obscured a larger truth in Murray's mind: it would cover the engineer's back ends if something went wrong. He was not the type of person to tolerate that kind of game. He preferred to aim for the highest performance possible and to take your lumps if it didn't work.
“In all this, I taught myself other things. I wrote some papers…about communications to establish that I knew the subject better than they did. One of the lessons I learned from this was that in order to be successful, the scientists had to learn the engineering at least as well as the engineers; I had to learn about spacecraft stabilization, had to learn about power, had to learn about active control, had to learn about scan-platform motions. Television was the big drive, all the way through. One of the reasons I was able to become the director of JPL was that in order to do that job I had to understand the whole spacecraft.”
But it all began with Mariner 4, and the follow-on missions of 6 and 7 had to be different in some meaningful way.
“So the Mariners 6 and 7 mission: one was targeted in equatorial areas and one was to go at higher latitude over the polar ones. Mariner 7, which had a lot of technical difficulty, such as a battery explosion a week before encounter, was in fact able to confirmthat indeed the seasonal caps are CO2…that was a major discovery. [The Mariners] discovered some collapsed terrain. [They] discovered some other physiographic features, but [they] didn't discover either channels or volcanism, which is, again, how Murphy's law operates in science. We have to look at the wrong places [first]. So it was not until Mariner 9 that the most significant surface features—these huge volcanic structures, and the huge water-carved channels—were discovered.”
But no probe can look anywhere if it can't talk to mission control. During the early space age, tracking of spacecraft was a rather ad hoc affair. One of JPL's crowning achievements in planetary exploration was the Deep Space Network, or DSN.
“The Deep Space Network is one of the most marvelous products of American science and technology in the world. It is also a marvelous attribute of JPL, and to a lesser extent of Caltech…. [It] consists of three principal stations for commanding—that is, communicating to and listening from spacecraft that are at some great distance from Earth. They are located at approximately 120-degree longitude differences, so as the Earth turns, the spacecraft is always in view of one of the tracking sites, which can spot occasional problems. There used to be one in South Africa, which was good, because it gave southern-hemisphere coverage and also gave additional longitude, which was about the same as Madrid. That was closed because of political pressure on US-South African ties. Among the many minor histories of JPL, there was a short period there where the official position was that we were out of there, but in fact we were still in collaboration. One can argue that sort of thing both ways. We also had to deal with Franco of Spain…. Institutionally, this has been operated, developed by JPL exclusively with relatively great independence from NASA….
“Technically the JPL group has been so superior and so outstanding, superior to anybody else in the world, that they really have been much more in charge of their own destiny than others…. The Deep Space net has gotten very, very good at introducingnew technology into an ongoing, highly reliable system. It's a very, very impressive situation. They've also been able to structure the administrative and political arrangements so that they can plan ahead. The plans get changed, but they always have a long-range plan. They're always developing new technology…. It's an integrated system, sort of womb to tomb…. The result of this is they've been able to use state-of-the-art technology consistently and bring it in, and that net has been superior to anything else in the world, almost from the time
“In all this, I taught myself other things. I wrote some papers…about communications to establish that I knew the subject better than they did. One of the lessons I learned from this was that in order to be successful, the scientists had to learn the engineering at least as well as the engineers; I had to learn about spacecraft stabilization, had to learn about power, had to learn about active control, had to learn about scan-platform motions. Television was the big drive, all the way through. One of the reasons I was able to become the director of JPL was that in order to do that job I had to understand the whole spacecraft.”
But it all began with Mariner 4, and the follow-on missions of 6 and 7 had to be different in some meaningful way.
“So the Mariners 6 and 7 mission: one was targeted in equatorial areas and one was to go at higher latitude over the polar ones. Mariner 7, which had a lot of technical difficulty, such as a battery explosion a week before encounter, was in fact able to confirmthat indeed the seasonal caps are CO2…that was a major discovery. [The Mariners] discovered some collapsed terrain. [They] discovered some other physiographic features, but [they] didn't discover either channels or volcanism, which is, again, how Murphy's law operates in science. We have to look at the wrong places [first]. So it was not until Mariner 9 that the most significant surface features—these huge volcanic structures, and the huge water-carved channels—were discovered.”
But no probe can look anywhere if it can't talk to mission control. During the early space age, tracking of spacecraft was a rather ad hoc affair. One of JPL's crowning achievements in planetary exploration was the Deep Space Network, or DSN.
“The Deep Space Network is one of the most marvelous products of American science and technology in the world. It is also a marvelous attribute of JPL, and to a lesser extent of Caltech…. [It] consists of three principal stations for commanding—that is, communicating to and listening from spacecraft that are at some great distance from Earth. They are located at approximately 120-degree longitude differences, so as the Earth turns, the spacecraft is always in view of one of the tracking sites, which can spot occasional problems. There used to be one in South Africa, which was good, because it gave southern-hemisphere coverage and also gave additional longitude, which was about the same as Madrid. That was closed because of political pressure on US-South African ties. Among the many minor histories of JPL, there was a short period there where the official position was that we were out of there, but in fact we were still in collaboration. One can argue that sort of thing both ways. We also had to deal with Franco of Spain…. Institutionally, this has been operated, developed by JPL exclusively with relatively great independence from NASA….
“Technically the JPL group has been so superior and so outstanding, superior to anybody else in the world, that they really have been much more in charge of their own destiny than others…. The Deep Space net has gotten very, very good at introducingnew technology into an ongoing, highly reliable system. It's a very, very impressive situation. They've also been able to structure the administrative and political arrangements so that they can plan ahead. The plans get changed, but they always have a long-range plan. They're always developing new technology…. It's an integrated system, sort of womb to tomb…. The result of this is they've been able to use state-of-the-art technology consistently and bring it in, and that net has been superior to anything else in the world, almost from the time
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