Until Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is safely in its final science orbit, it is largely an engineering game. Like any good squad, the engineering team practices before the "big game."

"We want to make sure our team is ready," said mission operations training engineer Ruth Fragoso. "We're trying to pressure the team. We want to see how they respond. We try to get them at their weakest spots."

In an exercise with a relatively benign name � operational readiness test � the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter engineers are put through their paces in an orbit insertion simulation that Fragoso notes is "as flight-like as possible."

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter chief engineer Todd Bayer said of their recent test, "For all intents and purposes, it is real. It's our equivalent of the cockpit flight simulator for pilots that allows them to practice their proficiency. Even in these practice runs, red alarms are very real!"

High-Scoring Scrimmages and Practices

Like a purposely placed mole, Fragoso and others (her "mole mentor" is JPL�s Larry Bryant) try to determine their own team's Achilles' heels and mission-related details that might be underestimated or overlooked.

"I try to listen for weak points and issues that are unresolved during meetings and make note of them; they are areas that are forced to be addressed during the rehearsals," said Fragoso. "There are typical ones and sneaky ones."

All told, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team endured 17 anomalies during their recent test; eleven of those were planned issues (officially called green cards) dreamt up by the team assembled to induce failure. Six irregularities were not intentionally thrown in, but real problems the team uncovered.

"Gotchas," as Lockheed Martin system engineer Cindy Schulz calls them, included electronics faults and a complex induced failure on a card that reads temperature data, which erroneously turned on heaters. Overheating can cause attitude control to fail, causing the spacecraft to veer dangerously off course. The team wasn�t even convinced that this failure could actually occur in reality but, alas, they learned it could and are now prepared to deal with it if it should arise.

"Operational readiness tests are where the bugs come out," Schulz noted. "We train so that these problems do come up and we can work through them."

The team has also gained invaluable knowledge about the spacecraft while it's been on its way to the red planet. Unlike Spirit and Opportunity, cocooned in their aeroshells (their protective casings), the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been in its full flight configuration since shortly after launch.

"With this spacecraft, we never had a quiet cruise to Mars," said Schulz. "We didn�t do just basic maintenance, we conducted major science and engineering calibrations to test how well the instruments were doing in space. These activities help shorten the learning curve for us when we get to Mars and start mapping."

Playbook, Field Positions and Skilled Players

To learn to maneuver as a team and to be prepared for whatever is thrown at them, the team learns critical procedures and develops its response time to spacecraft issues and decisions.

"We have three critical decisions about trajectory and orbital corrections to make within about 30 hours and some happen in the middle of the night," Bayer noted. "It's important to have people go through them at least once, to make sure our minds are focused and not marveling that it�s 3 a.m.!"

Bayer compares preparation for orbit insertion to a symphony orchestra mastering a musical score. And, like an orchestra, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team has strategic seating to make for a seamless performance. Unlike an orchestra, some of the key players are not in Pasadena at JPL, but at Lockheed Martin in Denver (where the spacecraft was built) and at Deep Space Network Stations worldwide. All of these special teams are part of the rehearsals.

Game On!

With a matter of days until Mars orbit insertion, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team has successfully completed dozens of preparatory tests. One final operational readiness test will serve as a real dress rehearsal.

With such a critical event approaching, engineers are reminded of the enormity of March 10. They have learned the hard way that Mars is no minor leaguer, so they�ve conditioned their star player for one of its biggest challenges.

"Orbit insertion is 'make it or break it' time. You either do it or you don't, and if you don't, you're done,"said Schulz. "We're making sure that the spacecraft has the best shot of making it into orbit around Mars."

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