The eyes of Mars visit Queen Anne

Melissa Rice has a sweet gig.

Dr. Melissa Rice of Caltech spoke about the Mars Rovers at a
Queen Anne Science Café event in July. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“I actually get paid to sit around and look at pictures of Mars all day,” said Rice, an Eastside native, during a Science Café talk at T.S. McHugh’s earlier this month. Dr. Rice, who works for the Division of Geological & Planetary Sciences at CalTech, is a science team collaborator on the Curiosity Mars science laboratory mission, and also worked on the Spirit and Opportunity rover missions. She was back in Seattle for a special July Science Café event, sponsored by the Pacific Science Center, KCTS-9 television, and the Planetary Society. Rice gave a talk titled “Through the ‘Eyes’ of NASA’s Mars Rovers.”

It was a good homecoming for Rice who, like Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye “The Science Guy”, got her start at the Pacific Science Center.

“As a kid I came many, many times and loved it, and that’s where the seeds were planted that led me here working on these Mars missions today,” Rice said. “I feel really honored to be back here, paying it forward, planting some seeds for some of the next generation that is here with us tonight.”

Rice and solar system ambassador Ron Hobbs both love
this photo of a sunset on Mars, snapped by the Spirit rover in 2005.
Photo: NASA.

As the “eyes” of Mars Rice has worked with the rover cameras, so a big part of her presentation was a showing of her top 10 photos out of the hundreds of thousands of them that have been sent back from Mars. Her favorite is of a blue sunset on the Red Planet, taken by Spirit in 2005. Coincidentally, that is also a favorite of local Solar System Ambassador Ron Hobbs, with whom I was sharing a table at the event.

Rice hopes humans visit Mars some day, though she would not make a very good travel agent.

“Mars is a pretty awful place,” she said. “It’s a dry, desolate, barren wasteland.” The reason to go is to answer the big questions about life somewhere besides Earth.

“If we do find that Mars is a place where life could have survived, and if we do eventually send spacecraft to Mars that bring samples back, and we find evidence for ancient microbial communities on Mars, then we know we’re not alone, and that’s about as profound a thing that I can imagine happening in my lifetime,” Rice said.

She’s fond of her Mars robots, but says they do have their drawbacks. Curiosity, for example, when it’s driving on automatic navigation can only travel about 200 meters per day. The rover has to analyze a lot of data before every turn of the wheels to pick the most trouble-free route.

“The rover is thinking so hard that it doesn’t have time to drive any faster,” Rice quipped. The speed points out one reason that she’d like to see people on Mars some day.

“What those rovers have done in eight years a human could do in a couple of days,” Rice said. She’s excited for NASA’s proposed 2020 Mars mission, a Curiosity-class rover that would address key questions about the potential for life on Mars, and pave the way for human exploration.

Rice was moved to start on this great adventure, a career in space exploration, by a video she saw during a high school astronomy class. The video depicted how the Sun would one day run out and our solar system would be no more. But the universe would roll on.

“That is what inspired me to study astronomy,” Rice said. “This thing that is greater than ourselves will be around longer than any of us will.”

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You can watch Rice’s entire presentation on the KCTS-9 website.