Been buried in work gearing up for a big @NASAPersevere operations readiness review. Now that that’s behind us, I will have a little more time to tweet about the big day coming up: February 18th!!

Today we are 20 days away from landing on Mars! You can find TONS of information on the mission at the link below, so I’m going to skip over all that and talk about what it’s like to be on the operations team so close to landing. https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/ 

Many of us have worked previous Mars rover (or lander) missions at JPL, but a lot of people haven’t. On my team, it’s about 50/50 split. Right now there are lots of conversations going on where the people who haven’t been on Mars time are asking the folks who have what it’s like

and how to prepare for it. “How many days in advance of landing should we start shifting our wake/sleep times later?” is one I got earlier this week. People are wondering what they do on days they’re not on shift. (Answer: stay on Mars time if you can to avoid jet lag.)

I should note that the project is preparing materials to disseminate on this topic, but in true JPL fashion people are eager to get a head start!

How landing day is going to go for my team: Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) will occur roughly ~12:40-12:50pm Pacific time on Feb 18th. My team has _nothing _ to do with EDL (we’re Science Operations!) so we’ll be watching excitedly with the rest of you!

After the rover is (hopefully) safely on the surface, it will execute a bunch of pre-loaded actions and we will wait for the next chunk of data to be downlinked from the rover. This will take a few hours and we won’t start planning the rover’s first full day on...

...the surface of Mars until later in the evening on the 18th, so my team _should _ (are you listening?) go take naps. There are people whose jobs it is to wait for that data and analyze it the minute it comes down, but that is not my team’s job.

Later in the evening a subset of my people (those who are scheduled for the first uplink shift) will wake up and go to work. Their jobs will be to plan the rover’s first full day on its home planet, and they likely won’t be done until 3-4am the next day!

It is late and I need to go to sleep, so I’ll save details of how we do that for another day!