WVU alumni Dan Moyers and Kenneth Costello still haven't come across any little green men, but being part of NASA's historic missions to Mars has them seeing stars.
Moyers, class of 2002, helped develop the software to run the data-gathering robots that scoured Mars and found evidence that liquid water once soaked parts of the cool, dry planet.
Costello,
class of 1998, supervised a team of specialists who tested the
software to make sure it would work.
Discovering evidence that Mars once contained water capable of sustaining life is the purpose of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration missions.
The rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars in January. Since their arrival, they have roamed the Red Planet, taking photographs of the Martian terrain and examining geological features for signs of water.
In March, both rovers found such signs. Opportunity discovered jarosite and other sulfates that form in water in an outcrop of rocks in the Meridiani Planum, suggesting an acidic lake or hot springs once coated the area. Spirit, meanwhile, came across material that appears to be minerals crystallized out of water in a volcanic rock in Gusev Crater.
Moyers, who earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from WVU, is part of an engineering team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. JPL, managed by the California Institute of Technology, does robotic exploration of the solar system for NASA.
"This has been really amazing," said Moyers. "It's really nice to be a part of history like this."
Moyers, whose interest is in robotics, started working at JPL last summer under an internship secured by the NASA West Virginia Space Grant Consortium at WVU. He helped to develop software that simulated paths the rovers would travel after arriving on Mars.
His
JPL supervisors were so impressed with his work they offered
him a full-time job as a sequence integration engineer. He joined
a team of fellow engineers whose job was to create commands in
computer tongue so the robots could do what the scientists wanted
them to. He even drove the rovers by constructing sequences that
controlled their daily activities.
Some tense moments arose when an overloaded memory temporarily sidelined Spirit.
"It was pretty stressful because our half-billion-dollar piece of hardware was in trouble, and we didn't know if we would get it running again," Moyers said. "We put a team together to find what was wrong, discovered the memory problem, and fixed it by deleting extraneous data."
Recently Moyers was promoted to tactical uplink leader. In this position, he plans the rover's daily activities.
While Moyers helped develop the rover's software, Costello made sure the software was free of glitches. As software verification and validation project manager, he oversaw an inspection team at the NASA Independent Verification and Validation Facility in Fairmont. Independent verification and validation, or IV&V, is an approach and process to providing better assurance that the software inside a system will work as required, Costello said.
"In
essence, we try to find errors before they cause something terrible
or annoying to happen," he said.
Costello, who hails from Pittsburgh, earned a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from Pennsylvania State University and landed his first job as a NASA contractor testing software for the space shuttle program in Houston.
A desire to return close to his roots, however, drove him to take a job at the NASA IV&V Facility, a 30-minute drive from Morgantown. There he worked on software for the International Space Station while completing his master's degree in software engineering at WVU. He has been working at the Fairmont facility since.
The years collectively get more intense for Costello, and the Mars project has proved to be one of the largest, financially and publicly.
"The thing with Mars is, there is just that mystique," Costello said. "It's the only other potentially habitable planet in the solar system, and we have the potential to perhaps get there. There is an intrigue to that, and it drives people's ambitions."
"The project has also proved to be one of the more expensive, roughly adding up to $800 million," he added. The best part of Costello's job is when the projects work with no complications.
"Our goal here is to help the projects succeed, so when they work, it's really nice," he said.
Moyers and Costello both said they enjoy their jobs and can't think of anything they would rather do, save following in the footsteps of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
"Since I was a kid, I wanted to do something like this," Moyers said of working at JPL. "I enjoy going to work, and that's what you should look for in a job."
Or as Costello, the software tester, put
it: "We do a lot of interesting stuff, and if you really
look, it's amazing what NASA has accomplished. I can't, at this
particular moment, think of a better job. Well, okay, if I were
an astronaut . . . ."