The long voyage out

NASA scientist Alice Bowman is monitoring the New Horizons spacecraft on its nine-year trip to get a look at Pluto

By Frank D. Roylance

September 7, 2008

Alice Bowman, mission operations manager for the New Horizons spacecraft, waits patiently for the craft to approach Pluto in 2015. (Baltimore Sun photo by Barbara Haddock Taylor / August 25, 2008)

Alice Bowman is the mission operations manager (M.O.M.) for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, now on course for a rendezvous with the (former) planet Pluto in 2015. It's her job to watch over the health of the spacecraft, to manage continuing upgrades and changes to the software for its support systems and scientific instruments during its nine-year voyage across the solar system.

From the mission control room at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory near Laurel, she and her team receive weekly signals from New Horizons reporting that all is well or, on occasion, that something needs their attention.

Last week, they awakened the craft for its three-month annual checkup, an intensive review of all systems. Their work is designed to assure that years of work by thousands of people - who began in 2001 to design and build the mission - will pay off with a scientific bonanza.

You majored in physics and chemistry and began your career doing cancer drug research at Cal Tech. How did you become interested in space exploration?

Space was just fascinating ... and the possibilities were just endless. As a child I would just look at that [points to a 1972 National Geographic poster of the Apollo astronauts on her office wall]. ... It was like, all the things that you could dream of happening were starting to happen, and I wanted to be a part of it.

What was it about math, science and physics that appealed to you as a kid?

When you got the right answer, you knew it. It was very logical and concrete, whereas writing and philosophy and things like that ... just seemed open. And science was just fascinating to me, sort of the small things, the cellular part and the viruses and all the things that work on a cellular level; and then the space stuff. ... I wasn't too interested in the stuff in between. It was either the little or the big.

With a mission this long, does the time seem to pass slowly?

If you think of where we started in January [2006], pretty much at 1 AU [an AU equals the distance from the sun to the Earth - about 92 million miles] and now we're at 10 AU ... time seems like it's just flown by. We've been so busy.

What do you do with your time when you are not worrying about New Horizons?

I learned how to play the clarinet ... in fifth grade. My husband plays a lot of stringed instruments and he was into bluegrass. ... I play the electric bass when I'm in the bluegrass band. ... [We also play] some country, and every now and then my husband and I will play a little old rock 'n' roll, like the Beatles. The [band's] name is Mountain View. We'll do the assisted living places and a couple of churches.

New Horizons launched in 2006 after five years of planning and construction. Was launch a scary time for you?

It was a little scary. ... We wanted to see that work come to fruition, and you knew you had to go through this very violent event to get there. ... We weren't able to get telemetry [data transmissions] from the spacecraft, by design, until after the separation from the ... motor. What that meant was, we had a 50-minute outage from launch until when we could get telemetry. ... So we were anxiously waiting. When we got that first bit of telemetry, that was the point where we knew we had a mission.

So how is New Horizons doing?

It's doing pretty well. We've had some issues [four computer shutdowns]. ... We didn't really expect this. Thank goodness it's something that, while we didn't anticipate it ... we did code the autonomy to look for it. In that sense it was fortuitous. ... We hope that we can solve the problem. ... We've narrowed it down to a certain portion of the [software] code.

Will you stay with New Horizons fulltime through the 2015 Pluto encounter?

I think I am committed to the project, even on those bad days when you go home and you think, "I don't know if I can take another day of this." After you've thought about it for a while, you can't imagine it not being part of your life after you've invested so much.

You're not going to know whether this mission has succeeded at Pluto until 2015. How do you deal with risk of failure after so many years of hard work and $700 million invested?

You've got one chance. ... The near encounter [with Pluto] part is probably 48 hours, so with the [round-trip time for radio commands] of almost nine hours, there's not much you can do except sit back and hope that all your testing and reviews and thoughts have paid off, and you've uploaded something that's going to give a big science return. And you just won't know until the spacecraft turns back after its encounter and starts sending the data. Hopefully, that's what we'll see. It's a challenge. I guess that's what motivates a lot of us, the challenge.

What if you get no data back from Pluto? Fourteen years of work!

There is a lot of stuff that we are actually doing now. Our [2007] Jupiter encounter was huge. ... There was a lot of new things that came up out of that. ... The imagers, every year they take data. So it would be hugely disappointing, but I don't think the mission would be in vain. And I can't imagine us being in that position where we would not get anything

Do you have bad dreams about this?

I guess the Pluto encounter is so far away I'm not having those nightmares yet. But with the Jupiter encounter, we had a lot of press here and it was like, "Oh my God, I hope this works!" ... But there's a lot of smart people working on this project. ... You just rely on people to check everything, and after some point you just have to sit back and wait. Nobody said space exploration was easy or straightforward. And that's the beauty of this job. Every day you come in and there could be something new that is discovered.

> Read Frank Roylance's blog on MarylandWeather.com