Bigwood part of Mars Mission

Mars landing set for Sunday

By Tom Hintgen (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Saturday, May 24, 2008

Nine years following graduation from Fergus Falls High School, Maria Schellpfeffer, daughter of Rob and Gretchen Bigwood, is among the NASA team in California coordinating Sunday’s Phoenix Mars landing.

“It will be a pretty amazing experience,” Schellpfeffer said, “and I'm sure the atmosphere will be electric as we first watch the data to tell us if our landing was successful. It will be even more exciting when we see the first images of our landing site a few hours later.”

Phoenix will enter the top of the Martian atmosphere at almost 13,000 mph. In seven minutes, the spacecraft must complete a challenging sequence of events to slow to about five mph before its three legs reach the ground. Confirmation of the landing could come at 6:53 p.m. Sunday.

Schellpfeffer works as a sequence system engineer on the Mission Planning and Sequencing Team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

“I joined the project in January 2007,” she said, “and worked on developing the structure of the background sequences that we sent to the spacecraft while it was on its way to Mars.”

These sequences contain commands to tell the spacecraft when to do certain activities, such as when to send data back to Earth and what kind of data to send.

“After we launched the spacecraft in August 2007 and began operations, I worked on building the background sequences,” she said, “and worked with the Scheduling Team to establish the time for Phoenix to use the Deep Space Network antennas. Those are used for downlinking data and uplinking commands to the spacecraft.”

Schellpfeffer also participated in Operational Readiness Tests throughout the cruise phase.

“We simulated the Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) event and surface timeframe,” she said, “to help train the team for both nominal operations and to practice anomaly responses.”

This week, at long last, the team came up on the EDL phase.

“It’s hard to believe how fast the last year and a half has gone by,” Schellpfeffer said, “and that we'll be landing on Mars soon. I’ll be on-console for EDL in the Mission Support Area here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) here in California. I’m really excited for the big event.”

Ever since she started working at JPL, on-console duties for a significant event such as the Mars landing is something she really wanted to do.

She will travel to the Science Operations Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson a couple of days after EDL to work on the surface operation phase of the mission. That’s normally scheduled for 90 Sols (a Sol is a Martian day and is ~40 minutes longer than an Earth day).

After her graduation from Fergus Falls High School in 1999, Schellpfeffer studied at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities where she obtained her bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics. “I've been attending graduate school part-time for several years at the University of Southern California (USC),” she said. “I’m working towards a Masters degree in Astronautical Engineering, and plan to graduate at the end of this year.”

The past few months have been both challenging and rewarding.

“It should also be an exciting summer,” she said.