win the Rose Bowl and finish at top of the AP and Coach's Poll. LSU would win the Sugar Bowl and win the BCS National Championship. Good Ole Mars!
And speaking of football, the Super Bowl will be played on this coming Sunday and the best quarterback on the Saints team in 2002 will be leading the Carolina Panthers, God willing, to victory over the New England Patriots.
When the 2002 Saints season started the starting quarterback, Aaron Brooks made this promise to the fans. I remember his words if it were yesterday, "I promise to take myself out of the game any time I would be hurt and not able to help this team win." Great words to live by. Unfortunately for the Saints, Aaron did not live up to his own words. With four games remaining to be played, Aaron Brooks got hurt, and instead taking himself out of the game, he stayed in and self-destructed: he threw balls into waiting defenders arms, into the sidelines, into the ground, and he got sacked over and over again, thus causing the Saints to lose the last four games and deservedly sit out another round of playoff games.
Meanwhile, who was sitting on the bench while Brooks was making a mockery of the Saints' playoff hopes? Jake Delhomme, that's who, the same young man who will be leading the Panthers in the Super Bowl this Sunday. I watched him in only one game during his USL career — it was the game he led his underdog team to victory against a nationally ranked Texas A&M team. It was the most brilliant performance I'd seen in a college quarteback in my lifetime.
In 2002, the Saints had him sitting on the bench while their express train to the Super Bowl in their home city of New Orleans derailed in the hands of a man at the controls who couldn't keep his word. All the while a Super Bowl quarterback was kept sitting patiently back in the caboose waiting to lead his team to victory. Could Jake Delhomme have led the Saints to the Super Bowl in 2002? Look at his performance in the Super Bowl on Sunday, February 1st. He got the Carolina Panthers there in the very next football season when he played for a coach and a front office who could recognize Super Bowl talent when they saw it.