In this week's newsletter, Aaron Moncur has a conversation with David Oh, Systems Engineering Manager and System Architect at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. David previously served as Flight Director for the Mars Curiosity rover and is currently leading the psyche mission to visit a metal asteroid.
There is nothing like being in the control room when the rover's on the surface and looking at pictures at two or three o'clock in the morning as they come down and thinking we are the first human beings ever to have seen what we're looking at right now."
In this episode:
How autonomous entry, descent, and landing takes spacecraft from 13,000 mph to zero in seven minutes with no Earth contact
Why Mars time's 24-hour 40-minute day cycle matches natural human sleep patterns better than Earth's 24-hour cycle
How sky crane landing systems can't be fully tested on Earth and must work perfectly on first real-world attempt
Why systems engineers spend 90% of their time on communication rather than technical development work
Bonus Content:
This Isn’t a Crisis - It’s an Adventure: Written in Partnership with Jake Kennington
S3E49 David Oh | NASA, Systems Engineering, and Sending Robots to Space
David Oh landed the Curiosity rover on Mars in 2012, then spent 90 days operating on Martian time - a 24-hour 40-minute cycle that shifts your schedule 40 minutes later each day. His family joined him, bowling at 2am and having beach picnics at midnight. The technical challenge was even more extreme: seven minutes of autonomous landing from 13,000 mph using systems that couldn't be fully tested on Earth. Now leading the psyche mission to a metal asteroid, David reveals how JPL breaks down missions too complex for any single person to understand, why systems engineers must judge when to drill into problems versus trust their team, and what it's like being among the first humans to see images from another planet at 3am in the control room.
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Entry, Descent, and Landing - Seven Minutes from 13,000 MPH to Zero
The Curiosity rover traveled hundreds of millions of miles to Mars, then had to land itself with perfect precision in seven minutes while Earth watched helplessly from 14 light-minutes away.
The spacecraft has to land itself on the surface of Mars through a process we call entry, descent and landing. In that process, which takes place over about seven minutes, the spacecraft goes from 13,000 miles an hour in approach velocity to Mars to zero so it can land safely on the surface.
JPL uses heat shields, parachutes, rocket packs, and a device called a sky crane that lowers the rover to the surface before flying away to crash-land 200-300 yards away. All of this happens autonomously because radio signals take too long to reach Earth for real-time control.
It has to happen completely autonomously, has to happen perfectly. Because if you miss any of those steps along the way, then you're not going to land on the surface. And it has to happen without any contact from Earth.
The hardest part about testing? You can't simulate Mars gravity on Earth. The sky crane system was used for the first time on Curiosity—its first real test was the actual Mars landing.
The first time it's really run under real conditions under real gravity and everything is on Mars. That is the first time you can do it. We cannot test it end to end here on Earth.
JPL tests individual components in wind tunnels, flies parachutes on rockets at 100,000 feet where Earth's atmosphere matches Mars, and runs thousands of Monte Carlo simulations. But some failure modes remain that could kill the mission with a single error. The team discusses these risks openly before launch so everyone understands what they're taking on together.
This Isn’t a Crisis - It’s an Adventure
Written in Partnership with Jake Kennington
You've built a solid career. You're competent, reliable, respected. And yet - a small, persistent question: Is this it?
Before Nike was Nike, Phil Knight was an accountant selling running shoes from his car trunk at track meets. For four years. He wasn't the global icon yet. He was in-between - learning, experimenting, building what Jake Kennington and I call a "bridge identity." Not the final destination. Just the next believable version.
Written in partnership with Jake, this piece explores why technical professionals reach this threshold, why "Is this it?" isn't a complaint but an invitation, and how to design the next chapter intentionally instead of drifting by default.
Explore what your “bridge identity” might look like through the full article at The Wave.
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