Introducing Nick
January 1, 2018
Hi!
My name is Nick, and I'm the Payload Element Lead for the APXS instrument on board Curiosity, and I also lead the APXS operations team and am a member of the Mars Science Laboratory science team. I was born and raised in Prince Edward County, Ontario. Read on to learn a bit more about my background, and what types of things I get to do as part of my job on this great mission.
I studied physics at the University of Guelph, and I finished my degree just as Ralf Gellert, the APXS Principal Investigator, arrived and the rover mission was in its very early design stages. When I caught wind of what was happening right in my home department I couldn't believe my luck - I had to get in on the action! Ralf gave me a chance to get involved from the very start and I got busy straight away. In 2009 it was announced that the mission launch would be delayed (from 2009 until 2011). When that happened I was fortunate to be able to make some lemonade out of those lemons by continuing my MSL work while simultaneously working towards a Master's degree in electrical and computer engineering under the very talented Dr Stefano Gregori. Bonus!
Officially starting on landing night, August 5, 2012, I added the "operations lead" role to my plate. That was a very special night! If Curiosity hadn't landed safely I'd have been looking for a job the next day! Luckily for me and everybody else the EDL (entry, descent, and landing) engineers at JPL put on a show that night and accomplished the hardest, craziest planetary landing ever. And I got to keep my job.
Even now that we're deep into our mission operations (over 5 years now!) my work gives me a great variety of challenges. Managing the excellent APXS operations team is a pleasure. While the team handles the brunt of the day-to-day work, I jump in to help whenever technical questions or unusual circumstances arise, and we often have to roll with the punches, adapting our operations, data analysis and tactical approaches to cope with the changing state of the rover systems and what the planet throws at us. Although nobody hopes for something to go wrong on Mars, when an "anomaly" does happen things get very interesting quickly. Using whatever limited data we may have to work backwards to figure out what actually happened on Mars is tricky, but so satisfying (especially if we can come up with a clever solution or workaround to mitigate the problem!!)
Since landing in 2012 the APXS has been powered on and acquiring new data on over 600 distinct scientific targets, totalling over 120 days of continuous measurement! It is also part of my job to deal with all that data, and this gives me a great chance to flex my programming and data engineering muscles! Also, playing around and learning new things from our big juicy data set is an awful lot of fun. Each new EDR (Experiment Data Record) produced by the instrument as it executes on Mars eventually flows back to Earth and through my systems where the scientific and instrument engineering data are parsed, analyzed, stored and distributed to our team.
Finally, when I have a spare moment I also try to keep our lab at the University of Guelph working in top shape, where we have our spare APXS instrument for testing as well as other facilities for developing new scientific and operational approaches and even instruments for other, future missions!
It's been a wild ride since I first became involved in this project nearly 12 years ago, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity I had to play a small part in this tremendous and important mission. I hope you enjoy following our progress as we climb Mt. Sharp!