Tyler Nordgren has a running fantasy that someday, perhaps hundreds of years from now, astronauts treading the surface of Mars will run across an ancient Earth rover and find a meandering inscription on its sundial.
The message, in English, tells the story of the different perceptions humans have had of Mars from early history to now. It ends by saying, “Through it all we have wondered: Has there been life on Mars? To those taking the next steps to find out, we wish a safe journey and the joy of discovery.”
Barring any mishaps, the NASA rover Curiosity will land at 10:31 p.m. Pacific time on Sunday, Aug. 5, and Nordgren’s fantasy can remain intact. The University of Redlands professor of physics is part of a small team of scientists and academics who constructed the rover’s sundial and the message etched into it.
The sundial serves as a Martian clock for scientists and is also important in calibrating color settings on the rover’s cameras.
Nordgren, who is also known for his photography for the National Park Service, will be keeping tabs on the landing at his Redlands home, he said. The mission has been described as the most complicated landing of a spacecraft to date.
Before the rover settles onto the planet, it will have to survive a super-heated descent through Mars’ atmosphere, a parachute drop and, finally, being lowered to the surface on cables from a platform powered with retro rockets. The landing has earned a name — “seven minutes of terror” — among NASA personnel at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the mission is being managed.
If any of the steps goes wrong, it could mean the failure of a $2.5 billion, eight-year effort.
Despite the complexity of the landing, Nordgren feels pretty sure that the operation will go according to plan.
“At the engineering meeting, the engineers were absolutely positive this was going to work,” he said. “They seemed really confident.”
Assuming Curiosity rolls into action, the object it will photograph more than anything else on Mars will be the sundial Nordgren helped design.
So, what is a sundial — among the most simple and ancient timekeeping instruments — doing on one of the most sophisticated pieces of machinery ever built? Essentially, it’s a fail-safe device.
“All it needed to be was a square plate and a stick,” Nordgren said.
The sundial actually has a sphere-topped protrusion and looks a lot like a video game joy stick. By looking at the shadow it casts, scientists can tell both the time and the season on Mars. It will give the scientists operating the rover a time signature.
“The first thing you do is snap a photo of the sundial,” Nordgren said. “And at the end you take another one.”
The sundial has a second important function. Red, green, yellow and blue tiles are set around the base of the sundial’s armature. The tiles serve as color keys so that the rover’s cameras — which produce 3-D images — can be adjusted to truly represent the colors on Mars’ surface.
“There is all this dust in the Martian atmosphere,” Nordgren said. “The sun there is shining through this dusty atmosphere. Everything would have this reddish glow.”
The two previous Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which landed on the planet in 2004, also had sundials that Nordgren helped design.
He got to be part of the seven-person sundial team this time by “being in the right place at the right time,” he said. “Spirit and Opportunity were really the brainchild of a former professor of mine at Cornell, a fellow by the name of Steve Squyres. He contacted me and said, ‘We have this great idea to use a sundial. I know that you are interested in art and you love sundials.’”
Nordgren’s work will be on view 35 million miles from Earth.
“That’s actually the best part of all of this,” he said. “Long after we’re all gone and long after anybody cares, this little part that I had a hand in creating will be there.”