IN THE CLASSROOM
Curiosity, NASA PUT UW-GREEN BAY RESEARCHER ON Mars, via Pasadena When the Mars rover Curiosity landed in August to begin an unprecedented mission that’s been called the Apollo 11 of the unmanned space program, R. Aileen Yingst celebrated as though her team had just won the Super Bowl. In a way, it had. “It’s just as big as I thought it would be, and it’s bigger than I thought it would be,” says Yingst, director of the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium at UW-Green Bay. “This is really the hardest thing we’ve done since putting people on the moon.” Yingst was temporarily on loan to the NASA project as deputy principal investigator for the Curiosity mission’s Mars Hand Lens Imager Camera. The instrument is so powerful it can return images of individual grains of sand on the planet’s surface.
was home to some 400-plus scientists for 90 Martian days after the rover first landed. Each day on Mars is about 37 minutes longer than a day here — and the orbiters that relay the team’s data have different schedules still. The high-power camera has returned some incredible images of Mars, Yingst said, and also has been useful for documenting the activity of other instruments on the rover. Her involvement with the mission didn’t end when she left Pasadena in November, and she’s continuing her work remotely. It’s an assignment of which she — and indeed the entire country — can be proud.
She and her colleagues worked long shifts that required them to make frequent sleepschedule adjustments. “It’s scheduled like a job,” Yingst said. “It’s just — you happen to be working on Mars.” Mars via Pasadena, that is, where the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) headquarters
20
UWGB • INSIDE 360° • December 2012
“It’s the taxpayers of this country,” Yingst said. “It’s the citizens of the United States who had the vision to say ‘we’re going to dream big; we’re going to think audaciously.’ … The country is going to benefit tremendously.” While Yingst was across the country in California, she also brought a bit of Wisconsin to mission control. A Packers fan, she sometimes sported her hometown colors, and the camera she operated assumed a local nickname, as well. Her fellow engineers came to refer to the instrument package at the end of the turret, or arm, as the “cheesehead.”