Signal: The mission was initially to last three months and has been extended another five months, through September. Talk about the success. What has it found?

Trosper: I think that there is a huge amount of circumstantial evidence from the orbiters that point to the fact that there was water in the past on the surface of Mars. But the real, confirming evidence that we're getting from the instruments now is something that confirms the things we've seen on the orbiters.
    If you have instruments that you've sent to Mars and you've calibrated and you know all these things about them but you want to make sure that they're not telling you things that are incorrect, then you send another instrument suite that tests different things, that can come to the same conclusion. So we're confirming what the orbiters have already seen evidence of.
    But the other thing that we really want to do is find out — a great example is Gusev, where the orbiters — it looks like there was a huge lake here at one point, but if we were to send our (future) Sample Return Lander to the middle of Gusev crater, we'd end up bringing back a volcanic rock, because that's what we're seeing right now in Spirit.
    So to send these rovers to explore ... the surface, they can learn a whole lot more than we can tell from the orbital imaging. Even though we can get great images, it takes a long time to get real high-resolution imaging of the whole surface, so the rovers can actually get some more of that imaging. We can't tell everything about the surface from the orbiters.

Signal: Then is one purpose of the rovers to find a good landing site for a future mission?

Trosper: It's one of them, (but) it's not the prime purpose. The prime purpose is, well, following the water. But once we follow the water and we find the water — evidence of it — then that's the place we want to go back and look at and to bring these rocks back that we see at the Meridiani plain, to Earth. To look at them in an Earth lab would be just a fantastic opportunity. And now we know where they are. We can go and say, "Those are the ones we want to get."

Signal: Tell us about Jennifer Harris Trosper. You grew up on a farm in a town in —

Trosper: Fostoria, Ohio. Buy it wasn't actually in a town.

Signal: Your dad built rockets?

Trosper: Yeah. My dad worked in the space industry in the ¬50s, kind of right at the very beginning when we were building missiles and rockets for the very first time. He had a lot of neat stories.
    Before I was born, they lived out here in Southern California. He worked for Douglas and traveled to White Sands for Douglas and did testing there, and traveled to the Cape (Canaveral) for Douglas, did testing there, traveled over to England and did some installation of some missiles over there. But then, right before I was born, his father passed away and he moved the family back to the farm in Ohio to help his mother with the farm.
    So I never really knew him at the time the was working on these rockets, but he had pictures in the den, and my dad was a great storyteller. He would tell me these stories of being in the block house — the block house is the place you go so the rocket doesn't blow you up as it's launching — being the block house and have a rocket, one of these early launches, go south and come screaming across the ground. It just sounded like a really exciting thing to learn about and to do. So I got the itch from my dad's stories.
    But I actually — I really liked music, and so I thought I wanted to be a concert pianist. I went to a music camp in high school, for a summer, Interlochen National Music Camp, and I practiced — not as much every day as I should have, but five to eight hours a day, and thought that I wanted to be a concert pianist.
    But then, in the mail, I got a flyer from MIT, saying, "Why don't you send an application in?" And I thought, well, why don't I? So I sent an application in to MIT and then they actually admitted me, and I thought, you know, that's probably something I shouldn't turn down, because I can go into engineering. I really liked math and science as well as music, and I thought that I could still do music; in fact I minored in music at MIT and majored in aerospace engineering.
    So that all kind of worked out for me. But growing up on the farm, I never thought I'd be a rocket scientist. My summer job was, every summer I'd paint the barn roof, and then I'd paint the trim around the house and I'd cut the trees on the ditch bank and help my dad pull the weeds out of the bean field, and that was kind of my life for awhile, so I don't think I sat there and imagined I'd be a rocket scientist.

Signal: But after MIT, it wasn't a straight course to Pasadena.

Trosper: No, that's true. I worked at a camp for girls for the summer after I graduated from college. We taught girls how to canoe, and we took them on backpacking trips and things like that. I worked with the junior high girls. I found that to be very rewarding. And then I came out to JPL and worked for about three years in the power systems area and the attitude controls system area and I worked on the Cassini spacecraft a little.
    But I still kind of had this — in fact when I was in college, I spent some time down in Peru, doing some missionary work. We built cabins for homeless children in a camp for homeless children. I thought that was the coolest thing, and I felt like it was a rewarding experience, so about three years into my career, I thought, I don't want to miss out. I don't want to look back at the end of my life and say I really wish —

Signal: You didn't want to say, "I've only been a rocket scientist and I've only gone to Mars" —

Trosper: Well, you just don't want to have regrets, right? So I thought, well, I can take a year off and do some more missionary work, because I found that to be very rewarding.
    I took about two weeks to play on this volleyball team that was in Europe, and I met some people who were interested in doing some missionary work. We decided we wanted to go to the former Soviet Union. We actually taught English there, and then we had Bible study with our students who were interested in doing that.
    I lived in a city called Sevastopol, Ukraine. It's right on the tip of the Crimean Peninsula. It was were the Black Sea fleet was. It's where the Crimean War was fought, largely, in that area, and obviously in Sevastopol. So I lived there for a year, and they only had about eight foreigners in the entire city because it was a closed military city for so long.
    This was ¬94, so it was not too long after the (Berlin) Wall had fallen down and chaos was everywhere and the mafia is running everything. It was a fascinating experience. But I just loved the people. The Russian people have such depth to their souls, and they're so generous. I mean, people who had saved their whole lives for a car and lost it because the ruble crashed, would go out and buy the most expensive wine and champagne they could because they wanted to have the Americans over for dinner. They would spend their monthly salary on that.
    It was humbling to be around people who are so generous in that way, and I loved the Russian people.

Signal: You returned to Pasadena —

Trosper: I was traveling around Europe with some friends after we finally got out of — it took us a while to get out of Ukraine. We finally got out of Ukraine — planes, trains and automobile-type stuff getting out of Ukraine. I sent a postcard to a friend at JPL — I took a leave of absence from JPL and they said, "No guarantees, but if we have something when you are ready to come back, we'll try to give you a job." I said, "I'm going to be back in Ohio in July; do you guys have anything for me to do?" And the day I got home in Ohio, this guy, Joe Savino, called me and said, "There's this new project called Mars Pathfinder, and people aren't sure it's going to work — you know, it's kind of a Skunk Works-type thing, but we need some people to work on that, and would you be interested?" And I was like, "Yeah, of course." And that was a huge opportunity for me, because Mars Pathfinder was the first real project I had worked on where I got experience with the hardware and the software and putting things together and testing it.

Signal: And Pathfinder was the demonstration model for what you're doing now.

Trosper: Right. That was the demonstration model for MER (Mars Exploration Rovers).

Signal: How did you progress to being in charge of one of the rovers?

Trosper: Yeah, that's a good question. I wonder that myself. Well, Mars Pathfinder — I started out as a test bed engineer, so I worked in the test bed, and when people wanted things to be tested, I would set the — in this particular case — the lander up, the Pathfinder lander up the right way and do testing, and as a result of being a test bed engineer I ended up being the lead engineer for testing the surface mission. Which on Pathfinder was focused on the first two days, really, because we wanted to land safely, and then we wanted to get the rover off the lander and driver the rover. So it was much simpler than MER.
    As a result of being the tester focused on that — Pathfinder was kind of small — I became the flight director for landing day on Mars Pathfinder, because I was the one who was closest to what was really going to happen those days. So that was a neat opportunity, to do that. And then there were several other flight directors and we swapped off. After Pathfinder I actually went off to do systems engineering on the Mars 2001 Odyssey orbiter, and that's now at Mars, and was the development manager for operations on that after I did the system engineering role.
    Then I got married and took a few months off JPL, and when I came back, there was this new project that was the marrying of Pathfinder and the rover and the payload, and I just couldn't stay away because it looked like it was the coolest thing going — and it was. So I interviewed with, ironically, the guy who — I had two job offers when I first was coming to JPL, one was from (MER program manager) Pete Theisinger and one was from John Klein, and I took the one from John Klein and worked in the power system and then interviewed with Pete Theisinger to be his project system engineer. He's the project manager, and project system engineer is the "big picture" system engineer who has to make sure everything fits together between the flight system and the mission system and the science, the mission system being the operations design and everything...
    So I became in charge of the system design, and then once you're in charge of the system design, you end up being responsible for the system verification program. (By) "system level," I mean, we have to test this mission like we fly it. So we had to design tests that would exercise the spacecraft like it would be exercised in crews, but do it on Earth, and design a similar test for the surface. So I worked the verification, and then once we launched, since we still weren't done, I kind of got the "and finish it all" flight software-ground software testing job...
    Because I had worked the system design and a lot of the verification program, it was kind of natural to have me go and be one of the mission managers.

Signal: As mission manager, you're in charge of doing what, exactly? Do you decide where the rover goes each day?

Trosper: Well, actually, it's more like I have veto power. I work with the science team — there's an engineering team, there's a science team. The engineering team looks at how well the rover did today on its objectives, if it drove or it was using the arm on the rock. And we say, "OK, the rover did great; here's how much energy we have to allocate to science tomorrow. Here's how much data volume we have that's available for science tomorrow, here's how much time we have that's available for science tomorrow," and then we talk to the science folks about what they want to do...
    The nice thing about our science team is, we did about seven operational readiness tests before we landed, and these were tests where we were still on Earth and we were using the rovers in our test beds and we were pretending we were on Mars. And as is always the case when you're trying to simulate the universe, which is what we were trying to do because we weren't actually on Mars, and then drive the rovers, the tests were just disastrous. One thing after another went wrong, so we really trained the scientists that things weren't quite going to work as well as they thought.
    So once we got to the surface, and the universe does its thing, and we don't have to simulate it anymore, so (we're) less likely to mess that part up — they actually, I think, have gotten a lot more out of this mission than perhaps they thought at the beginning when we were doing these operational readiness tests.

Signal: So it's not quite like, they say "let's go here," and you say "no."

Trosper: No. in fact, this science team, because they've sort of been through it with us, it's definitely more like one team. They say, "We want to go to this rock," and we'll do everything we can to get there. But if we think it's not safe — I mean, my job is to make sure that — it's my problem if something happens that's bad to the rover. So I need to make sure we that we don't make decisions that would cause something bad to happen — make sure we don't drain the batteries too much, that we thermally are heating things properly, we're not damaging any hardware.
    I mean, the worst thing would be to approve something and then go and damage the rover. You can't get up there with a wrench or whatever and fix it. So that's what we do. We make sure that things go right.

Signal: What's up with the music you use to wake up the rover each morning?

Trosper: Nowadays? Not much, actually. We have to sometimes rack our brains quite a bit to figure out what the most appropriate song is, but it's kind of a fun thing we like to do to break up the monotony of Mars time —

Signal: Sure. What you're doing is sooo boring —

Trosper: Well, the round-trip light time of 30 minutes gives you lots of time to pick out music.

Signal: If one sol is 36 minutes longer than an Earth day, then over the first three months, the difference is about 60 hours. So you're waking up in the middle of the night and going to work and coming home and going to bed in the middle of the day?

Trosper: Yup. It rotates around. Some people want more time in their day, so we at least have that.

    See this interview in its entirety today at 8:30 a.m., and watch for another "Newsmaker of the Week" on Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. on SCVTV Channel 20, available to Comcast and Time Warner Cable subscribers throughout the Santa Clarita Valley.