Scott Maxwell's Cool Tech Job

What's your title?
Mars Rover Driver Team Lead, Mars Exploration Rover Project, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA

If you had to write an ad to fill your job, what would it say?
WANTED: Interplanetary explorer.
That's it. I wouldn't add anything. Anybody who doesn't answer that ad is not the right person for the job.

What's the coolest thing about your job?
Any time I want to, I can look through the eyes of a faraway robot, gaze at a four-billion-year-old frozen desert where no human has ever set foot, and reflect that my team and I represent all humanity in exploring that place. To the Romans, Mars was a god; to us, it's a new world, somewhere to adventure and explore and learn, and my job -- for the first time in history -- is to begin to fully explore the surface of such a world.

What are at least 5 duties you have as part of your job?
1. Drive the Spirit and Opportunity rovers across the surface of Mars, keeping them safe while expeditiously getting them where the science team wants them to go.  Once they're there, my team and I are also responsible for reaching out the rover's arms and carefully placing their instruments on science targets.

2. Refuse impossible requests! My job is to say "yes" whenever possible, and to figure out a way to *make* it possible when it seems not to be. But from time to time, it's important to recognize that we can't safely meet our goals within the constraints we have to work with, and when that happens it's equally important to be willing to say "no." However heartbreaking it might be to give up on today's goal, we need to make sure we still have a rover to drive tomorrow.

3. Herd the cats. Mars rover drivers are a highly strong-willed, individualistic bunch, which makes for a great work environment, even if it sometimes means it's not always easy to ensure the whole team is moving in the same direction. I liberally apply the main thing I've learned about herding cats, which is: don't. Just show them the mouse, and trust them to do the right thing. I like it because it's respectful and it works every time.

4. Improve everything all the time. No matter how good and careful we are, we'll make mistakes; but we can try to avoid repeating them as hard as we try to avoid making them in the first place. So I and my team are constantly finding ways to improve our software, documentation, and processes, to make sure that we can do our job better and better and better.

5. Have fun and make sure my team is having fun. We'd all do this job even if it were a grim one, just because it's so damn cool; it's got its own built-in motivation. But people work better when they enjoy what they do -- and, more than that, it's only right to make someone's job a happy one if you can.  So I do my best to do that.

What's the coolest thing you've done so far in your current job?
I'm tempted to say ... "everything."  More than five years ago, I reached out my hand across a hundred million miles of emptiness and moved something on the surface of another world.  I've done that a thousand times since, and it still feels like magic every time.  I can't get over it -- not that I'd want to.

Does your career ever get dull or routine? How do you rekindle your love for it?
Happily, driving the rovers tends to stay new: practically every day, we're in a new place, or coming up with something new for the rovers to do. (For example, we've recently worked out a way to use thei tilt sensors to detect "marsquakes" -- the equivalent, of course, of earthquakes.)  This constant novelty tends to keep us engaged and generally keeps things from becoming too routine.

Then there are the really unusual parts of the job, like the last few weeks.  One of our rovers, Spirit, is currently embedded in a sandy slope, and we're trying to reproduce her situation in our testbed so we can safely drive her out.  So I've been up to my elbows hand-mixing dirt, and the other day I helped build a hinged ramp. (One of the scariest things in the world: a software guy with a hammer.) This is not your average desk job!

Having said that, I'll admit that this job has its ups and downs, just like any other. But I fully recognize how fortunate I am to be able to do what I do, and even to get paid for it. If I sometimes face the same downs as I would anywhere else, I'm more than compensated by the ups that are, literally, out of this world.

Did you ever expect to have the career you have?
No: I've had a passion for exploring space ever since I was a little kid, but I never truly thought I'd actually get to do it. I believed there was some kind of magic, invisible wall between me and the people who explore space.  Of course, there's no such wall, but I discovered that only after I was already doing it.

What was your career path?
I got really lucky, in that JPL recruited me directly from graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since I never thought the space program would want me, it's a good thing they came to me -- it simply wouldn't have occurred to me that I could have gone to them.

I spent my first five years at JPL working on software to help coordinate getting commands up to a spacecraft for missions with a distributed team -- some people here at JPL, participating scientists at remote institutions around the world, and so on.  At the same time, I also worked on software that processed the data sent back from JPL spacecraft.

In 1999, I was ready for something new, and someone I had worked with when I first came to JPL ended up recommending me for the job that turned into my current position on MER. I started out helping to write the software we'd use to drive the rovers, then parlayed that into a job using that software to drive them.  After a couple of years, I was promoted to the lead position in my team.

Do you have advice for how people can find their own cool job and live out their passions?
Everybody already knows that you have to work hard and stay focused on your goal.  It helps to be a little lucky here and there, and although there's some truth to what they say about making your own luck, sadly, it's not something you fully control.

The only possibly useful thing I can add is this.  When pursuing your goal, there will come a time when it feels like you cannot possibly go on. When that happens, go on. You can do it.