The Simple Task That Mars Made Impossible

Troy Hudson didn’t want to think about Mars. It was Christmas, he had taken some time off, and this planet had enough going on at the end of 2020. But Mars was difficult to escape, he told me. It twirled in a mobile of the solar system in his home. It sat right there on his skin, tattooed on his arm, below the elbow. Hudson had spent more than a decade working on a robot that was currently parked on the surface of Mars, and NASA was about to decide whether to give up on it.

Hudson is an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he works on the InSight mission, which delivered a lander to Mars in late 2018. One of the spacecraft’s instruments, a spike-shaped for nearly two years to hammer into the soil. At several moments during the desperate efforts to rescue the probe, team members believed they could succeed. Of course they thought that—this is NASA, and NASA is known for doing some improbable things, especially with robots. Plus, NASA is good at Mars. For decades, it has sent machines to orbit, drive, and drill around the planet.